NYC skyscrapers sit vacant | Hacker News Reader

NYC skyscrapers sit vacant

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185 pointsmirthlessend413 comments

Neckties were an essential business requirement for ages. At some point, people had had enough of the mostly pointless ritual and began rejecting the norm. Even still, stodgy companies required it with the argument that it was necessary for being considered professional.

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.

> Many workers have tasted the freedom of no commute, or at least a pleasant walk/bike commute to a nearby coworking space.

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.

> Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two.

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?

It was not dumbass. It was an attempt to cut the spendings on the workspaces for the employees and increase the profits for shareholders.

Open plan in a nutshell: would you like to save 20% on seating costs for the low cost of a 30% reduction in productivity? Then open plan offices might be right for you.

The nutshell takeaway here is that concrete reductions in costs will always outweigh greater but less concrete increases in costs, because... well George Carlin covered that.

My theory is it's a classic cargo cult situation: "If we just do the same thing this successful startup did (we'll ignore that they were doing it in a different context for different reasons, and ignore the ones that did the same thing but weren't successful) then we too will have the same explosive success!"

One would argue that it was "dumbass" if the attempt to cut cost affected a greater loss of productivity.

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.

> It's only the whole dumbass "open office plan" bullshit that made everything suck.

Certainly that's at least part of the GP's "growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two."

open plan offices were the norm until the 1960s.

I can't stand them either, just point out that they were the norm except for a 35-year period.

Sure and mud huts were there way longer than any kind of office but neither this or that is relevant now.

35 year is almost entirety of the working age if you started working after uni

What I really hate about open offices is the fishbowl effect. Having someone behind my back and staring at whatever's on my computer screen feels extremely uncomfortable.

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.

One way to mitigate this is to get into a position where it's illegal for someone to look over your shoulder. Barring one two-year stretch a decade ago I've always had a private office.

In what positions is it illegal? HR? CSM?

> open plan offices were the norm until the 1960s.

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.

When I interviewed with Boeing in 80s, it was large rooms filled with desks an no partitions with managers around the perimeter. (The company I took a job with had private offices but there was obviously a lot of variation.) Later in the 80s I had the stereotypical cubicles.

> open plan offices were the norm until the 1960s

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+.

> most workers were probably head-down looking at paper on their physical desktop

Not really. If you go back to the 50's you will find armies of people looking down at paper, reading and writing, but not most. By the 80's all of those people had machines on their desks, while most didn't do paper work.

I believe the majority of people only started doing information (since the paper isn't there anymore) work this century on the rich countries. On many countries they didn't yet.

Also, sales people were always loud.

    By the 80's all of those people had machines on their desks

What kind of machines? Computers? My father was an office worker his whole life. He didn't get a PC on his desk until the 90s. Before, he had a type writer.

Writing machines, calculators, card organizers, whatever counter, etc. All of them loud.

The cubicle was invented in the 60s as a way of liberating workers from the tyranny of the open plan. To give people their own space.

Ironic that it became its own oppression.

In retrospect, cubicles were just aesthetically unfortunate and a convenient target for those who wanted to mock business culture (a la Office Space). But full size cubicles were vastly superior in visual privacy and sound dampening to the hell of “open office” seating at long benches that came after.

Cubicles were mocked into being removed for no good reason. A programmer analogy would be the goto-statememt. Mental institutions are another.

Neckties are a great example.

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...

> 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.

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.

Translation: Your well being is a violation of my rights.

Whereas a humanist might consider how to make blue-collar work less terrible.

The entire egalitarian fad we're living through is not longer interested in alleviating poverty, but abolishing any form of "inequality" [0]. As if inequality were a bad thing and equality a good thing.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/09/poverty-no-inequali...

Another reactionary Catholic argues against teachings of Jesus, rejects Second Vatican Council, despises liberation theology.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Yawn.

It's hard for me to visualize why some jobs would require neckties. It's not a piece of useful equipment, like a safety helmet. What would offices lose by having workers wear whatever they like?

It’s a great way to filter out the people that won’t listen to what the boss says.

There's also a "status" thing for people and for companies - companies are not immune to "fake it until you make it" and many pour billions into status-buildings that are perhaps not technically necessary.

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.

Skyscrapers are those neckties of the corporations.

> 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.

Hum... Did the thread stop being about remote work at some point? I missed it.

You mean like...

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1172301798/workers-affordable...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/18/is-elon-musk...

In europe that's exactly what the state it is. There's so many levels of taxation, company-, employement-, wage-, pension-, health- and property-tax. And then there is 25% vat on everything.

> companies are not immune to "fake it until you make it" and many pour billions into status-buildings that are perhaps not technically necessary.

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.

Definitely. If someone foolishly chooses to work for the government, where dealing with the proletariat is unavoidable, they should work in the crappiest of environments. I don't think we should even provide chairs, they should be standing so they work harder. Save the Fog Creek style offices for the übermensch who drive productivity and advancement towards the future.

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?

A hollow analogy, unfortunately.

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.

> hollow

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.

Right -- the RTO debate is also partially about perceived norms and "Everybody knows this". But only partially; let's say about 30 percent.

Neckties however -- are 100 percent in that category.

Narrowing down a bit, I think it's the "downtown business district" that's on the way out -- and the accompanying high office rents, long commutes, etc.

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.

Central business districts were created by trains which let people move to suburbs; then hung around for a while due to concentration of office effects even as many commuters moved to cars. Interesting tho think about what transit looks like in a world without them. Public transit would need to move more away from the hub/spoke model, which possibly dooms new rail construction in existing car-centric cities; busses already go much more point to point with a lot more route options, but if you have less commuters, do those fail to maintain their current timetables as well?

Then why do cities built around cars - that never had trains - still have central business districts? i.e. the entire south & west of the US, pretty much.

To get the same concentration-of-offices effects in new developments, like I mentioned. But take a look at the size of those central business districts compared to older cities; look at the population of LA vs Chicago or Boston vs the size of their downtowns. (And LA is one that did have some streetcars for a while - Phoenix would be an even more extreme example of a big metro area with a truly pretty small central business district.) There was a lot less pull outside of certain industries - new industries like tech largely avoided ever going downtown much in the first place, preferring big suburban office parks.

So if you don't even need the suburban office parks anymore, do things sprawl out even more in places like Austin or Dallas that are surrounded by empty land (vs somewhere like the Bay Area which is hitting geographical barriers)?

You end up with city/county hall, local courts, then the lawyers, general contractors, banks etc all clustering around that. There's a natural clustering of resources that happens just from local government. It's not uncommon for the largest hospitals in the region to be near city hall. From there it just snowballs.

That said, I'm not sure why the neighborhood around San Jose's City Hall is so dead, it's very odd experience to go there

I've been reading that this change (hub and spoke to decentralized) was already a big effect of COVID.

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.

The car-based world was supposed to work on suburban houses and out-of-town office parks - no expensive centralised land in a hub-and-spoke model, more like a grid.

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.

Moving offices outside of the downtown doesn't really help. The only visible benefit is less load on the city center (often tourist and historical destination).

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.

Yeah, living in these legacy markets has become clunky, and the markets can't be changed. If I found out that I no longer needed to swallow rocks to digest my food, why would I ever go back to doing so?

I don’t totally believe that remote work is going to go completely away . I think that personally for me never going into the office wasn’t really a great experience. It made me much more sedimentary (which in tech is almost a work hazard) but that was my fault . I do like being hybrid (but also the team I was a part of basically stopped existing) so while I think it could be a combination of working from home and the team imploding made me lonely.

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 don’t totally believe that remote work is going to go completely away . I think that personally for me never going into the office wasn’t really a great experience. It made me much more sedimentary (which in tech is almost a work hazard) but that was my fault . I do like being hybrid (but also the team I was a part of basically stopped existing) so while I think it could be a combination of working from home and the team imploding made me lonely.

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.

love when commenters are just immediately dismissive of other people's preferences.

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"

Don’t worry it’s not the worst one. That one was where I said I liked the Apple Keyboard on the 12 inch model and that I didn’t experience many keyboards but I have used an IBM model M, Corsair k70 and various other ones. So you can get keyboard shamed…

I wasn't dismissing their preference.

> 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.

I have other senses of community but that doesn’t mean that working from home for long periods of time makes me feel that way.

One big problem with these preferences is that they carry an incredibly high long-term cost for society.

One can't easily switch from a skyscraper to a park or apartment building. Office work culture affects how entire cities are designed.

sure - I agree with this, but I think this goes both ways. I will give a parallel situation that I think about quite a bit: cars. Cars have quite a bit of the same benefits as remote work. You can live further from work, you have independence, and quite a bit of the concrete negatives (e.g. no more crowded public transit) generally go away. But we now know that designing society around cars was a mistake. It ends up being bad for everyone and is more isolating by default. I'm similarly concerned about doing something that will make Americans more isolated by default.

