NYC skyscrapers sit vacant
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Startups certainly saw differently, although admittedly many startups are not remotely professional (no pun intended).
Now we have remote work vs office work. In an information age where physical items passed around from worker to worker are a thing of the past in most industries, the need to spend $$$ for a high profile location is going the way of the necktie.
Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space. They don't want to go back, and like myself they will reject any job which has a firm requirement for such. Companies are torn between the old-school management notion that worker will only work while being observed and the realization that they can save a ton of money by not having a big fancy office.
The day of the office is passing. There will always be offices, but they will be, like food trucks, existing where and when they are useful. The real estate world better clue into this.
And beyond the office topic there is the residential topic. As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. Better to live someplace pleasant and less expensive, and then spend the saved money on trips to many different nice places.
Ofc the benefits of this have to be weighed against real estate costs. Let's just stop pretending anybody knows exactly what the office situation will be in the coming years.
How would you demonstrate this?
I’m with a funded SV startup that’s been remote-only since its founding, a few years before covid. We have staff in at least five countries, and in the US, in at least five states (just based on the people I can think of offhand.)
The company is the leader in its field, which involves significant real innovation, and has many major enterprise customers.
I’ve helped onboard many employees, and I’ve managed one of the key product teams.
When I hear people talk about all the disadvantages of remote work, I just internally roll my eyes. As you say, they’re plugging their own personal preference. But that seems to be exactly what you’re doing with the quote above.
We parted ways about 9 months into the job when we both realised this wasn’t working.
My impression is that remote work for new employees needs a lot of explicit relationship and trust building that we get for free when we interact with people in an office.
Companies that have gone fully remote, also quickly discover how much of their company knowledge is in one person's head, or whether it's well documented, which helps with the onboarding too.
Some companies have definitely moved to remote working better than others.
Is it? I don't believe it is. At this point, people just plug right in - once you're used to remote work, it's a matter of learning which chat platform they use, getting access to email, and away you go. It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days, precisely due to needing to accommodate remote onboarding.
I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote. We'll just have to wait a few more years for more robust, large scale comparisons before we really understand how much an office is worth.
I can see ways it might be worse, obviously, and I've experienced good in-office onboarding. But I've also experienced absolutely crap in-office onboarding (a month of no working development environment!) - so I question whether that experience was because of the office/remote dynamic, or because companies that do a good job onboarding because they value it, regardless.
So it's interesting to hear stories and experiences from other people's perspective, both onboard-ee and onboard-er, since I'm just one dude with my own Unique Perspective™ and limited total experience based on that viewpoint.
Even if your interlocutor can, and even if the large scale studies run counter to your argument, that doesn't mean your experience is invalid.
Life isn't a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled study. There is no control group consisting of you and your cohort to measure against.
The scientific method is, I argue, on the whole, the wrong instrument to bear in these scenarios, at least because measuring the metrics affects the study group and publishing the resulted affects the society in which the study occurred.
If there's some thought put into the onboarding process, I believe remote can be effective however I would argue remote onboarding requires far more effort and planning for the same result.
It's just not. In the office you're sitting next to a person you can lean over to and ask a question. Yeah, it interrupts their workflow, but that's ok when they're supposed to be helping you onboard. Remotely you've got to send a message, wait for somebody to reply, schedule a zoom call, whatever. It's async communication and it's slower, which is OK when you're not blocked, but when you're onboarding and blocked you need to be unblocked quickly because you don't have the experience to know where else to go while you're waiting.
I think it is only the case in companies where there is no proper onboarding process or it is an afterthought.
I was hired as a remote worker in a company in late 2021 and it was the most seamless onboarding process I ever had. I remember in a lot of companies having to chase people, trying to find them or waiting for them to get back from a meeting. Or the unpleasant experience of spending hours with a new hire and literally feeling his breath behind your neck while I would show him something and not being able to multitask at the same time on other things, especially those that had a private matter or were too confidential for that person at this stage. I am currently doing a lot of knowledge transfer for a new member of the team while I am moving to another one and I spend hours in video call with that guy. I am sharing one screen, while I can still do other tasks, reply to emails/instant messages in a separate screen. It is more walkie-talkie approach than a real videocall. But I can work on something and I don't have to tell him "look I have to do something urgent and confidential, let's discusss in a bit again" and then get dragged by millions things and not being able to get back to him.
I think this is what it comes down to. Most companies have nonexistent onboarding, so new hires can be unproductive for quite a while.
But due to covid forcing remote work I was able to go from renting a basement, to buying a home (and renting out MY basement).
House cost me the same as a city apartment, but I only qualified for the mortgage due to the added rental suite income. So if I'd stayed, I'd be unable to buy and have to continue renting.
Compared to staying in town, since I made the move in 2020, the difference in my net worth is now more than the entirety of my untaxed salary over that time.
tldr: I prefer office work, but working remotely has been the equivalent of earning 2.5X my salary the whole time.
More difficult, doesn't mean it's impossible or shouldn't be done.
Do not confuse one's inability to do something with a general impossibility.
Now yes, it does take a different mindset and we probably need to try different strategies for 'breaking the ice' over remote
It's documented ad-nauseum that developers (or any other job that requires concentration and reasoning) are far more productive in quiet surroundings.
I've worked in my own office, with a door, for a couple of years out of a 30 year career, and those two years were by far the most productive. Apart from the last 3 where WFH has been even better.
Open plan offices are awful for most, and commuting 90 minutes each way, standing for the full 90 minutes on a rush hour train into London is also a waste of time.
