A lot of the feet-dragging concerns can be summed up as: We ruined suburban areas because everyone had to commute centrally (e.g. closure of community spaces, shops, restaurants) and it will take a while to adjust.
I do find it interesting that when individuals take risks and lose, there is near zero sympathy from society but when big commercial real-estate firms do so, suddenly we have to adjust our way of life around them.
A lot of the smaller downtown businesses will be absolutely fine, they'll just move suburban where the workers now are.
I do worry whether they hold the economy hostage. Do they have the ability to ruin that? Do they have the choice of ruining it or not, or have they gotten shit so tangled up that it would be ruined even if they didn't want it to be? And does anyone really believe that, given the choice between themselves being ruined but the economy surviving just fine, and them being ruined while the economy is ruined as well... that they'd choose the former?
And I don't care. They can rot. Really.
But if they drag everyone else down with them... god help us all. Can they? Could they, for instance, destablize the stock market, or cause a cascade of bank runs? Is it a matter of choice on their part, or will they also be helpless to stop this supposing they even want to stop it?
I too laugh at my enemies as I see them sink down into the quicksand, but first I check if they've grabbed onto my ankle.
For anyone reading this, I'm not being rhetorical. I do not understand the economics of this well enough to know if they're going to blow up the world on the rest of us. Are they?
The CMBS market is about $1T in total asset value. It's comparable to Bitcoin. It's significantly less than the $9T in residential MBS that caused the 2008 crash. So if CMBS crash is likely to have financial effects similar to a crypto crash (of which we've had several) or the drop in value of FANGs (total CMBS market size is about the same size as Meta's market cap).
The problem is that commercial real estate's woes are caused as much by the interest rate hikes as they are by WFH - notice that CRE (outside of certain locations like SF) did fine in 2020-2021, but now has really big problems. And the interest rate hikes absolutely do affect corporate bonds and the stock market, and yet have not really been priced in. Corporate bonds exhibited a "taper tantrum" when interest rates went up to 2.25% in 2018; rates are now more than double that. Most of this is long-term debt coming due 2025-2027, but if rates do not drop before then, we could see corporate bankruptcies and unemployment that make 2008 look like nothing.
Big businesses have a lot of employees. Even if just a small percentage of those employees contact their representatives and get on the news, it's still a much larger and more focused message then individuals doing it about individual problems. A big business failing becomes a very loud squeaky wheel.
It's the most obvious no brainer thing to do, that a majority agrees on across the board, in a time where they agree on nothing else. Yet, it isn't happening because powerful alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical lobbies are against it.
People can unite and call representatives all they want. Unless you can primary a representative in a local election they won't give a crap, and will gladly please their donors.
For example, nobody would think that the current agro-transportation-healthcare system where we make everybody fat with subsidized high-fructose corn syrup, ensure they don't get enough exercise, and then spend massive quantities of money fixing all the obesity-related illnesses is efficient. Nobody thinks the housing stranglehold where home prices get bid up, investors and people who bought them early buy more of them on leverage, and other people go homeless is efficient. Nobody thinks modern enterprise software is efficient.
But these systems are held in place because there's essentially no lever to topple them. The economically rational response to a housing shortage is to build more housing, but if you pick up a hammer and do it yourself, you will get shut down so quickly by the local planning commission and building inspector. Corn subsidies and local zoning are held in place by the government; various people have tried to change them, but democratic government by design moves slowly. It would be a big (and expensive) lifestyle change to cook all your meals at home from fresh ingredients and walk everywhere - people that actually do it tend to be significantly healthier than those who don't, but it requires an economic & free time surplus. Building enterprise software with a good UI is an expensive and pointless waste of time, because the decision maker who decides whether to buy your software usually cares about price, how easy it is for IT to manage, and whether they can blame another company when things go wrong. Hence why we get dumpster fires like Concur.
It's very likely that remote work will end up in a similar situation. The decision-maker for whether your job is remote isn't the employee; it's the employer, sometimes your manager and sometimes someone higher up in the org like a VP or HR. They optimize for their own incentives, which usually includes how easy it is to manage people. For the economically-rational result to happen, remote workers need to be able to start independent firms that are remote-first, so they can do an end-run around their managers. But for that to happen, remote work needs to be more efficient in the competitive, early stages of a new technology market, so that those remote-first companies win the market when it is still winnable. I'm not convinced that's possible; I think in-person work is still significantly more efficient in a highly-ambiguous environment where people don't have well-defined tasks to do, and that's exactly the environment where most companies get founded.