>I'm similarly concerned about doing something that will make Americans more isolated by default.

You're right to be concerned about this, but I think it stems from a combination of "false dichotomy" and "learned helplessness":

The socializing we do at work is ultimately a side effect of the work environment, not part of the primary goal. We can learn from how non-car-oriented societies structure their settlements. Returning to the previous (and terrible) iteration of the American status quo is not the only alternative.

We don't have to settle for terrible choices simply because they have mildly beneficial side effects.

I'd also like to start taking steps toward a society with less work. There will come a time when human work simply isn't needed: when robots can do the physical labor and AIs can do the mental labor--perhaps not in our lifetimes, but it will happen. And even now, we don't need to be working as much as we do.

Economists have been predicting that for one hundred years now. Hopefully AI will work out to do this.

“Economists have been predicting that...”, in a tone of “...and it ain't happened yet, so they're probably wrong”. Actually, they've been right all along, only it's been masked by the twin phenomena of hugely skewed distribution of wealth and creation of ever more bullshit jobs.

> 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.

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.

> Literally all of my adult friends are former coworkers, with some of them not even becoming friends until after we quit jobs.

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).

> 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.

Can you really say they were your friends tho? do you think your rock climbing buddies will be your buddies after you stop?

I think going to the gym is not a social activity and I am very tired of bro's giving me "feedback" on my deadlifts.

Let's examine your I don't spend majority of hours claim, So there are 24 hours in the day, you work for 8, 2 hours for commuting, 1 hour for showering, taking a shits, getting dressed and all that, 1 hour for various chores, like buying groceries, laundry, cooking, etc, 1 hour for exercise, 7 hours for sleep. You have about 6 hours a day left for "fun". Last time I checked 6<8

> Let's examine your I don't spend majority of hours claim, So there are 24 hours in the day, you work for 8, 2 hours for commuting, 1 hour for showering, taking a shits, getting dressed and all that, 1 hour for various chores, like buying groceries, laundry, cooking, etc, 1 hour for exercise, 7 hours for sleep. You have about 6 hours a day left for "fun". Last time I checked 6<8

Let's examine what you know about my life: last time I checked, nothing. It certainly does not look like what you describe (hint: I don't work 8 hours a day, even on most weekdays).

Given the claim was "Incidentally, I don't spend the majority of my waking hours at work", it's a bit strange that you've included "1 hour for showering, taking a shits, getting dressed and all that, 1 hour for various chores, like buying groceries, laundry, cooking, etc, 1 hour for exercise" in there. And I agree that you should include commute in calculating your hourly pay, which is why I would not take a job which required 2 hours of commuting per day.

And do you work weekends, or are you ignoring a solid (24 x 2) - (7 x 2) = 34 hours of the week here?

I'd respond to the part of your post before that, but this math is too absurd.

Are you assuming I include various things you have to do during the day that are not exactly social into hours you spend at work? No, these are just hours that you end up spending on such activities, every day, because that’s what you have to do to be able to live

And i’m not here to argue with you how many hours you work or do not work, that’s absurd. I’m arguing from a general point of what schedule is roughly true for majority of employed people. Of course you as an individual can work 3 hours a day or 17, that’s besides the point.

The 34 hours of the weekend is only true for people that have absolutely 0 other obligations, such as children, parents, chores, etc.

I’m not here to say that people absolutely must make friends at work, but implying that it’s somehow unhealthy or bad is just incredibly out of touch with how majority of adults live

Remember where I said, "(Incidentally, I don't spend the majority of my waking hours at work)." Yeah, I was talking about myself, as indicated by the word "I". So I'm not sure why you decided to "examine" my claim from the perspective of what most people do when that wasn't what I said, and then decided to include a bunch of things that aren't work as work.

> I’m not here to say that people absolutely must make friends at work, but implying that it’s somehow unhealthy or bad is just incredibly out of touch with how majority of adults live

And I'm not here to say it's somehow unhealthy or bad. That's a hallucination that you had.

> Are you assuming I include various things you have to do during the day that are not exactly social into hours you spend at work? No, these are just hours that you end up spending on such activities, every day, because that’s what you have to do to be able to live

Still irrelevant and you were rightly called out on it. It doesn't matter if you spend an hour taking a dump and a shower, climbing rocks, or doing housework (just a single hour? You're a guy, right, with a wife?). It's still not an hour spent at your job.

The week has 168 hours. Normal people spend about 40 of them at work and 56 sleeping. That leaves 72 waking hours not at work; almost twice as many as at work.

You would have looked so much better if you'd just manned up and admitted you were wrong.

Try meetup.com or something similar to hang out with people who share similar interests or are in a similar age range and just want t to socialize

Why do ya’ll think I am socially inept or something?

what about my comment makes you think that, friend?

I mean I said all of my friends are from past employment. I am pretty content with that. I'm not sure why I need to try meetup.

Also I didn't mean to come off as rude, it was more of a joke answer, not trying to come at you for suggesting it

your question was, "where else do you make friends? Please don't say the gym."

my comment answered that question (and did not mention the gym)

neither the question nor the answer were about you specifically

It isn’t my only source of community. I participate in my local python software group and also I help out with a research software package porting algorithms to it so I do have alternate places where I have communities.

> Work doesn't have to be your only source of community

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 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 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.

This is very dependent on personal circumstances. Some of us live in circumstances where we're close to the office or have transit alternatives which makes the commutes fine places to get work done or nap or veg out on other things. Some of us bike to work.

As another comment said, a lot of the consternation about whether or not to go to the office is based on personal circumstances.

Yes, certainly. But most don’t. So in the discussion of whether to return to the office, there’s not much good in discussing those rare options other than noting that those people are fortunate and not representative and can certainly go into the office if they like.

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 feel like much of the hate towards offices comes from people with long commutes. Personally, I've resolved to never be more than a 15 minute drive or 30 minute public transportation/walk away from work and it's been wonderful. Pop into the office, say hello, have lunch with good friends, talk to the people I see, leave the office around 4:45 and I'm home before 5. I recognize that's not feasible for many people due to the cost of living in their area, but there are many places where you can work at a big FAANG company and still have a house within 20 minutes for a not great but not terrible price.

> Personally, I've resolved to never be more than a 15 minute drive or 30 minute public transportation/walk away from work and it's been wonderful.

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.

Company I work at has taken to running most large meetings in person, booking out a large meeting room for half the day, and then often structuring social events around the day as well, often with paid for drinks and food.

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.

I get that not everyone is like me but I just cannot stand those pre/post meeting socials with food and drinks. I'm just sitting there fidgiting thinking about what a completely nonproductive imposition this is on my time.

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.

They aren’t mandatory, if you want, you have the option to sit by yourself worrying about productivity while the rest of us go enjoy a drink and free pub meal.

> It made me much more sedimentary

You probably mean sedentary. Sedimentary would be quite extreme. :)

> As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities.

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.

Mega yacht costs bazilions.

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.

Great! Then we don’t have to fill the city with offices and we can have places for humans instead of employees.

Right, well, see, the problem is we already did the former instead of the latter, and it costs billions of dollars to reverse that.

Ok - well, residential in Manhattan is $150/square foot. Commercial $85. So… seems worth it?

And billions of redevelopment investment? GDP and employment!

Where did you find those prices? NYC is so insanely diverse about living/office, I find it hard to quote something here. Average or median is mostly meaningless.

internet commenters are allowed to spitball, obviously a 800 sq ft 1 bdrm can go from anywhere between a quarter mil to 2 mil depending on the neighborhood and the view, OP's point is that converting to residential is a net positive for the real estate owner.

A few real estate trade websites I quickly googled. The $85 for commercial was “top tier” Manhattan commercial office space (the other tiers ranged to over half off IIRC) and the residential was a general average of inventory in 2022. Certainly for my dissertation I would have cleaner references, but I controlled a bit on the supposition by picking P90 vs avg to give the other side the statistical advantage.

I think we'll have to see what the demand for living in big/dense cities looks like in light of at least somewhat reduced demand for living there because of employment. Certainly, there's some demand--especially among younger people in the college-educated demographic.

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.

Just, Devil’s Advocate.

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.

2-3 days/week isn't daily but still qualifies as pretty frequent. From first-hand experience, I still don't want more than an hour commute. Of course, I don't need to live right in the city for that but, especially in the absence of a good commuter rail system (which those specific cities have to at least some degree), you can't move that far out.

Depends what "in a city" means. Some people might say I live in the 'burbs, but my postal address still has the city's name in it.

What city? It is probably not very dense.

I don't know if it's the city he's talking about, but by landmass, about half of San Francisco is the burbs.

I'm sincerely curious, and not disagreeing with you: what definition of suburban are you using, and which parts of San Francisco?

Areas with lots of single family homes where you're more likely to drive to go somewhere than not. Much of sunset, much of richmond, twin peaks, bayview/hunters point, lots of the places around 280 between 101 and 1.