I'm sure it's the same in the US, but substitute car and traffic jams for trains.
The tl;dr here is, if there's so much office space available and going cheaply now, isn't about time employers add proper offices for those that want them, and entice a large number of developers back to the office?
This industry is rich, pays $$$, pays $$$ bonuses, employs smart people, will supply you with $3k, $4k, $5k laptops, desktops, $1-2k monitors, peripherals, free lunch, standing desks, send you on 1-2k conferences and travel, and so on and so on.
But not personal offices. WTF.
Not sure about that. Working without a necktie can feel like working naked. It takes some effort to change your feelings on that.
Also, ghmm, that nice long shit I used to take while browsing reddit... Go ahead and send me a meeting invite for timeslot.
I would argue that the prices reflect at least an incredibly persistent demand to live in those cities.
Just for different reasons than before. For instance, since the pandemic many cities have invested heavily in bike infrastructure and pedestrianization. E-bikes have become extremely popular. And as the post-COVID reopening has progressed, people have been organizing local hobbyist meetups, many of them having acquired those hobbies during the depths of the pandemic.
There is a huge lifestyle appeal to living in cities, and it will not go away anytime soon. Cities need to recognize that both the massive increase in residential demand and the massive plunge in commercial demand are incredible opportunities to differentiate themselves by converting their dead-after-6pm business districts into thriving, walkable mixed-use hubs.
And billions of redevelopment investment? GDP and employment!
But it's less obvious what tradeoffs people make in general to the degree that employment isn't part of the equation. I certainly never lived in a city when my company was located well outside.
But the whole reason we’re even having the discussion is because of the evidence that more people are remote working. So I’m assuming we’re talking about people who might have to go to their office at max two or three days a week in the extreme cases? Not sure how that will create enough of a market drain to make NYC, Boston, or San Fran living affordable?
I think the suggestion to reclaim business districts is the only rational way forward with any kind of chance of lowering prices. There just don’t seem to be enough people willing to live outside the city to bring down prices. If anything, everything price-wise points to market demand increasing.
Some people like crowds. Crowds are fun. Parties are fun. Food is fun. Community is fun. Or not. It’s great we have freedom to choose.
Is an American city for you? Are you a( indigent; b( a literal aristocrat or rich enough to be one; or c( a "financial domination" enjoyer who desires to give everything they earn to some combination of landlords and governments when you are not giving all your time to your boss? If you answered yes to any of the above, an American city is for you. If you are a working stiff, the city doesn't want you anyway.
Decreasing demand for an asset that has a fixed cost to the supplier (mortgage payments) pushes up prices just as much as increasing demand.
Yes, lot of people would not reject idea of having it, but at the same time actual demand (i.e. actual number of people who would think price is worth it, is quite lower compared to spagetti which is much cheaper but has many more buyers)
All in all. high price does not necessarily mean huge demand.
Yes, although I say it a different way. Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two. People put up with it in part because they had no option.
But once they worked outside of those spaces and realized what hell they were, of course they resist returning.
So it's not just about discovering new "freedom", it's about discovering that a major thing that makes life suck doesn't have to be a thing at all.
Offices don't have to be terrible. IBM, GE, Bell, etc. knew how to put together offices that didn't suck. Occasionally the architects got out of hand and produced some monstrosity, but the offices were mostly fine.
It's only the whole dumbass "open office plan" bullshit that made everything suck. Given that's the "standard", is it any wonder everybody wants to work from home?
I can't stand them either, just point out that they were the norm except for a 35-year period.
I do a lot of technical drawings. It feels way different to be in an open workspace with a horizontal drafting board (which is what I would have had prior to the 1990s) than with a brightly-lit, vertical screen. You have more privacy, even in an open space.
I did not know this.
However, pre-1980+ (or later), most workers were probably head-down looking at paper on their physical desktop. And surely more of them had actual offices compared to the cubical 80s-2000s or open offices 2000+.
Also, I would assume that pre-voip technology meant that salespeople were not yelling into their phones for the "joy" of their open-office-mates as they were 2000+.
I remember visiting the workplaces of both of my parents in the 1970's and neither were anything like open plan. I know you said "1960s" but the buildings my parents were working in were well established at the time and had been there since, at least the 1960's.
35 year is almost entirety of the working age if you started working after uni
But that is often the case; attempts to increase "shareholder value" come at an outsized and detrimental cost of productivity and ultimate profit. But such is life. You cannot know the outcome of two paths as you can only test one of them.
Certainly that's at least part of the GP's "growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two."
They're a good rejoinder to Musk's recent farcical argument that since most blue-collar workers cannot work remotely, it's immoral for white-collar workers to resist Return-To-Office mandates [1]. Some jobs still require neckties, but that does not mean we should all be obliged to wear them too.
I personally enjoy commuting — a 35-minute journey in a big city via public transport. It gets me to an office full of friendly faces who also enjoy the commute. The people who prefer remote stay home. It's a happy medium.
RTO mandates in US cities with poor/non-existent public transport options are bad ideas all around.
[1] https://www.mediaite.com/tv/elon-musk-calls-remote-work-bull...
One of the dumbest things he’s ever said (and that’s saying something). Most people can’t fly private either but it doesn’t seem to stop him.
Whereas a humanist might consider how to make blue-collar work less terrible.
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/09/poverty-no-inequali...
I rather have the option to going to work and I think companies should still offer a solution for that if they are able to. I do like traveling into the city so maybe I just like neckties.
