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Comment by tjmc | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a good opportunity to rezone and modify some buildings to residential.

Precisely, but instead city councils will provide incentives to businesses to push their staff back to the office sigh

But... why? Why not incentivize foot traffic via new interesting small businesses and vibrant culture? Why must it be offices always.

Rossmann had some rant recently about NYC, talking about how the loans developers get when building out buildings tend to demand a certain minimum rent (or, if you don't meet that, you gotta basically show up with more capital). This leads to the whole "empty spaces but rent not dropping much" thing.

I get there are costs with having people in the building but at one point it would be nice for society to just be like "let's not leave stuff entirely empty"

Bc us society is relying on dependency: ppl will depend on cars to move/buy groceries, ppl will depend on jobs bc they neeed health insurance, ppl will depend on office working bc they should depend on cars and businesses will depend on office bc govt will get money.

They'll try and fail. Probably repeatedly. This is much bigger then them. There's a new reality where successful companies no longer cling to the past of overpriced office real estate that is populated by overpriced staff that commutes to town for hours every day.

That was stupid before covid and there are now plenty of companies that grew past that and no longer need that. The next logical step here is that investors get the hint that their investments spending most of their money on SFO real estate (housing and offices) is not great from an ROI point of view. That too was true before covid but now much more obviously so as there are now a lot of companies with a lot less expenses on that front and a lot more runway. Paying people extra just to show up in an office isn't going to be the smart move here.

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