Oh how I wish the suburbs I grew up in could have been as diverse and interesting as those SF "suburbs".

Thus my point about how ambiguous "in the city" is.

Not the person you were asking, but to me, "suburban" is not defined by density, but by how walkable an area is. Even relatively low density neighborhoods can be urban under this definition as long as residential isn't zoned far away from commercial districts and everything is within a few minutes of walking or an easy bus ride. Suburban is when having a car provides an enormous QoL boost, but isn't strictly necessary. And rural is when a car is absolutely required to survive.

These are fairly car centric definitions. But considering the car enabled the suburb in the first place, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use it as the metric.

> But considering the car enabled the suburb in the first place, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use it as the metric.

The first suburbs were a result of trains.

But I think the modern suburbs (in the USA) were more of a "white flight" phenomenon, enabled by cheaper construction methods and perhaps a confluence of a few other post-war trends/policies.

White flight swelled the population of suburbs but they were already substantial. I think it would be a misleading picture if you just choose one point in a continuous process and start from there.

We don't need to create the universe to bake an apple pie from scratch. I agree that a history of the suburbs might begin before WWII, but the general concept of needing to start at the beginning is a slippery slope. I'd say nearly all histories must pick an arbitrary start, mid-stream.

In that case I recommend the commuter train, which created inner-ring suburbs which still exist. Not exactly ancient history anyway.

Interesting, TIL. I still think modern suburbs are defined by their relationship to cars, not trains.

I think there is still, even now, a difference between these older, inner-ring suburbs with many people commuting to work by train (and generally smaller plots and the like) and newer outer-ring suburbs or exurbs (or just rings around newer cities) which are more car-focused from the start.

Technical "car" is short for "carriage" and trains have carriages.

Suburban is where it’s unreasonable to walk to school, the doctor or a convenience store.

Only in the US.

Wait, are you saying:

    Suburban is where it’s _reasonable_ to walk to school, the doctor or a convenience store.

If yes, then where?

Or are you scoffing at US suburbs?

Depends which part of the city.

When talking about "living in the city" one generally didn't talk about the postal address, but rather the density.

Oh. Well in that case the vast majority of Americans live in a metro area so I guess they do like the city.

It's too crowded, nobody wants to go there anymore.

I mean at some point do People stop and think, “maybe not everyone thinks like me?”

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.

Sometimes I wonder, and then I look and see that people vastly underreport how dense/urban the areas they live in are and I feel that maybe many of the people claiming to feel so different are not being sincere.

Sometimes I wonder, people say they don’t like crowds but are still not living in the wilderness and I feel that maybe many of the people claiming to feel so different are not being sincere.

If you conceive of living in a city as only being in the middle of Manhattan or Shinjuku or wherever then yes I guess what you're saying makes sense, not everyone wants that.

I would argue that the prices reflect at least an incredibly persistent demand to live in those cities.

Decreasing demand for an asset that has a fixed cost to the supplier (mortgage payments) pushes up prices just as much as increasing demand.

A lot of that demand is for the house/apartment as an investment vehicle or for the idle rich for a party pad. Alternatively, it is a place for people directly or indirectly on welfare of some kind to be funneled to. Those two uses have become increasingly more prominent in US cities. You have to be addled in some way to think these cities are for middle class people, which is why many of them have seen historically massive waves of middle class outmigration in recent years.

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.

This take does not square in the slightest with my actual experience in the DC area. I make a middle class income, pay a fairly modest rent, and have an active social life and tons of hobbies that are enabled by the trappings of city living - density of educated people, easy mobility on a bike, a wealth of pleasant public spaces.

That's an inspirational narrative. However, offices aren't significantly vacant due to remote work. Advancing the narrative that this is the reason will in-part hide economic decline, and will help allow important people to escape the political consequences of the worst economic decline in ninety years.

Some have apparently downvoted you, but I think you make a good point.

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.

> 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.

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've gone over to the darkside. I live in a suburb 20 minutes from my favorite neighborhood for entertainment, 30m from my parents, 20m from endless fields, 1 hr from the rest of my family and friends. I have a yard, access to a lake, a riding mower, and no utility lines in my backyard so I can dig and build to my heart's content.

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.

> employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them.

I make more now in a remote position than when I commuted? I'm in California, not in a LCOL location.

> employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them

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 mean yes in general I agree remote first companies are probably going to have lower profit margins and fail to keep up with competitors but how does that help them find a well paying remote job?

> 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.

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.

Well, yes, eventually companies will have to pay a premium if they want people to actually move there every day.

Relative to what is an open question, because the jobs that require that also don't currently pay a lot.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Reading the title, my initial thought was residential skyscrapers. Reading the article clearly indicates that it's discussing offices.

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...

Billionaires and vacant apartments cause issues, but they at least pay taxes. An office building with no tenants will face plummeting property values and a corresponding dive in tax bills.

* Note: residential property taxation in NYC is in dire need of reform but the point still stands

Regarding property ownership, for a number of recent years it has been a challenge to find "safe" places to park money. Real estate in NYC and other prime locations is probably seen as pretty safe.

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.

Unfortunately, here in the real world, people have to go to work. Hospitals, stores, schools, manufacturers, warehouses, truck drivers, and builders/maintaniers of all the infrastructure that your lifestyle depends on.. even your car salesman with necktie: these are all places that need workers and always will. The small proportion of workforce that are startup employees dont make the rules. You're crazy to think that everyone wants to work from home, I know I sure as hell dont.

When it comes to the office-vs-home discussion everybody is just plugging their own personal preference. Clearly there is a mix. Personally, I love going into my office: it's close to me and has amenities and coworkers I like very much, and I'm personally much more productive there than at home. I realize there are plenty of people who prefer and are more productive working from home. But clearly it's not nearly as superficial as a necktie. Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely. Maybe a happy balance for new hires is an extended in-office orientation followed by the option to go remote, although this also requires some senior employees to be in the office to help with orientation.

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.

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

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 now struggling to find the study I was thinking of when I said "demonstrably", but I can say anecdotally that our new hires ask fewer questions online than in person, despite my reminders that the worst thing you can do while onboarding is ask too few questions. Coworker relationships are more formal and compartmentalized online than in person and they can be more reluctant to ping people with questions out of fear of being considered annoying. This doesn't apply to everyone but it has a noticeable effect on the average new hire.

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.

Absolutely. I personally found myself less likely to ping someone over Teams to ask them a small question versus leaning over to the next seat to ask. I was assigned a work-buddy when I was on-boarded, but I think I asked him a total of 3 questions. I believe that if I was on-boarded in-person, and had a few lunches with him, it would have been quite different. Also, the fact that the only time I talk to my co-workers is over Zoom makes it necessary from a human relations point of view to start many meetings with a bit of chit-chat, which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.

FWIW i am FAR less likely to interrupt the person sitting next to me and yank them out of their current flow into a different topic. I'd rather send them a chat message that they can answer out of bounds when it does not interrupt their flow.

>which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.

So in terms of time there is little difference? I find myself to spend much more time chitchatting in person - which is nice but also not the job.

> I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote.

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.

Absolutely agree. I just wanted to provide a counterpoint to the idea that it was just accepted and obvious that remote onboarding is worse - that doesn't mean it isn't, but I don't think we have to assume that it is.

I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences especially because I've been remote since 2011 so I have a clearly biased perspective.

Life feels a lot like a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled study sometimes.

I don't have a counterpoint, I'm interested in other people's perspectives, honestly. I just thought it was a little absurd to gently move past the assumption that remote onboarding is obviously worse!

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.

Upvotes are not enough to express agreement here, don’t have much more to add other than it reflects my experience, too. Most people don’t know if they’re supposed to ask the most trivial questions so they implicitly default (wrongly) to not asking. This doesn’t happen in person because the most trivial issues are noticed without newbies asking. To replicate this fully remotely you need a purposefully designed process.

>It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days

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.

Increased difficulty doesn't mean impossible or unsuccessful. Personally, I think it greatly matters what sort of culture and tooling you have available at your companies. If you've always done remote onboarding, you have years or training and materials. Having started remotely at a company that was not really prepared to be remote (2021), it was quite difficult as often many questions were expected to be answered by someone sitting next to you. Seeing new coworkers start while being in-person has shown it to be a better experience than what I had.

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.

I think onboarding is easier at remote-only companies because you can just search for relevant conversations, you don't have to puzzle out that the way to understand the wonky CI process is to go mountain biking because it's the drive home from the trail where they actually hash out the problems.

Good luck finding anything relevant in usual chat history older than a week.

Oh c'mon. Code is like the cosmic background. It's a picture of how the universe was back when it's author's we're only barely capable of making it work. They know better now, but it works, so they're off doing other things.

Therefore, if it's a year old and it smells bad:

- either it's still like that

- or somebody has since harvested its improvement into at least one standup update, which you can search for

At the very least, you're likely to be able to find who to ask.