I am definitely against all of this rhetoric about how remote work is horrible and the laptop crowd isn’t doing good work when we don’t really give people enough time for childcare or elder care which I think is a much bigger problem that motivates people to work remotely. Also real estate markets are way overvalued.
I love being in the office. I hate the hour commute. And I hate doubling or tripling my housing price. I prefer showering at 745 and connecting and being productive at 8 over showering at 645 and driving into work to be productive at 8 (while being in zoom meetings all day anyway).
I like records too. They are so cool with nice artwork. And I like record stores. But I listen to music 99% of the time digitally.
The office is the same way. It’s not that it isn’t nice. It’s that the cost of using it over better alternatives is madness, especially at scale.
Imagine all the pollution saved from people driving to work.
That’s nice you’ve resolved that, but it’s not useful to many people. It’s like saying “personally, I’ve resolved to wake up at 4am and run 14 miles. The health benefits are amazing. Yadda yadda yadda.”
Or even better “personally, I’ve resolved to inherit family wealth and not work.”
This advice is not very applicable to the return to work discussion.
Most people have families and community ties that limit them from living close to work and from moving every time they change jobs.
For me, the schools are very bad near my work and private schools cost $30k/year. So I’m not going to move close to work as my income doesn’t allow it.
If wishes were fishes, I would definitely like to live close to work and walk and be able to pop home for lunch and whatnot.
But even if schools were great and house was cheap near my work, I’ve changed work locations in the same metro area 7 times in the past 20 years so I’m not going to uproot my family each time I change positions.
So I, and I think many others, chose commute to give family opportunities. And now I choose remote to save that expense while still giving family opportunity.
As another comment said, a lot of the consternation about whether or not to go to the office is based on personal circumstances.
My office had a funny interaction where when we were discussing remote work, one person remarked that they liked coming into the office on their bike and it was so pleasant. This was one of the highest paid people who lived in a $1.5M house 5 minutes away from the office. And they said this to a zoom of 100 people of which maybe half commuted from $200k houses and made $75k.
Yes, that’s nice, but not useful for productive decision making.
Of course the consternation is based on personal circumstances. I don’t think workers have ideological stances on remote vs office work. I think it’s based on cost and productivity and quality of life.
I think a lot of people ran into these problems, but there are solutions. Work doesn't have to be your only source of community, and in fact, it can be problematic when it is, because then your community only lasts as long as your job. On the one hand you might lose your job, and on the other hand you might not quit when you should. Having connections outside work is pretty key to having work/life balance IMO.
I feel the same as OP. I have a very healthy social life outside of work but full time remote work at home feels isolating and repetitive. My mind does not like the lack of separation between home and work and I've tried every trick in the book. This is also true for most other activities in my life (e.g. I don't like exercising at home vs. a gym).
I don't want to force people to the office, but it gets tiring hearing other people assuming I haven't tried their "solutions"
> I have a very healthy social life outside of work but full time remote work at home feels isolating and repetitive. My mind does not like the lack of separation between home and work and I've tried every trick in the book.
If OP had said any of that, I wouldn't have responded in the way I did.
One can't easily switch from a skyscraper to a park or apartment building. Office work culture affects how entire cities are designed.
Literally all of my adult friends are former coworkers, with some of them not even becoming friends until after we quit jobs.
You spend majority of your waking hours at work, where else do you make friends? Please don't say the gym.
Ehh, some of my friends are that way too, but a lot of my work friendships have withered when there wasn't work keeping us in contact on a regular basis.
> You spend majority of your waking hours at work, where else do you make friends? Please don't say the gym.
It doesn't have to be the gym either. I personally have met a lot of my friends out rock climbing, but that's going to vary from person to person because you have to find things you enjoy doing. Going to the gym to meet people if you don't enjoy working out at the gym doesn't make sense.
Are there other things you enjoy doing besides work?
(Incidentally, I don't spend the majority of my waking hours at work).
Sorry if this sounds blunt, I’m moments away from sleep, but this comment of yours really frustrated me. You are assuming that someone who enjoys the social aspects of working in person does so because they lack social outlets outside the workplace. That is just your assumption, and a distortion of the discussion. I see this all the time. What gives?
I feel like these in person get togethers are far more interactive and productive than a day of calls where most people go camera off and fall asleep 30 mins in. Actually doing work remote works mostly fine, but god I hate group calls, the latency, the bad audio, etc.
If I want social time with food and drinks I want to be with family and friends. If I'm at the office I want to be working. Otherwise I don't want to be there.
And Zoom anything can suck it. Full Stop.
You probably mean sedentary. Sedimentary would be quite extreme. :)
Unlike neckties (which are entirely about appearance and perceived norms) -- there are very considerable intrinsic benefits to having people onsite. They just don't outweigh the very considerable negatives, many are coming to find. So it's fundamentally an argument about tangible tradeoffs -- not social norms.
An entirely different argument, in fact.
I think "hollow" is a bit heavy for the judgment, but I agree they are not the same in terms of tangibility (although I'll bet if I dig enough I could find some practical use for neckties (in the office, at least)).
However, like neckties, many companies do the office thing because that's what you're supposed to do. "Everybody knows this." Some (many?) offices exist without a tangible benefit.
Neckties however -- are 100 percent in that category.
And those things can change, suddenly having a huge tower in downtown NY becomes a sign of a out-of-date "old" company; perhaps the new hotness will be something like a small company "town" in the outskirts somewhere.
So the "new hotness" will be kind of like the old days where you worked for Pullman, and with those wages you earned, you: paid rent to Pullman, bought your goods at the Pullman general store, and so on in effect giving much of your earnings back to the company.
