I put it to you that while you have taken one step back, you will get a clearer view if you take 10 paces back.
We are in the midst of catastrophic accelerating climate change. We are heading for a world that is 3-4º C warmer by the end of the 21st century, when children born today are getting to old age. That means the certain collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and worldwide sea level rise of 5-6 metres in those kids' lifetimes.
Now look at how much of these expensive cities and their expensive offices are build under 5-6m of current high tide level. All those buildings will be lost to the sea before they are paid off. All those investors will lose their money. All cities and city districts wholly located within 5-6m of mean sea level will disappear completely.
Just considering sea level rise, whole nation states will disappear. Whole economic sectors will collapse.
But it's not just about sea level rise. With 3-4º of warming, much of the tropics becomes uninhabitable. Most glaciers disappear; currently fertile countries lose their year-round water supply.
The Himalays are called the world's 3rd pole. 5 or 6 major rivers originating in the glaciers of the Himalayas provide about one third of all humanity with their fresh water.
All those countries become desert, even if only seasonal desert. All agriculture fails.
If you view the world in terms of money -- not a good strong robust worldview at all, but a common one -- then there are far far bigger financial threats looming than empty offices and bankrupt financial institutions that invested in them.
We should be tackling commutes by building denser cities with mass transit, not by having everyone with more space in the burbs.
Another point: it takes a lot more to heat and cool thousands of individual houses to human comfort rather than setting those thermostats back throughout the day and only managing the HVAC for densely packed offices.
HVAC is a completely solved problem by just putting solar on roofs, especially for single family homes.
I lived in such a city until January, in a dense medium-rise apartment block, with 3 forms of public transport available to me within walking distance. It had no heating system of any form, heated by hot water from the mains supply, provided by waste heat from a power station 40km away.
I worked from home from it from early 2020 for 3 years.
I'd prefer, for that purpose, that it were considerably larger and had a dedicated office space, or even a co-working space in every building or something like that.
I have never, even driven a car to work routinely in my life. I got my driver's licence at 37 and have not owned a car as a licence holder.
But TBH I personally did prefer going into an office. Almost everyone I know prefers not to, though.
So, you're right, but the two designs are not mutually exclusive, which you seem to be implying.
What we are seeing is that with the proliferation of broadband internet, information workers don't need close proximity to one another. Cities are now largely obsolete, unfortunately. They're a choice whereas before they were a necessity, and arguments about how much someone loves the diversity of a city to the contrary, the emptiness of these office buildings speaks for itself.
I personally don't want to forcibly stagnate development to protect what amounts to unrealized losses becoming realized. The numbers are big, and so the impact is big, but fundamentally all this is is nonviable business models failing. If your pension relies on office buildings being full, if your city based it's investment plan on information workers requiring proximity to something physical, it was not viable, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that. I won't be forced into a life I don't want to save a city budget or someone's pension plan. Am I cheering? Sure, a little, but mostly I'm just looking at the situation pragmatically and realistically and seeing what's in front of me. If your retirement necessitates me paying thousands in rent to overlook deadlocked traffic, commuting for an hour or corporations paying for floor space as what amounts to a frivolous amenity, you backed the wrong horse and will take a financial hit, whether I cheer or not won't change that fact one iota.
There are still plenty of physical-only things that cities exist for, and other benefits besides working. And when people talk about how much they love cities, office buildings are not the first thing that come to mind.
Cities aren't entirely nonviable, just nonviable in their current iteration from the current paradigm. Their main attraction is that you have to go there to make good money. If cities are to survive into the future, they have to change from that to being attractive to live in regardless of your source of income. The only viable jobs in a city are ones that require workers to be present for practical reasons, such as dockworkers and service workers, and cities have evolved into service economies that cater to information workers, which is nonviable in an age of global connectivity. To survive, housing has to be the largest market for real estate development. Cities have to be made more walkable alongside this transition. Most cities cannot afford to make such a transition because their tax bases would dry up and they'd go insolvent. Those that can, some of them won't make the hard choices before it is too late. I expect at some point some cities will do it and survive, albeit very changed and different.