Which parts of onboarding do you feel like are pain points?

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

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.

I am just plugging my preference. Tried to emphasize "me personally". I'm sure many companies work much better without an office, though I think at a certain size it almost certainly becomes beneficial to have at least some office space. My main point was that neckties are not an apt comparison, and that we don't really know yet how valuable offices are under various circumstances.

Remote work definitely works for some companies and not for others. If football player X never lifts weights and player Y lifts weights a lot, and they have similar levels of performance, it does not follow that lifting weights is unnecessary for a successful football career. It just means that it's unnecessary for player X.

I was hired into a senior role (architect level) by a company that was compelled to go remote because of the pandemic. Remotely building working relationships at that level was hard AF since most people I had to work with already knew each other from the pre-pandemic days and were happy to have sidebar conversations to keep moving.

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.

This is about being "remote first". All discussions should happen in the shared chat or at the weekly group video call except if there's some specific reason not to (eg. disclosure of non-public corporate financials, personal 1-1s, or similar). It sounds like that company transferred some bad office habits to online.

This is the thing right here

Remote requires personal responsibility as well. From everybody

This sounds suspiciously like a “no true Scotsman” argument to me.

Remote first is a spectrum and dismissing lived experiences as “oh, you just haven’t experienced the right kind of remote first” helps no one.

What makes you think documenting everything exhaustively is a panacea? What if the quality of documentation sucks? Will your argument change to “you have to document everything to a certain level of quality otherwise you aren’t remote first enough”?

Please don’t feel I’m attacking you. I was a big remote first proponent before experiencing the difficulties of integrating with teams who didn’t know me except as a voice on a call.

After this, I’m more sympathetic to execs demanding RTO for culture reasons.

I joined a remote only company 5 months ago and saw people face to face for the first time earlier this week. It takes more conscious effort, sure. But that's also all. It will be a hard adjustment for companies whose staff is not used to remote work, but it's just a skill people will acquire.

I'm in a similar situation now, but the new company has been more than happy to have company days where we fly in from around the world and get to know each other and it works pretty well. Also, having zoom/teams/slack video channels permanently open works surprisingly well too (you don't have to have your camera on).

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.

We saw immediate changes in productivity when people moved home 2 years before covid, less meetings, things got done and people where in generel more happy, but that might not be for everyone but onboarding wasnt made harder, what was harder is the comradery you get at the office, but that was also what swallowed alot of time in the first place i suspect..

> But clearly it's not nearly as superficial as a necktie.

Not sure about that. Working without a necktie can feel like working naked. It takes some effort to change your feelings on that.

On the other hand, working with a necktie can feel like working with a noose around your neck. The first (non-intern) job I had out of college required a necktie as part of the dress code, and though I got "used to" it after a while, it was never comfortable in the >5 years I worked there, and I was extremely glad that when I got to the interview for the job I'm in now, one of the first things they said was (paraphrasing, this was over a decade ago) "well, we certainly won't expect you to wear a tie if you get this job!"

It's great how you're more productive at the office. Now picture this: instead of your office with people in it who live within an hour commute, your team now consists of candidates literally anywhere in the US. You had 20 qualified people interview for your job, and you got it as the best, most productive person to get it done? Now the company picks from a pool of candidates 200x the size. You are now the 180th best qualified candidate. The guy who beat you, who lives 3000 miles away, is the best. Now do that for literally everyone you see when you do a little spin in the lunchroom. And it's not about the resource pool averaging out the same, because all companies can pick from anywhere. The guy who beat you isn't superior to you - his skills and experience and personality just more perfectly align to your job. And yours will align better to a better job. Both of you are now happier and making more, while the company makes more by saving on rent.

Also, ghmm, that nice long shit I used to take while browsing reddit... Go ahead and send me a meeting invite for timeslot.

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

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

The majority of offices are located in the biggest cities >1mil population. Every such city has huge size and insane traffic jams, where people are wasting a lot of their lives. Regardless of my preference to work from office (some days I do want to see my colleagues), the sad reality of commute is going to be a major factor in preferring remote work. I do not want to waste 15 full days every year at sitting in traffic jam, or standing in a bus packed with people. And neither do most of the people with such option. Having an office in <30 minutes commute or even walkable distance is a luxury really, and very few people have it.

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

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 it is only the case in companies where there is no proper onboarding process or it is an afterthought.

I think this is what it comes down to. Most companies have nonexistent onboarding, so new hires can be unproductive for quite a while.

It really just boils down people wanting a quiet place to work, or not, and employers wilfully ignoring that.

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.

I also preferred working in office. My company had a really nice one.

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.

Serious question: If I'm working from home, what's stopping my employer from replacing me with some dude in India or something for 1/3 the price?

I'm just having a hard time believing that we're at this moment in time where life suddenly got better for workers.

English as a first language. Implicit shared cultural values. Time zones. You are way less work to manage than someone across the world from another culture.

Some companies do outsource everything but it’s HARD.

A half answer here is, given "agile devops" software development (i.e. developing with iterative tradeoffs on both features and operational stability), then regular meeting time matters a lot to resolve conflict, and so working time zone matters a lot. The more spread, and the more you get people blaming "not good enough processes" on what is really just "not enough common time to meet to collaborate".

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.

A few things:

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...

If your boss can save on your wages and the cost of office space by hiring a guy in India you'd think employing you in an office would be even less appealing than employing you to work from home...

Has this meme ever been a real thing? I know quite a few people who've made entire careers off of fixing the mistakes these outsourced "cheap" Indian make in their work, cheap being in quotes because the end result is that you have to pay someone more, for far longer to fix up the crap they leave in their wake.

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?

> Neckties were an essential business requirement for ages. At some point, people had had enough of the mostly pointless ritual and began rejecting the norm. [...]

Neckties are still widely worn.

Have a look at the demise of hats throughout the 20th century for another example.

I believe both in the flexibility of remote work, and in the benefits of learning and collaborating with people in person.

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.

It's not so much that the days of the office (and neck ties and other nonsense) is passing but that the economies of scale that made such environments economically viable are changing.

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 found most of this kind of argument quite unnecessary.

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've been working remote from NYC since 2008, and for a chunk of that time I had rented a cheap, no-frills loft space in Brooklyn with some friends. I had space to have a soldering setup, another area for a shared work bench, storage for tools, bookshelves for CS/math books, space for some couches, a sink, etc. I think we paid around $400/month each to split amongst the 5 of us. It was a lot of space.

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.

Those places still exist out in bushwick / east williamsburg. If you hang out with the right people, or go to the right facebook groups you'll find them.

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.

I'm looking for something like OP's description. If you see this, I would really appreciate a couple pointers on where to look!

tornadosoup+hn@gmail.com

Do you have fb group references? I leave in greenpoint and my lease ends in Sept. I'm looking for something like what you've mentioned.

Gypsy housing used to be the mecca for this kind of activity. They changed the name (reasonably so!) to Ghostlight Housing, but it looks like it was suspended by an admin in 2022.

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!

Not for long. The old "punk lofts" are finally being kicked out for redevelopment.

A few friends of mine are also trying to do something similar here in SF. We want somewhere else to work other than our cramped apartments, but don't necessarily want to go into a real office.

Man theres a ton of warehousey spaces on Mission. I used to rent a great on around 21st. Check out craigslist.

There's multiple free coworking spaces in SF

Which ones?

> Finding that now in NYC is pretty difficult without paying a ton, even with all this unused commercial space.

NYC makes renting most of the unused commercial space to random people illegal or highly impractical.

Even in Atlanta, it's like that.

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.

Ok, I will be the first to say that I hate offices: the culture, the aesthetic, the rituals and customs. But I'm not necessarily sure that--especially for young people--work from home is the best option. Someone who is married, has kids, has a whole social world in their neighborhood, that person would enjoy and promote work from home, but that person is usually in a higher power position. A young person just starting out or at least earlier on in their career doesn't really have the opportunity to make friends, meet people (romantically), or otherwise make social connections while working from home.

I think this is right. I'm married with kids and have little desire to go to an office. It was indeed different when I Was younger -- I didn't cook at home as much so enjoyed office lunches with coworkers, I lived in a smaller apartment which was easier to find closer to work, etc.

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.

It's often frowned upon to make romantic arrangements with workmates. But the rest, sure. I guess some new social construct will be needed. Like in the old days - balls, cotillions, clubs?

I think we as a society would benefit from evolving the "third place". A place that is neither work nor home where you can socialize. Like it or not, lot of people want remote work, so the best path forward is to adapt.

This is traditionally called “the pub” in the UK or “the bar” in the US.

Maybe it’s time for society to work on that drinking habit, eh?

That used to be called church.

Probably what we will end up with is school from home, work from home, everything from home. Socialisation will move entirely online where you meet up on VR Chat or whatever is popular at the time. Many people will almost never leave their house.