Cities too. My city government offices are located on some of the best real-estate in the city and in elegantly refurbished turn of the century buildings.
Government offices should be pre-fab cheap as possible in brownfields or on other low-value land. High value land should be used for at minimum something that will generate property tax revenue.
You should realize that the real estate around the government offices in your city are high value because they were located near the government offices?
It used to be that companies had to have lots of people around organized in hierarchical processes working to certain uniform processes to produce value at scale. These days, you can outsource a lot of these things, automate a lot away, to the point that many businesses are scaling down to human level.
Many companies exist that are only a handful of people working together. They do business with other companies or sell to consumers directly via the internet. Instead of doing things in house, they partner with other companies for things that used to be done in house. HR, accounting, marketing, manufacturing, logistics, etc.
And in so far people still need to be internal, they no longer have to be in the same place or even on the same continent. Remote work is here and still somewhat controversial. But it works and has liberated a lot of people from going to an office on a daily basis. These people are often acting more like independent companies rather than employees. Often that's exactly what they are: independent contractors, freelancers, etc. And of course, a large and growing part of the workforce is no longer permanently employed by anyone.
So, having all these people come to some huge sky scraper in New York isn't that logical or productive anymore. You could do it. But it doesn't really add that much value. And it actually costs a lot of money and time to do it.
I assume some many continue to exist but employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them.
> As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. Better to live someplace pleasant and less expensive
No one wants to live there too many people live there......
I also have Gbps internet and a job at a startup as a principal. This literally is the best of both worlds for me. I'm not particularly wealthy and not particularly clever - I'm sure everyone is doing this and the best part is, there's _room_ out here, at least in the USA.
How does that follow from anything? I am working remotely from the start of 2011 and never once took a pay cut compared to an on-site job, as far as I am aware at least.
Then these companies are going to have to get used to lower profit margins as time catches up and kicks them out with competitors.
I make more now in a remote position than when I commuted? I'm in California, not in a LCOL location.
Some companies are losing their more experienced employees when they force RTO. If they want to compete for this portion of the talent pool, they'll need to offer more than the other remote first companies.
Relative to what is an open question, because the jobs that require that also don't currently pay a lot.
In my experience, the employees that have to go into the office are generally the ones that get paid less than the ones who can work from home. I'm not really sure how you came to that conclusion.
My home is a place of rest and family, not work. Work happens at a dedicated location five minutes from home, on foot.
I think we'll see more of this in the future--mixed neighborhoods with a lot of residential space next to offices. What I think we won't see as much of, are huge office blocks very far from residential areas, where the majority of the workforce commutes an hour+ every day, each way, to work.
But that kind of office park and lifestyle pretty much sucks. So I don't think city centres are in any danger. Turns out they're a useful way of organising socially even if they're not where the offices are.
I like trains, but an alternative could be electric buses, with Uber Pool-like dynamic routing. I'm not sure how the speed would compare, but, it gets pretty wild when you consider what's possible with mobile phones, AVs, and electric vehicles.
I for one, am excited by this.
It simple 2D geometry - if you live 1x from the office your commute is 20 minutes, if you live 2x from the office, your commute is 50 minutes, 3x from the office - 90 minutes commute, and so on. If you move the main cluster of the offices outside of the city border, then the commute time would change for people, for some it will decrease, for some it will increase. There would be exactly the same percentage of people living 1x, 2x, 3x etc. from the office, just the people would be shuffled between the quartiles.
But back to residential: I understand that many wealthy people buy real estate for the prestige of having a certain address or as a way to "lock up" wealth in an asset. See Billionaires Row [0] [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row_(Manhattan...
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/nearly-half-of-luxury-units-em...
* Note: residential property taxation in NYC is in dire need of reform but the point still stands
Also, if you have true "FU" money, then owning a piece of prime NYC real estate is just another mark on your bedpost, like your superyacht.
I'm just having a hard time believing that we're at this moment in time where life suddenly got better for workers.
Besides if it's cheap enough to hire someone overseas (who by definition would be remote), how would it not be cheaper to just pay their current workforce to work remotely?
Now the other half of that is what remote-first, "all I need is more time to code" developers really don't want to hear, is that in resolving conflict, in-person communication is much higher bandwidth than even zoom communication, both for the whiteboard, and for the fact being in-person de-escalates emotion. This is particularly true for early career developers, where some pushback (i.e. conflict) in their naive assumptions is actually how they are going to learn better from senior developers.
So while 5 days a week in the office is dead, its way too early to say what the eventual outcome will be. But I do agree less days a week will force some amount of square-foot downsizing, so I am glad I don't own any office buildings.
1: Indian wages are going up. The difference gets smaller every year.* Note that many of the best Indian developers are paid in USD, and even for the developers that get paid in Rupees, the company they are hired by locally often does get paid in USD by the American company that buys their services, so the fact that the Rupee goes down doesn't necessarily offset their wage increase for the American company that hires them.
2: American workers can still meet in every Tuesday. It's hard from Hyderabad.
3: Time difference can be a real issue (but of course it can also be an advantage).
4: It's often easier for Americans to understand American English than Indian English.
5: American developers might understand the American market and competing products better.
* https://www.statista.com/chart/25729/india-annual-average-sa...
Some companies do outsource everything but it’s HARD.
Neckties are still widely worn.
Have a look at the demise of hats throughout the 20th century for another example.
Most of the people want less work and more pay, that’s a reality.
