Commercial real estate needs to pull its head out of its ass soon and start heavily discounting spaces or shit’s going to get real real.
Agreed - so many viable businesses have been forced to close due to rent hikes but the underlying problem is that there a lot of investors who were promised guaranteed high returns for commercial property. They should be forced to accept the downside of that gamble but as a group they have so much political clout. Pretty much all of the “return to office” hype machine is driven by those very well-connected people and cities are receptive because most downtowns were heavily over-focused on subsidizing suburban car commuters, which can’t easily be converted into more attractive spaces for actual residents.
Looking at SF, I think it is not only a discount thing. The way it was rented before: "open space" office with bare wall, rows of desks and insanely high price per sqft or a mall is probably not gonna work anymore. They need to repurpose it: convert to apartments, smaller open space offices, regular offices, etc. Trying to do any kind of construction in SF is ridiculously complicated. When money was flowing it created many layers of bureaucracy and complexity, but it was affordable. Since then money flow dried up but complexity and bureaucracy is still there.