This is... demonstrably untrue? People who work from home generally aren't house-bound, they will still go to the coffee shop, the local park, local stores, meetups, pubs, bars, etc.

Sure, if you live in a very amenity-poor area WFH may in fact be quite isolating - but if anything that reinforces the main thrust of the argument: live in a city where there are things to do other than working and hanging out with coworkers!

I think it’s is quite observably already happening. We have a growing portion of anti social shut ins and the problem is only getting worse.

I think it’s realistic that social media and VR will just completely take over.

Shut-ins have always existed, at least they can be employed now. That is actually a nice pro for generally available remote work.

The Bar or Church they haven't gone away.

The church at least has gone away for an increasing segment of the population. And bars are squeezed by increased rents etc, sadly.

And, frankly, while alcohol has its place in society, it shouldn't be the basis thereof.

that's called the pub mate

India really struggles in this regard. We don’t have a widespread pub/bar culture so everyone meets out on the streets…just knots of people sitting on bikes and chatting with each other.

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.

My job dictating my friends, romantic attachments and other social connections is incredibly disgusting and dystopian to me. Meaningful social activity has only occurred outside the workplace, to me. Being forced to commute to an office decreases the chance for that by stealing even more free time, and it pushes many people to move away from their friends/family to entirely different cities or countries!

> My job dictating my friends, romantic attachments and other social connections is incredibly disgusting and dystopian to me. Meaningful social activity has only occurred outside the workplace, to me.

last stats I found is that 43% of marriage come from the workplace so it's most certainly not something to discount that easily

Shocking statistic if true. Especially after considering gender imbalances it's hard to imagine, particularly in tech

“Met at work” doesn’t necessarily mean “met coworker” - if you marry the barista at your coffee shop you did the first but not the second.

I find it hard to believe (unless it's data from the 80s). Online dating has absolutely devoured all other ways to meet people romantically

Your job isn’t dictating your relationships - it’s giving you an opportunity at making some.

Disgusted? By… a company… having an office? We have shockingly different interpretations of dystopian!

It's not just having an office. It means work-life balance is so tilted that your workplace is basically your whole life. That implies all sorts of terrible things.

Why even leave work? You'd get all sorts of nice marriage statistics if you force people to live in a prison-camp environment 24/7

The point is that alternative (sitting around in home working on your computer) is not more social.

There are severe social costs to pushing/forcing people to relocate away from friends/family and spend time commuting, so I disagree with that conclusion

Do you go to work to accomplish your assigned goals or do you go there to socialize? These things seem contradictory.

A salaried employee who can maintain productivity in a WFH environment has far more time and freedom to socialize, wholly on their own terms, than an employee who is forced to expend some amount of time on commuting.

For people who go to work to get work done, WFH is the obvious best choice.

> Do you go to work to accomplish your assigned goals or do you go there to socialize? These things seem contradictory.

I mean if you can get 8 hours of solid uninterrupted coding, good job, but otherwise social interactions gonna happen.

And while some also happen over remote chat, it is nicer in person. Of course that flips if you hate your coworkers or don't share any common interests.

But yes, trading for 2h commute is definitely not worth it. 15 min commute to work ? Why not. Especially if you can do some shopping along the way.

Honestly, hybrid 1 day-at-work currently work well for me. The on-site day is mostly planning, some gossip and whatever requires some bigger coordination, then rest of the week nobody bothers me.

>I mean if you can get 8 hours of solid uninterrupted coding, good job, but otherwise social interactions gonna happen.

I see these interactions as overhead related to work ("hey I need your help with $COMPLEX_PROBLEM" or chitchat waiting for a meeting to start), not a conduit for genuine friendship. They're (hopefully) cordial and pleasant, but almost completely work-related.

I don't use work time to discuss hobbies, music, or other interests at length. I do mention these things in passing, and if a coworker shares interests and wants to talk more, we sync up outside of work hours. Is this not the way most people operate?

> The on-site day is mostly planning, some gossip and whatever requires some bigger coordination, then rest of the week nobody bothers me.

That sounds like a pretty good balance if everyone is local. For more distributed teams needing 'virtual onsites', there are some interesting concept such as Gather

https://www.gather.town

https://sea.ign.com/ign-sea/174057/news/how-virtual-office-a...

You're not locked in at home. There's very little stopping you from joining a coworking space, going to the coffee shop etc and working in an environment outside of your home. In fact this is far more beneficial for your career because assuming other people are doing so, you are passively networking with people outside of your company and finding better opportunities.

People have gotten so use to the corporate propaganda of work being your life that they cannot understand you can live and socialize outside of work, and that it's far healthier to do so. I've made friends at work and while working full remote but corporations use this to add friction for people to stay.

> There's very little stopping you from joining a coworking space

I know my employer wouldn't cover this cost, and I'm guessing most of them won't, so why on earth would I take money out of my paycheck to be able to work from an office instead of the one my employer provides? Further, confidential discussions with customers or coworkers in a space filled with people working for other companies sounds like a very bad idea.

Co-working spaces have private booths and such for sensitive discussions. And ultimately because it's cheaper to go to a nearby co-working space on occasion than it is to move and live close to the office.

I'm full remote. Moving to the office would quite literally cost 1.5x in rent.

Regarding cost, some employees might still find it worthwhile to use a co-working space at their own cost, if they save enough on commuting (which employers also typically don't pay for), or if they earn enough to be able to absorb the cost.

Regarding confidentiality, using co-working spaces needn't be full-time, but could be combined with WFH, just like going to the office can, which could help somewhat.

> Your job isn’t dictating your relationships - it’s giving you an opportunity at making some.

This is abuser level rewording. Are you a manager?

Seriously though, if 'work is giving you opportunities to make relationships' to the point where it's a significant downside to get rid of it in some capacity, then we should consider that we're in a live-to-work system, which is dystopic.

Disgusted by companies encouraging you to become entirely dependent on them for your social life, making it much more difficult to stand up for yourself, ask for a pay rise, or leave.

I've seen severely underpaid people stay far longer than they would have out of a misplaced sense of loyalty towards their peers. The only entity that benefits from that arrangement is the company.

It's also IMO a significant part of how some companies retain people.

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.

Correct, this is what companies build "culture" for. Turnover goes way down in situations like this and once their employees have a mortgage and fixed living expense they basically only need to give them cost of living adjustment for 20+ years or they quit

Replace office with school. They're extremely similar in concept. Is making friends at school dystopian to you?

The modern school system is incredibly dystopian and prison-like, yes.

Many people talk about surviving school, especially people with autism or similar divergence from the acceptable norm. Making friends at school is a small non-guaranteed consolation prize for them, and it comes at the cost of lifelong trauma.

Let people, including children, socialize on their own terms.

Agreed. I think it is even worse than the workplace. My social skills were stunted because I mainly learned how to attempt to socialise in a structured prison-like environment. I was trained to obey the authority figure saying to ignore friends if they tried to speak to me during class. Forced into classes with people I didn't get along with. Often my friends were put into a different class so I was forcibly segregated from them, damaging the relationship. I'm in 30s and still have nightmares about school often

It’s easy to find friends in a group of people you have things in common with and spend lots of time with. I know not every job is like this, but some of my best lifelong friendships started at workplaces. (And outlasted the companies that they started at)

If I could upvote this more than once.

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.

> A young person just starting out or at least earlier on in their career doesn't really have the opportunity to make friends, meet people (romantically), or otherwise make social connections while working from home.

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.

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...

I don’t really understand how that’s at all relevant. The point is that social connections are more difficult with remote work irrespective of how many hours you’re working.

When you have to work 60h+ weeks, you're way too exhausted in the evening to do anything social, and you'll lose the weekend to barely recovering. That forces many people to look for companionship in their coworkers.

I don’t work 60+ hour weeks, I work an entirely respectable number of hours. I don’t in any way feel “forced” to look for companionship with my coworkers, I want to, they’re nice people. And remote work makes it harder.

Human civilization existed without office culture for many millennia, and we managed to socialize and reproduce just fine. Even in modern times a very tiny percentage of people in the world are white collar office workers, and the rest somehow don't have any of the problems you mention. Heck I'm willing to wager that people who don't have these kinds of office jobs do better socially and romantically than those sitting behind a desk all day.

> Human civilization existed without office culture for many millennia, and we managed to socialize and reproduce just fine.

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

> You couldn't remote in into a cow

Don’t give John Deere ideas

I work for a big corp with a big grad intake. We are RTO 4 days a week and I think its great, lots of young people working together, going out after work. I feel kinda sad for those at home.

Cool. I WFH and so does my wife so I get to spend more time with my favorite person. My kids' school is a very short drive so I get to see them 5 minutes after I get off work. I guess I no longer get the appeal of going out after work with young people.

I’d rather not drink with coworkers anyway. I have a tendency to ramble when drinking.