On the other hand, staying competitive is most company’s reality too.
So it is really not about you as a employee or employer’s will but rather than the market supply and demand that determines the work location flexibility. If I am employer and I have 2 candidates with similar skill level, of course I will prefer the one who can come to office everyday. And if I am an employee with two job offers with similar pay and working items of course I will choose the one with remote flexibility, because having choice is always better.
I think we have gained and lost things in the remote shift. I feel bad for young people starting their careers who will never know what it's like to make acquaintance with their coworkers and feel at ease with them, to work on problems together.
The workers may have rejected the onsite companies such that it is difficult to fill the expensive offices. But also, it is likely that the COVID forced out-of-office situation has caused companies to re-evaluate the value of prime office locations.
Fashion is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. If the scenario is visible and hyped, others will believe they must follow it to be relevant. And then it becomes stronger, and effectively relevant. Soon every real US finance company needs a prime Manhattan office... unless it's a commodities company, in which it must have a prime Chicago location.
Aside from inflating finance company performance via tax laws, I don't think politics really has so much to do with this. Actually, the global upward wealth redistribution policies do mean that a smaller group has a more difficult time finding places to park money, so that indeed does inflate propertly values.
Finding that now in NYC is pretty difficult without paying a ton, even with all this unused commercial space. Co-working spaces have all these amenities I don't want and charge $1200-2000/month for a closet you can kind of fit a few small desks in. A lot of these buildings are holding out to get one or two big corporate leases. I'd totally rent a small space in Manhattan if the price was right, just to have the option to head into the city when I want to get out of the house, but I don't think anyone is trying to cater to a bunch of hacker/artist types anymore. Until then I'll just work from home.
The living or working arrangements are often illegal, so they aren't visible in the "above-ground" market (Zillow, Streeteasy, IRL ads, etc.), but they're still there.
If you generally search the web for "NYC housing facebook groups", those keywords will lead you to the right groups. Note you'll probably have an easier time searching for these groups with Google than with FB. And don't be intimidated by private groups, the barriers to entry are really low.
There are niche groups for artists, craftspeople, etc. if that appeals you – just add appropriate keywords!
tornadosoup+hn@gmail.com
NYC makes renting most of the unused commercial space to random people illegal or highly impractical.
My company has a couple of suites in a small one story building.
I'd say it's only about 30% full now (down from about 90% last summer or so). Even so, they were unwilling to budge on the rent for one of the suites my company leases. Now it's sitting empty too.
In years past there's always been a persistent strain of criticism of perk-heavy offices because "it's a ploy to get you to work late" - I think the criticism has actually been off the mark. It's actually a little bit more sinister than that: the perks create a culture where your entire social world exists at work, and massively raises the barrier to quitting.
If you've worked at a perk-heavy FAANG like Meta or Google you've met them: the people for whom nearly all of their friends are from work, who relish going into work for the social contact. For them leaving the company isn't just leaving a job, or even colleagues they like, it's the near-total obliteration of their social world.
I don't begrudge people for making friends at work - you have to do a job, you may as well make the best of it, but I would heavily caution people against forming the bulk of their social world around their workmates.
Having a life outside of work isn't just good for you personally, it's IMO pretty critical to your career's success.
last stats I found is that 43% of marriage come from the workplace so it's most certainly not something to discount that easily
Disgusted? By… a company… having an office? We have shockingly different interpretations of dystopian!
Been working 12+ years remotely in a company that has been doing it even longer in some departments. It works and you can get around all the complaints no problem. I understand some people prefer to work in an office and I understand it also depends on the type of business you are it. I get that but people also need to remember times change.
Sure they do - if they live in a city. I am a young person who started my first FTE job last year and am WFH. I have an incredibly bountiful friend group that comes from hobbyist meetups, social bike rides and dating apps.
Maybe it’s time for society to work on that drinking habit, eh?
This is traffic nuisance but also makes the streets relatively safe (on average).
I just wish a “third place” culture would spontaneously arise if only to decongest the roads.
It occurs that shows including "Call my agent", "The Newsroom", and to some extent "Madam Secretary" depict the better version of office life (particularly for young people) pretty well.
I actually have (and especially back then, had) a life outside of work believe it or not, and the thought of all of my social interactions (especially back then) being tied to the office sounds absolutely disgusting and completely dystopian.
I don't particularly care for anyone in my company or any of my past ones bar 1 or 2 people, and I much prefer keeping it that way, where my work life is a completely separate universe to anything even resembling my personal life.
I am the same. I've only ever met 1 person who I would want to hang out with outside of work.
You can go to the office, play ping-pong, rant about your boss, flirt with coworkers and then "go home" and socialize some more (if you want that.) It's not either-or.
I've found that if you spend all time together at home, at the end of the day, you have nothing to talk about with whomever you happen to live with.
Oh, we Europeans have no problem with that. The difference we have is that we have employee protection laws that put a hard cap on working hours to 48h a week on average over a year (with some rare exceptions, usually for crews of offshore rigs, boats, public health/safety, military and private security) - and that this stuff gets audited, especially on complaints. And when the government looks at a company, they audit everything, not just the person who complained...
Because they worked together outside of office.
You couldn't remote in into a cow. Before office being a place to work together there was factory floor, and before that it was the field
I've been expecting "peak office" for years now. Offices originally existed to contain paper records. Look at pictures of offices from 1700 to 2000. You'll see much paper, and much paper storage. That's dead. If everybody in the office is using a screen and keyboard, the classic function of an office is gone. It may still be useful as a social business space, but the age of the clerical plant is over. (Outside of some Government agencies.)