I think the assumptions many are making incorrectly is that the workplace is the center of one's social life. This is truly the triumph of a bizarro and dreary corporate capitalist individualism and an indictment of the state of our families and communities. Certainly, the workplace is a part of our social lives, but the argument that WFH leads to isolation should lead the arguer to reflect on what is wrong with the way he is living his life rather than condemn what I think is a welcome change. IMO, remote work can amortize the affects of market changes so that people aren't forced to uproot their lives to find work. They can work in the vicinity of their children. They can save time by avoiding commutes. All of this seems to contribute to the formation of community because it reduces social churn. Once communities form, the other aspects of community life can come into existence that open up the possibilities that are attributed to the workplace but that are not proper to it. The notion that you cannot make friends or find a spouse or whatever without the workplace or corporation being the social organizing principle is truly horrifying. This echos the WEF's ideas of how social life ought to be organized. I think that remote work will also cause a redistribution of other kinds of labor that office workers have long benefited from (like the restaurant industry). All of this seems to enable better social conditions.

Most people have a 40 hour/week contract and it would be a shame to spend that in solitary confinement.

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.

I'm someone who entered the workforce fully, 100% remote (ignoring jobs I had as a teenager anyway) at 19 and I couldn't disagree more.

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've been working from home 12+ years and been working since 2001 in an office outside of that.

I am the same. I've only ever met 1 person who I would want to hang out with outside of work.

(Link in the middle of the article: "NYC’s Record-Breaking Rents Squeeze Tenants Across Boroughs".[1] That's residential, of course.)

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...

How much of this has to do with paper storage vs digitization of records? Yes, paper would be stored near the people who use it, but that’s not the only benefit of people being in one place.

> that’s not the only benefit of people being in one place.

fair enough, but it may be the only necessity

Humans being inherently social animals, I'd say that nature is objecting here.

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

Work is not the only place you can socialize.

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

Sure, but it’s not like socializing isn’t necessary in business. While obviously public spaces can (and are) used for much of that, sometimes you need a private space for that aspect as well.

Lots of business will continue to have some office space, if only for in-person meetings, or for people to work from the office on days that they have meetings.

I do think that there are intangible benefits that come from being at the office in person, but I work remotely 98% of the time, so I’ve clearly made my decision as to the trade-offs lmfao

FWIW, the fraction of co-workers I like to socialize with is significantly higher than the corresponding value for neighbors.

Liking my co-workers is an important part of good workplace culture for me, and if I wouldn't like them then it would be time for me to go look for a new job. Unfortunately, I'm less flexible regarding my housing situation.

Time-wise, I work about 50 hours a week, which is about an order of magnitude more than I'm even near my neighbors.

I used to work from an office I just have no idea how I managed to; mainly due to having to do things for my kids and house. School gets out at 2, work ends at 5:30 and then 45 minute commute. Don't always want to be the first one out of the office. Kids have boxing at 4:30 and math tutoring after and bed time is at 8:30. Other sports as well. Constantly people in and out of the house for deliveries, repairs, etc. When do we go to the grocery store and run errands? Logically I know I could figure it out but I don't really want to.

What’s really lame is that parents have to become chauffeurs for their kids activities all damned day.

That is an Americanism I hope the rest of the world doesn’t emulate fully.

Yeah I don’t really understand this. I would ride bus to and from school. Stay after school for activities and find a ride back with friends or siblings or some other way without my parents needing to get involved. Anecdotal but whenever I see school buses now, they mostly seem empty and whenever you pass a school there’s a huge drop off or pick up line.

There's a ton of reasons, but mostly - kids don't have autonomy any more. Both due to hyperactive child protective services government oversight (ill-used I may add) and lots more sprawl/roads/cars and longer distances between activities, it's became untenable to let kids roam.

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.

I mean, parents were still chauffeuring kids around. You even say you got rides back with friends, presumably meaning their parents.

First 6 years I walked to school. Most of my friends either did that or took a bicycle. Next 6 years I took a street car. To/from school as well as afternoon activities.

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'd rather spend the time driving my kids than sitting in traffic driving to work and back. Getting them from school is not a big deal, school is 5 minutes away and they often walk. Real issue is to sports, to far away to walk. But yes, getting kids to activities and back is a lot but I enjoy sitting there and watching my kids have fun. Few things better in life than watching your kid do something they are proud of.

Aren’t you supposed to be working from home and getting paid for it whilst doing all of that?

I can see why employers want people back in offices if that is what the working day looks like for some people.

My day is similar to the poster you’re replying to. It’s easy to make up the time in the evenings if you’re already set up for working from home. Also some employers who have embraced remote working have also learned that results matter more than time served, and no longer care where you are or what you’re doing as long as you’re achieving what you need to.

Considering the time I have to put in over the weekend occasionally and at night, they are more than getting their money's worth.

When I started work I had two huge desks with office furniture behind me - my own working space. Seniors and managers had offices to work in and to hold meetings in. I shared a meeting room with about 10 other people. One of my colleagues left because the crowding and noise were intollerable. I thought it was really nice.

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.

If the skyscrapers stay below required occupancy rates for too long the CRE securitisations they collateralize will default and they will become (mostly) bank property.

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.

And then at some point the artists will be pushed out in a gentrification wave after they made it cool to live in the skyscrapers. Those artists that had money to begin with, or made a lot really fast, will have bought a bunch of the property and stick around and make it seem like it’s still arty… but of course they’re actually real estate investors now as much as they are artists.

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'm really thinking/hoping that offices become the new lofts.

Nobody predicted this except pretty much everybody who thought about what the long-term effects of COVID would be on commercial real estate around mid-2020 or so.

Exactly.

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.

IDK, it seems like only a subset of people could have predicted it. People who think remote work isn't good wouldn't have predicted it. People who thought it was good might think it was just accelerating the inevitable.

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.

Covid did nothing to cause this. Our response to covid caused all of it.

Do you feel that this level of pedantry improves the discussion?

guns don't kill real estate markets, real estate markets kill real estate markets

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35547193>

Something similar to this would have happened without COVID. SF was in massive oversupply, London is in massive oversupply, all these cities had massive growth in supply fuelled by debt (CRE is probably one of the biggest benefactors of low rates, Blackstone Real Estate was basically finished in 2008, they were doing huge deals at the top of the market...move-forward ten years, fastest growth area of the business, the guy who led the division in 2008 is now second in line to run the firm).

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.

My employer is requiring mandatory RTO Tuesday thru Thursday for all employees within 30 miles of an office stating in June. It does not matter if your manager or most members on your team are remote. It does not matter if you are productive remotely. We have many employees distributed in many states and even countries. During COVID the number of remote employees exploded. I’m really curious how this goes down and who shows up in June.

My company is instituting a similar policy in July.

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.

I think there’s a least a number of folks with a similar mindset, but time will tell if they push back or just accept the change. The economy has softened too, so there aren’t as many options as there were in the past.

No doubt, but as always the best engineers and technical leaders will be the ones with the most alternative options. Calling their bluff is a bold move.

This incentivizes a mailing address that's more than 30 miles away from any office.

Sounds like a change of address to somewhere just outside 30 miles is in order.

As someone who knows nothing about commercial real estate business but lived in NYC for a long time. Why can't they convert to residential? Is the cost of conversation so prohibitive that it is a non-starter?

> Is the cost of conversation so prohibitive that it is a non-starter?

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.

Aesthetic requirements aren’t the big issue, things like plumbing are. Office buildings don’t need to distribute water infrastructure the way residential buildings do.

> things like plumbing are

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.)

I think on average we can do better than literally hell.

> think on average we can do better than literally hell

Sure. But not with the existing CRE stock. Not for cheap.

My prediction is code won't be compromised. We'll raze the buildings and construct new housing. It will never be as cheap as the alternative could have been, or, more pointedly, than what tens if not hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers endure. But it's an easier sell on the lectern.

In the US they force people to live in the tents after demolishing the slums and call it progress.

Then they demolish the tents.

> 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.

> 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

Yup, do this. "Young people who can't afford anything else" in New York are a population comparable with that of Atlanta [1].

> 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

The buildings' owners are screwed. Their leverage constrains them. The question is whether the structures have positive value. Retrofitting to current code leaves most with negative value, i.e. it's cheaper to abandon. The question I was answering is if it's possible to economically convert these to housing for somebody. Under current code, the answer is no.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/911456/new-york-populati... 20 to 24

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

> Yup, do this. "Young people who can't afford anything else" in New York are a population comparable with that of Atlanta [1].

You can't just link to the age distribution and cite the number of "20-24 year olds in NYC" as evidence that there are half a million people in NYC who can't afford to live in anything other than an SRO.

I’m saying there are half a million New Yorkers aged 20 to 24. Is your argument really that there isn’t a market for a cheap, minimal build in New York?

You're also pulling "can't afford anything else" into that as if the two groups are the same, which is what they're complaining about. (I'm not expressing an opinion myself, I've never been to New York.)

High rises are designed to have reconfigurable floorplans. So, very few internal walls are going to be load bearing. In the absolute worst case (low fixed ceilings that prevent drop ceilings), you can always go for the industrial look + expose upstairs' plumbing to downstairs, and/or add fixed internal walls for vertical plumbing runs.

> We just need to update the code to remove aesthetic requirements while ensuring that doesn't mean skimping on safety.

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.

> 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.

> Office buildings are fireproofed in ways residential units are not. One can also replace windows with proximity to a fireproof stairwell without compromising safety.

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.

> that's done because the safety needs of residential buildings are different from the typical safety needs of office buildings

You're acting like residential retrofits have never been done. They have. These are workable problems.

As others point out, the killer is plumbing. Not fire escape.

> only really being advocated for smaller and mid-size buildings, not the tall skyscrapers discussed in this article

Most of New York City's CRE tax revenue comes from mid-sized offices. Not from skyscrapers. Everything I'm suggesting is aimed at, and has been proposed for, those.

> I'm really only aware of one

There are many more. I'm winging the solutions. Not the capacity for them, which has been and is being studied by architects, engineers and psychologists.

> You're acting like residential retrofits have never been done. They have. These are workable problems.

I didn't say residential retrofitting can't be done. I said that they can't be done while still demanding the resale value (read: net profit) that the building owners are demanding.

> Most of New York City's CRE tax revenue comes from mid-sized offices. Not from skyscrapers.

This comment thread is on an article titled "NYC Skyscrapers Sit Vacant, Exposing Risk City Never Predicted". So we're talking about things that apply to skyscrapers.

> As others point out, the killer is plumbing. Not fire escape.

There are multiple issues. I addressed fire escape only because you brought it up, not because it's the only issue.

Again, this whole thread is in response to your claim that the limiting factor is "aesthetic requirements" in the building code that are not motivated by safety concerns. So far, you haven't pointed out any.

> "aesthetic requirements" in the building code that are not motivated by safety concerns. So far, you haven't pointed out any.

Yes, I have [1]. Communal water, toilets and showers.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989481

> Yes, I have [1]. Communal water, toilets and showers.

No, because that's non-prohibitive under current building code. Contrary to popular misconception, it's permissible to have communal facilities; it's just not economically viable, in part because it's extremely undesirable to live in.

Again, because of the other fixed costs of development. When those units come on the market there is ample demand. That doesn’t work if you have to price in years of community board and planning meetings.

> You’re acting like residential retrofits have never been done. They have. These are workable problems.

The issues is not “is it a workable problem”, everyone knows it is, that’s not in dispute.

The issue is “is the cost compared to the value recovered after the conversion such that, with the particular properties in the particular concrete situation that currently exists, it would be financially better for the owners to do a conversion or to abandon the property”.

You are trying to make a specific, concrete issue into a general, abstract one.

> at the price the building owners require

Supply and demand will fix this. Real estate speculators will eventually realize they've already lost the money they put into the building, then sell it at a loss (or at bankruptcy). Then, the residential conversions will happen, producing a supply of large, irregularly shaped manhattan condos that will certainly sell.

Capitalism does have its advantages.

> Supply and demand will fix this. Real estate speculators will eventually realize they've already lost the money they put into the building, then sell it at a loss (or at bankruptcy). Then, the residential conversions will happen, producing a supply of large, irregularly shaped manhattan condos that will certainly sell. > > Capitalism does have its advantages.

The inherent land value is so astronomical and the cost of retrofitting is so high that, at virtually any price, most developers would decide it's more economical to raze the building and start over, designing a residential building from scratch with cookie-cutter units that can be sold for maximum profit.

One problem is that the owner of the land, the owner of the building, and the developer are generally separate and distinct. In my experience the vast majority of property owners - especially those with the wherewithal to own prime CBD real estate - tend to be quite happy to sit on unproductive land for a very long time. If any of these buildings get razed, my guess is that many landowners would rather turn it into a parking lot for half a decade than let a developer turn it into something cookie cutter.

Windows aren't for aesthetic reasons. They are required in bedrooms by most codes for fire egress purposes.

> Windows aren't for aesthetic reasons. They are required in bedrooms by most codes for fire egress purposes

Commented on this elsewhere [1], but egress into a fireproofed stairwell is a safety-neutral compromise. It's against code, however.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989503

Egress is also insane for high-rises, but it is still code.

> Egress is also insane for high-rises, but it is still code

That's the point. It's vestigial code that could be loosened to promote housing supply.

Pretty hard to egress from the window of the 30th floor of a skyscraper anyway innit

Have you ever pondered what the big ladders on firetrucks are for?

> Have you ever pondered what the big ladders on firetrucks are for

The tallest ladders in the FDNY's inventory go up to 100'. (They were testing a 300' rig, but I don't know if it was deployed.) They aren't designed to recover people from burning skyscrapers.

Most buildings in NY are less than ten stories tall. You don't have to exit from the floor you live on.

> You don't have to exit from the floor you live on

Which means you don’t need a window in every apartment—those people can’t use theirs for egress.

Let me know how that works from the 43rd floor.

We're already deep in a mental health crisis, particularly among the city folk, I don't think ignoring the aesthetic experience of where one lives is a wise idea. People aren't widgets even if they themselves don't realize that.

> I don't think ignoring the aesthetic experience of where one lives is a wise idea

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.

> Many office buildings are old, with tiny windows surrounded by load-bearing walls.

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...]

> 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

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.

Not that I expect NIMBYs to make sense but that's all nonsense. The buildings already exist, so there's no issue of open air and sunlight for surrounding buildings. Older office buildings actually have windows that open to let in fresh air unlike to newer glass towers.

I used to worked by FIDI, most the apartments there are old converted office buildings. Visited a lot of friends and coworkers in those buildings, I felt fine inside. But I supposed midtown buildings are a bit different in terms of girth versus old brick and stone buildings.

NY has already begun changing the code to facilitate conversions.

> They're also laid out with an office, not home, in mind. (Think: plumbing.)

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.

IIRC, the issue with plumbing is often sewage volume from cooking + showers and the like. There's a certain amount of load expected per floor of commercial space that is lower than for residential, and often commercial buildings literally don't have a hookup to the main sewer line large enough to accommodate residential use, and adjusting that can be immensely expensive.

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.

>Plumbing is easy, pressurized pipes and pumps can deal with that just fine.

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.

Is that a problem though? Office toilettes are used way more often then residential. You can just put more residential toilettes in series than you could put office toilettes.

Pipes dimensioned for an office floor is surely enough for flats.

It really depends on the building. I've seen some older office buildings with 2-4 toilets per floor. Not sure how those can be retrofitted for more capacity...

My point is that people don't poop or pee less at the office (I guess?), so those 2-4 toilets should be flushed about as much as if they all lived there and had a toilet each. And offices have more people per sq feet, so residential conversions should not flood the pipes.

Although showers could mess up my 'theory'. But the sewer from those is easier to get flowing than toilettes I guess.

What you're saying makes sense.

However, I think the capacity requirements for water/sewer are determined by law, much like the hard requirement that habitable residential spaces must have egress windows.

In the USA there are similar laws around septic systems for detached houses, where the capacity/size of the septic system is determined by the number of bedrooms in the house.

> Plumbing is easy, pressurized pipes and pumps can deal with that just fine.

AIUI, plumbing is technically easy, but is still insanely expensive for conversions.

That said, it makes sense that HVAC would be a bigger problem.

I’ve heard to do plumbing work to convert office to residential would be so ridiculously expensive it would be easier in some cases to tear the building down and start anew

> plumbing work to convert office to residential would be so ridiculously expensive

If you require plumbing to every apartment. Dorm-style lay-out would sidestep this problem.

Who would want to live in a dorm?

> Who would want to live in a dorm?

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.

The tories wouldn't mind asylum seekers living in them

People who are on the street or living in their car today.

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.

What's old is new again

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

I can see this in progress. Needs windows, but we also need more residential, so happy to see it.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/24/longtime-nyc-home-of-the-daily...

Basically. There are a ton of logistical problems, but a major one is that the big office buildings in Midtown have a lot of interior space with no windows, and apartments need windows.

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...

If the trend in office usage keeps going, it's not long before these white elephants in the middle of cities will be considered of "negative value". Empty monoliths in very valuable lots, that you have to spend money to make useful? Sounds like negative value to me.

Negative value isn't really possible in this scenario. I'll buy a floor of one of these buildings for $1, and promise to pay for its upkeep.

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).

Will you also take on the debt payments?

> prices that valued the _ structures_ as having negative value

You are ready to pay $1 for a floor in the structure and how many millions for your share of the plot?