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-18/nyc-s-rec...
fair enough, but it may be the only necessity
Don't succumb to the strong selection bias that is the HN nerd crowd. Obviously over here we like to solitarily sit at our machines at home. We'd do that even if nobody paid us. And for those of us who trive with that, the remote work revolution was a blessing since it at least opened up those options and employers are recognizing the benefits (happier workers, more productivity, less cost for office space).
But we are not representative, so let's be careful with extrapolating
In fact, many people who strongly prefer working from home prefer it because they can socialize more with people they actually prefer to socialize with: family, relatives, neighbors
That is an Americanism I hope the rest of the world doesn’t emulate fully.
I also remember doing all sorts of stuff by myself and getting bussed around as needed (school/camp/afterschool) - my parents at first didn't even have a car out of college.
Curious - now that everyone has to drive everywhere for their kids - Auto/Petroluem industries thrive with that.
This was in the 90s in Europe. Where I live now (still in Europe), all my friends have their kids to the same thing.
There is the occasional parent who shuttles the kid to/from school. They either live in some inaccessible place in the countryside or they are weird (or both). The kids that need shuttling by their parents actually have a social disadvantage since they don't get to spontaneously hangout with their friends and do stuff. Everything needs to be coordinated and scheduled and approved with/by their parents. Poor kids.
I can see why employers want people back in offices if that is what the working day looks like for some people.
After 25 years I had been promoted to Director level (6 steps) and now had a desk that afforded me 4 inches on each side of my elbows. There were maybe 50 people sharing the same meeting room space. All the offices were gone unless you were "executive" grade.
It was hell on earth to work in. In hindsight I got nothing done for about three years because the working environment was just impossible. "Execs" were happy because they got efficiency savings on the floorspace.
Then came covid. I was working from home. I cleared a space and set up a workstation (I was lucky to be able to do this I know). I went in on the monday morning I started work. I had cleared everything I needed to do by about 1:30 in the afternoon. I basically got 4 hrs a day back + travel. This improvement was sustained, and I was able to use it to actually contribute and create value and business rather than just putting out fires.
The new owners will try to offload them to the highest bidder. So I forecast an active second hand skyscraper auction market (with the usual lemon problems).
What will be the price? Well if people don't need and/or don't want to work in those places anymore, the price will be determined by the next best use.
For a low enough price I could imagine artist colonies turning them into cavernous post-modern studios where the sky-high rise and precipitous fall of a particular way of living and working will be documented with great artistic sensibility.
Exactly like it happened with the old industrial lofts in so many cities. NY, SF, Berlin just off the top of my head.
That said, it’s probably the best realistically possible outcome here.
I'd guess there are still a lot of people who think returning to office life is inevitable. There's certainly a big push for it from a certain subgroup now.
Within about a day of “two weeks to flatten the curve” a large amount of people predicted exactly what was about to happen to the entire country because they understood economics. If you pointed any these things out, routine accusations of wanting people to die were thrown your way.
It was a weird time.
COVID definitely took the edge off but you are seeing the same thing in residential (particularly people moving into single-family) and it isn't of the same magnitude.
This isn't unusual (NY had a similar downturn in the late 80s, you don't even need to go back far) but it was multiple things at once. COVID is a very easy get out for people who did extremely stupid things with other people's money.
Half my team, including my manager, do not live in a city with an office. Real curious how this will play out.
I don't mind an occasional on-site day when there is a purpose, but LMFAO if you expect me to commute in on days where I will mostly be dialing in to calls or doing solo work, reaping zero benefit of face-to-face time.
Seems like they are setting up for a reckoning of some kind.
Having asked the same question of developers, it's a combination of cost and code. Many office buildings are old, with tiny windows surrounded by load-bearing walls. They're also laid out with an office, not home, in mind. (Think: plumbing.) This combination means extensive renovation, retrofitting and–if you find a previously-unseen problem–rebuilding.
That said, it's New York City. My first two apartments were illegally subdivided and subletted, the first having no window. There are people who will happily take an apartment with a tiny (or non-existent) window in exchange for cheaper rent. We just need to update the code to remove aesthetic requirements while ensuring that doesn't mean skimping on safety.
Just a nit-pick: older buildings with windows and load-bearing walls are actually better candidates for residential conversion than newer buildings with glass curtain walls and structural columns. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...]
Structurally, yes. Politically, community boards will claim they're hellscapes and then trot out studies on the health benefits of open air and sunlight and whatnot.
Plumbing is easy, pressurized pipes and pumps can deal with that just fine. The real challenge is air conditioning: showers create lots of humid, warm air - introduce that into your building's HVAC and you'll get issues with rust and mold - and cooking isn't much better, people generally don't want to smell the curry that someone at the other end of the building is cooking. Or they don't want to hear their neighbors having sex through the air vents.
It's also a question of what the trunk water/sewer line can handle. There's places in some cities where larger apartment buildings have to hold sewage in a tank and pump it out at night because the city pipes can't handle a normal load during normal hours.
The bigger problem is finding space for pipes. Many commercial buildings have specialized vertical tunnels for plumbing. The bathrooms in these buildings are usually adjacent to these tunnels, and there are no provisions for expanding plumbing to other areas of the floor in order to separate the floorspace into apartments with their own bathrooms.
The vertical tunnels are also designed to contain some number of main pipes with capacity based on N bathrooms per floor that you'd typically find in an office, with no room for expansion to handle N*10 bathroom capacity.