Pinky swear you’ll pay for the upkeep, all of it? It’s not just day-to-day maintenance (which I promise costs more than you’d expect) but also long-term building integrity and lifespan assurance. There are about 100 condo residents in Miami who kicked that can down the road to disastrous consequences and paid with their lives.

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.

Seems like they could make decent mixed use spaces - with some of the space being converted into retail / malls, some of it being used for on-shoring / light industry, and the rest remaining office space.

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...

Plumbing is a big one. Most commercial floors only have a few hookups and drains. Each apartment typically has at least 6.

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...

In Columbus, Chase is doing just that. Converting 23 of the 25 floors into 253 residential units.

https://columbusunderground.com/office-to-residential-conver...

> Why can't they convert to residential?

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.

It's not, they're just dragginf their feet hoping they can pressure the workforce to stuff the genie back in the bottle. It ain't happening.

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.

Floor plate size. Offices are very deep and the elevators are far from the windows. Condo towers are small so that natural light can penetrate. You can’t just convert an office tower to condos. Also, office towers don’t have the plumbing to put in a shower and drain for every 500 sqft.

Many things can be converted to office space. Old hotels for instance - they have common bathrooms, small rooms, lots of doors. Pretty compatible with offices.

The opposite is harder. Adding bathrooms, combining rooms, adding kitchens and drains and individual utilities costs maybe more than the building is worth.

Looking beyond the regulatory hurdles (others have covered that, plus it's being worked on), there are some real practicality problems:

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.

Apartments are quite difficult in the footprint, I think. Depending on the size of the unit, it becomes impossible to give everyone a window, and not have some overly narrow floorplan. And that's not even taking into consideration the need to build out the plumbing to some x10 or x50 scale of what it currently is. Every unit needs a wet wall for kitchen and bath. Evacuation routes suffer.

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,

After 9/11, they tried doing this in downtown NYC because no one wanted work there. It was not good at all.

That just sounds misguided from the start. No one wants to work there but they’d be willing to live there?

The solution to this problem is converting those office buildings into apartments. This would save a lot of downtowns. However, city zoning rules and real estate investors absolutely do not want this because it lowers the cost of their housing. If you look into why this isn't happening there are some ridicuous rules requiring all units to be able to open out to the outside. I'm of the belief that affordable units are affordable because they don't have amenities like an outward facing window. In places like NYC, people want places to sleep that are affordable. Oh well, these are all self inflicted wounds which will lead to an inevitable collapse in CRE.

Why isn’t the solution lower the price to rent office space?

The real reason is that there aren't enough businesses out to fill it. Sad but true.

I love going to the office, but recognise I'm in the minority (at least in our industry). What's always puzzled me regardless, is the insistence of all going to the same city.

Alright, offices, sure, but why do we need them all in London? Are businesses _visiting_ each other? What was the rationale?

People were historically drawn to urban centers because it was just easier to live that way vs making do on your own in the middle of nowhere.

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.

Aggregation effects. You're more likely to switch to a different employer if it doesn't mean moving. Startups will put up an office near a larger company to poach their employees. Etc etc. This is how you get an industry crowded into a single city even if they're not actually transporting physical items around.

Its also for if you quit and work for a different firm you can stay where you live.

"Asking rents in Manhattan offices averaged $75.13 per square foot"

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.

Are those prices quoted per month or per year?

per year. e.g. 1000 sq ft office at $72 sqft = $72,000 / year or $6000/month.

It's no chump change, but most Manhattan 1000 sq ft apartment with 2 bedroom will cost more than that, especially with common charge.

The whole “bullpen of cubicles” mode of offices created office building floor plans that cannot easily be repurposed for residential.

Less humane office spaces lead to less versatile buildings and now the chickens have come home to roost.

> City spending for the next five years on expenses including education, health care, pay raises for unionized city employees and the extraordinary and unexpected surge in the number of asylum-seekers is projected to grow 3.9% a year, exceeding projected annual tax revenues by more than a percentage point, Champeny said.

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.

With so many hi-rise office buildings vacant and so many employees today trying to maintain a work-from-home arrangement maybe we should take note of the recent news that Manhattan is sinking due to the trillion ton weight of all those buildings and just demolish all the vacant buildings and consolidate businesses in the remaining units.

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.

You want me, the owner of a vacant skyscraper (and possibly the land that it sits on) to do what? Donate it to "we"? I don't think "we" are going to compensate me adequately. I think I'll just turn the buildings into condos as soon as "we" let me.

My post was a bit tongue-in-cheek and was intended to tie this story with the other badly written story in the news about how the weight of the buildings on the island could be causing subsidence. Proposing to demolish unoccupied buildings, haul the debris off the island, and convert the lots to usable park space was obviously a bullshit proposal.

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.

Bloomberg is writing these articles about every big city. These old buildings are the workforce of yesteryear, but so much money is invested in these monoliths, and the audience Bloomberg writes at wants to know about their money, thus we get articles lamenting the fact that these big, expensive buildings are vacant, and if we can't force workers back into them, there will be catastrophic repercussions

Maybe people will start living in them and real estate costs will go down. Truly catastrophic for the readers of Bloomberg.

There are real logistical and engineering difficulties in making those buildings suitable for habitation. In many cases, it would be less expensive to tear them down and build a new building for that purpose.

That's not a bad idea

What are some of the difficulties? Are there compromises that would allow them to be ok residential use at some tradeoff (like fewer units per floor)?

For buildings that are partially built, can they still be converted or is it too late?

I'm no mechanical engineer, but as I understand it, the biggest issue is plumbing-related. If you want every unit to have water and a drain, that's a huge retrofit right there that can be extremely difficult.

There are other factors, too, but the plumbing seems to be the biggest hurdle.

For the most part, there are no insurmountable engineering issues. It's just a question of cost.

The NYTimes had a good article on this, along with some examples of buildings that have actually undergone the conversion:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office... https://archive.is/gQiQW

Floor plans are awkward if you had to segment them in to apartments, having each apartment meet code for residential spaces turns in to a puzzle in ensuring things like light entry. Math that made sense for office buildings doesn't translate as easily to residential, so you're paying for more elevators (made for an office building) than you need, you have less floor space you can rent out because you need it for amenities, you have to do extensive renovations to make it suitable for living, and then have to hope the commercial real estate market doesn't surge in demand after you've done it.

It's apparently doable, but not easy, and has a significant downside if there isn't enough demand to meet your new luxury apartment building, and the risk that commercial real estate bounces back after you've done it.

Looking into the past, I think it's more likely that the development would be analogous to what happened to old industrial zones in developed cities, such as SoHo in Manhattan. People started moving into old, derelict industrial buldings, and eventually the style became so trendy that it's now one of the most expensive neighborhoods of the city. If the downtown office building truly stops being a thing, I could see something similar happening.

On the other hand, you could use them to solve finding a home for the homeless. Sure, they have windowless rooms and less bathrooms than is ideal but surely that’s better than living under a bridge.

NYC is weird.

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.

> Goes to time square

> The whole city seems like a money laundering operation

Classic

As someone who lives in NYC, there are a lot of "sides" to it. What you're describing definitely exists, but to generalize the whole city as a laundering operation would be akin to generalizing a large tech org based on your experience with one small team.

Approximately what percentage of the whole city do you believe you've seen?

What do people get from making up narratives like this? Bloomberg literally writes thousands of articles a day. This topic is just one of the few that HN happens to care about.

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!"

This explains the RTW push.

Every time I've heard someone say "we need to go back to offices", I wonder how much money they have in commercial real estate. Businesses always want to cut costs (shareholder returns and whatnot), and office space is a large cost that has proven to be largely unneeded. But an executive telling the public at large to go back to offices is overreach.

Not really. If you rent, letting you lease expire is cheaper. If you own it outright, you'll pay less in upkeep for an unused building and less in property taxes. If you borrowed money and are under water, you can walk away and save money. The only companies who care are ones who were already thinking about selling the real estate. And commercial real estate companies.

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.

Bailout are coming in 1,2,3...

Given that apartments rent for $77/sq ft and office space is $75/sq ft, getting the zoning fixed so that you could turn this into apartments might get it rented faster?

Commercial rent isn't collapsing like I'd expect under this pressure. Seems like folks are holding out for something.

"Extend and pretend." In some cases, lowering rent would mean defaulting on your bonds. Might as well wait for those bonds to roll over naturally rather than get sued by your bondholders.

I couldn't care about the building owners. Low quality office buildings should be destroyed and replaced with housing.

Are things any different in, say, Dubai?

Yes. Dubai serves as a finance hub for the entire region, and there are hundreds of thousands of people in southeast Asia who would take an offer to move there at the drop of a hat. Towers are culturally more significant too. (Source: spent years living in the SE Asia region) Plus the war has resulted in many people and companies relocating to Dubai.

Time to retrofit into housing!

I use ublock origin and adding this https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter... to it does not have any effect on bloomberg.com.

Pass a law that says if it’s vacant for a year, it becomes property of the city.

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