Pipes dimensioned for an office floor is surely enough for flats.
AIUI, plumbing is technically easy, but is still insanely expensive for conversions.
That said, it makes sense that HVAC would be a bigger problem.
Commented on this elsewhere [1], but egress into a fireproofed stairwell is a safety-neutral compromise. It's against code, however.
There are very few "aesthetic requirements" that prevent an office building from being converted to residential. Most of issues with building code - including the window issue - are in fact motivated by safety concerns.
Office buildings are fireproofed in ways residential units are not. One can also replace windows with proximity to a fireproof stairwell without compromising safety.
I'm winging this. The point is there are places we can make tradeoffs. They're just not the kind Manhattan voters like.
You can't, really.
The way that emergency exits are laid out in office buildings is different from the way that they're laid out in residential buildings, and that's done because the safety needs of residential buildings are different from the typical safety needs of office buildings. It would be more expensive to build office buildings with those requirements from the get-go, so few dedicated office have them (particularly the larger skyscrapers that we're talking about).
You can either retrofit the core of the building (very expensive) or you can redesign the unit size and shape to conform to the existing building core (less expensive, but results in layouts that cannot be sold at the price the building owners require - the exact problem discussed in the article).
> The point is there are places we can make tradeoffs. They're just not the kind Manhattan voters like.
To make that claim, you'd have to point to actual tradeoffs that could be made without significantly compromising safety, and which aren't being done because "Manhattan voters" have rejected them.
And as someone who probably has a much better understanding of NYC commercial and residential building codes than the typical HN reader, I'm really only aware of one, and even that is only really being advocated for smaller and mid-size buildings, not the tall skyscrapers discussed in this article.
> I'm winging this.
Yes, I can see that.
Nobody says to ignore it. Just not to make specific expressions of it a red line.
Windows are a great example. New Yorkers get emotional about windows. Guess what: nobody is egressing from the 57th story of a burning building via the window. Yet go to a community board meeting and every numpty who Ctrl + F'd the fire code will pull up photos from 1911 to argue for windows an aircraft carrier can fit through.
You know what you can provide the residents of a building with tiny, tiny windows? A rooftop garden. Modern heating and fresh, filtered air. Potted plants in the hallways, community spaces, warmer lighting et cetera.
There are apartment buildings in Hell's Kitchen with communal toilets and showers for each floor. There is still running water to each apartment, but I'm not sure that has to be a requirement. (My college dorm didn't have running water.)
You're talking about prewar walk-ups that have been converted to de facto SROs. Also, those are mostly downtown, not in Hell's Kitchen. They're cheap and mostly occupied by young people who can't afford anything else, because they're incredibly undesirable ways to live, limiting their market rental price. Some number are also rent-stabilized and occupied by longtime residents, for the same reasons.
There is no way that you can seriously argue that doing this for newly-constructed skyscrapers would result in units that can be sold at the price that the building owners are demanding. There's a reason no new construction uses this model except for dedicated affordable housing (to the extent that's even built anymore). People simply do not want to live like that, and the market reflects that.
The opposite is harder. Adding bathrooms, combining rooms, adding kitchens and drains and individual utilities costs maybe more than the building is worth.
A recent study in NYC found:
"Most conversion projects would only become financially feasible if buildings could be acquired at significant discounts, in many cases at prices that valued the structures as having negative value."
https://cbcny.org/research/potential-office-residential-conv...
I'm sure I can find someone willing to rent a 10,000+s.f. downtown manhattan apartment for more than the cost of maintenance (and the property tax on the $1 the floor of the building is apparently worth).
Plus, negative value to equity is absolutely possible in this scenario. Let me know how far you get in the commercial real estate world without signing a personal guaranty.
You are ready to pay $1 for a floor in the structure and how many millions for your share of the plot?
Another solution for cities with astronomical land prices (like NYC) is to look into moving some of their city buildings into sky scrapers, and then selling their buildings & land to be re-developed.
Like why can't the police "building" just be 30 floors in a sky scraper? Why can't a hospital just be a bunch of floors in a sky scraper? Why can't a high school just be a bunch of floors in a sky scraper? Etc...
Building layout is another. You could only reasonably put apartments on the outside with windows. There would be a lot of wasted space in the core of the building.
It's all possible, but the question becomes is it desirable to live there? Will the rents justify the cost to convert? I doubt it...
Financial district has a number of converted office buildings, which are now residential. If anything, that area is now more vibrant and cool, certainly not an apocalyptic thing.
Retrofitting should certainly be possible, but neither cheap nor quick, and you either run into the problem of the resulting monthly being too high (and having trouble getting occupancy up above 95% where you want it), or it goes too low and you can't make back what you spent,
https://nypost.com/2023/04/24/longtime-nyc-home-of-the-daily...
If you require plumbing to every apartment. Dorm-style lay-out would sidestep this problem.
We have a desperate need for affordable housing all over this country. SROs and hostel-style residences are perfectly reasonable as a step to keep people stable and off the streets.
Younger me. Lots of people. If you don't work from home it's just a crash pad. Saving a few hundred bucks a month is a good bargain for having to walk a few feet to pee.
https://columbusunderground.com/office-to-residential-conver...
They can, and will, but it is not an easy process (yet).
I would guess that within 1-3 years we see major cities changing their codes and zoning processes specifically to fast track commercial -> residential conversions.
1 - Windowless rooms are heavily undesirable in residences but pretty normal in office settings. In many areas they are also illegal (all bedrooms must have natural light) - but regardless of legality they are shunned by most buyers/renters.
Offices however have lots of windowless rooms in the form of supply closets, utility rooms, freight elevators, conference rooms, storage rooms, etc. This combined with the popularity of open floor plan offices means that office buildings are really deep dimensionally. You can easily find modern office buildings where a desk is 50+ feet from the nearest window.
This makes them nearly impossible to divide into residences, because the resulting apartments are dungeon-like, with only the very outer reaches getting any significant natural light.
2 - Cost of conversion is high but the resulting product is worse than purpose-built.
Keeping in mind the natural light factor above, a lot of office-converted apartments are less pleasant to live in than purpose-built residential apartments, but the conversion costs are very high, and the two opposing dynamics cannot be reconciled. The cost of converting an office demands a level of rent that it cannot achieve in competition with actual residential buildings.
3 - Utility usage increases in residential buildings. A lot. Electrical, water, and sewer needs in residential buildings are much more intense than in commercial buildings. This is non-trivial to retrofit - since additional conduit and piping has nowhere natural to go. Conversion projects often have to punch through the concrete floor plates in order to create new top-to-bottom shafts to run all of the additional utilities. This is intensely expensive.
4 - Commercial buildings have over-built elevators relative to residential buildings. Office workers move from floor-to-floor a lot more than residents, and so for the same floor area commercial buildings would have more elevators. They take up valuable floor space that can otherwise be rented, and removing them to recover the floor area for residential use is incredibly costly. Many modern commercial buildings are in fact built around their elevator cores, so removal may not even be feasible.
There are some successful conversions - but as others have brought up, they tilt towards conversion of pre-war office buildings where, because they didn't have powered HVAC, there are more windows and no office is too far from a window, creating good opportunities to convert into actually pleasant spaces. Modern offices with their gigantic floor plates are a whole different story.
Alright, offices, sure, but why do we need them all in London? Are businesses _visiting_ each other? What was the rationale?
Business saw a large number of people collected together and went, well, might as well set up shop here.
Now we have come all the way around where people want to move away, and businesses are going nope, you stay right here, because we need you to survive.
I rented a nice office on 25th / Broadway near Madison Square Park back in early 2000s for a few years and it was about $45 per square foot. All utility included.
I'm surprised the average isn't higher.
It's no chump change, but most Manhattan 1000 sq ft apartment with 2 bedroom will cost more than that, especially with common charge.
Less humane office spaces lead to less versatile buildings and now the chickens have come home to roost.
The list is technically correct but deceptive. It implies that those are the biggest expenditures (unless you read it carefully). The NYPD expenses, which is 10% of the total budget, the 3rd highest cost, and 5 times bigger than the asylum seekers budget, is left out.
We mitigate some of the subsidence issues and we free up a lot of real estate for new parks and quiet spots where people can reconnect with nature in the bowels of a huge city without having to go to Central Park, etc.
This looks like a win for New Yorkers.
Of course it we put some thought into it maybe good things could happen.
Lets think outside the box in a move fast and break things manner. If we moved fast enough and broke down enough of these buildings then the island could find an equilibrium much sooner. (As a geoscientist I am skeptical). Like in many things related to new software, services, apps, the whole part about how me make it pay off can be figured out later. Run at a loss long enough to fix all the defects in your business model and maybe your first adopters will be gullible enough to set you up for success later. The important part is to be first to the product space and to set the tone and tempo for those that follow. You're the leader, defining the narrative and all others must iterate on your model and brainstorm ways to improve the process while trying to attract funding for their dubious improvements.
I recognize that you and others may not be as forward thinking as I am. If something is to be broken you want to make sure it belongs to someone else or that there is a path to enrichment for you. Surely your investment has paid out many times over and you are ready for a new challenge in an exciting new market or product space.
Maybe you should call someone at HUD and explore your condo options. It may be better for society anyway if some of the commercial space were converted to affordable housing. That region could use more affordable housing. You are probably aware that conversion of commercial property to housing requires a lot of infrastructure improvements and building upgrades to be feasible. Fortunately HUD or other government agencies may have funds to soften those costs and get you right back into business as owner of the most conveniently placed residential property in the city. Just be sure to follow project guidelines in how the money is used to avoid legal problems down the road. People could live a block from their jobs in one of the not-vacant office properties.
Like at least one of our large news services, I'm just throwing shit at the walls here. Maybe some of it will stick.
The main audience of Bloomberg aren't executives who need validate their comercial real estate purchases. They're analysts who just want to be informed about the current economic landscape.
Do you expect that someone will read this will think "welp, better start commuting to the office because I don't want my city's budget to be cut!"
For buildings that are partially built, can they still be converted or is it too late?
Been there a few times and it always gave me the impression it's one of those fake cities in Disney.
A sea of people on the streets but some buildings seem like 90% empty.
Some shops are highly suspect too. My wife wanted a selfie stick and we got one in an electronics shop in 7th avenue, a couple of blocks from Times Square, big store but completely empty.
We went in, browsed, bought one selfie stick for few bucks (not expensive) and left, no other shoppers in sight. Later that day we went to exchange it because the button didn't work, same ordeal.
I'm not an economist, but I pretty sure that a business in that location with that rent cannot be profitable without a continuous stream of shoppers, no way.
The whole city seems like a money laundering operation.
> The whole city seems like a money laundering operation
Classic
Spotify leases floors in 4 WTC until the end of the decade, so it's a sunk cost. They're paying regardless, but it's cheaper if it's vacant since there's less janitorial work, electric, etc.