The Remote Work Challenge: Lessons from 5 Cities | Hacker News Reader

The Remote Work Challenge: Lessons from 5 Cities

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> "As office building vacancies jeopardize urban fiscal health and downtown vitality, here’s how cities and states are adapting."

The distress over remote work comes not from employers, but from owners of commercial real estate.

Here's a view of that from a lending broker in the commercial real estate sector. [1] The high vacancy rate is all too real, and papering it over with "extend and pretend" lending tricks is mostly over. A lot of loans renew in 2026-2027, and they won't have the near zero interest rates from last time. Vacancy rates are higher than generally reported, because many landlords are making concessions.[2] San Francisco has about a 30% office vacancy rate, by the way. All this means foreclosures, distressed property, markdowns, and bankruptcies. "A January 2026 Morningstar DBRS analysis, reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Real Deal, found that more than half of the roughly $100 billion of securitized commercial mortgages coming due in 2026 are unlikely to pay off at maturity."

The loud "return to office" pronouncements did not result in an increase in office space in use. Despite all the noise, remote work has not really decreased much in recent years. "Less than 1/3 of companies requiring fully in-person work in 2026."[3]

[1] https://fidentcapital.com/the-2026-maturity-wall-what-the-en...

[2] https://www.cbcworldwide.com/blog/buyers-sellers-are-making-...

[3] https://founderreports.com/return-to-office-statistics/

>Despite all the noise, remote work has not really decreased much in recent years. "Less than 1/3 of companies requiring fully in-person work in 2026."[3]

Remote work is generally being displaced by hybrid. That still requires employees to live in expensive metros and employers to maintain offices with space for everyone. The offices can be a little more austere and the commutes a little worse given that they're only for 2-3 days a week, but everybody's still got to pay for basically the same stuff. Downtown retail, though, is screwed with only 2-3 days of foot traffic to pay the bills.

> San Francisco has about a 30% office vacancy rate, by the way. All this means foreclosures, distressed property, markdowns, and bankruptcies.

Hmm, a city in desperate need of housing has an oversupply of office space. I know it's not a simple conversion, but it feels like a natural fit.

It is likely we need to see it crash first. I am not in this industry but it does make sense to me that it gets easier after the current owner gets wiped out, banks take possession, value gets marked down, and then money gets spent on the conversion.

With the loan under water or the fear of it going that way it is probably hard to fund additional debt for a multi-year construction effort when no one is sure which way the market will go. Also may mean that they miss out on a govt bailout that could make them whole.

Just a theory on why we haven’t seen much of this.

The key problem with adapting offices into apartments is the lack of natural light in office floor plans. You have a glass skyscraper that has a huge floor surface, but no way to deliver light in the middle of the building. So even if converting it, you’re looking at making very big apartments since they need to hug at least one exterior wall to have any light, and then go toward the middle of the floor plan, whilst getting darker and darker. Essentially you’d be buying a 1-window or 2-window apartment with multiple bedrooms, which is hardly desirable. The problem is that we’ve built office spaces quite differently than residential high-rises, making a conversion into (desirable) apartments sometimes untenable.

Yeah, in my mind it could go one of two ways - huge luxury apartments, or tiny ones with communal amenities in the center, more similar to a dorm.

While the latter may sound ridiculous, one thing I've heard over and over(and over) again from younger people in the area was complaining about paying so much for rent when they're never home, and just needing a place to sleep. I'm not up with zoning or even the feasibility of such a thing, more of a thought experiment.

Agreed, a dorm-like setup with amenities in the middle might work. It’s a whole different economic model and pitch to potential buyers/renters, but it could work.

As long as I have reliable climate control I prefer not having windows or "natural light".

I presently live in a townhouse triplex with like 5 huge windows to the outside world and everyone in my household has them permanently blackout-curtained like nobody's business.. and there is still way too much light getting in each one of them. :(

Perhaps there are vampire-like demographics which could be served by some of the interior-space of such buildings?

Plus, depending how folks feel about it it might be interesting to user fiberoptic cable to transport natural light about wherever one desires, not least of which because that ought to prove quite simple to be able to switch on and off at will.

the best approach & sustainable cities has always been mixed zoning.

city buildings at human scale i.e 4-5 stories like in most European cities. shops / retail etc at retail level. then offices / apartments occupy the other levels.

make places walkable & dense. then have public Parks etc. then shit like niteclubs etc - should be relegated to basement level. same as parking.

That is not how Europe is actually built though. You'll see those four to five stories with shops retail on the ground floor and then the others above on the main street. However, if you get off the track and go behind those streets, you discover that there's a lot of places that are just pure apartments with no retail and some offices but very few in between. If you're expecting to find a place where there's ground floor retail and residents and offices above, you need to be looking at places where there's 15 or more stories on every building. And by every building, I mean every building, not just downtown.

I don’t know why people use “Europe” as a broad term. The city layouts in Warsaw, Paris, Athens, and Amsterdam are quite different.

Even then, I’d say that most larger/capital cities have 5-8 story buildings, with retail or other shops on the ground floor in the majority of central areas.

I usually dislike using 'Europe' as a broad term, but in this context I think it’s fair. I’ve been to more than half of European capitals, as well as major cities in the US, China, Korea, and parts of southeastern Africa. On a global scale, major European cities really aren't that different from each other.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but the places with pure apartments and such are not like this because of zoning laws similar to the US, but they just were created like this by their developers. Thus, they could change much easier to whatever else you'd want from them, should need arise.

Not really because houses and business have different physical needs that are hard to retrofit after the building is designed.

Zoning limits what your neighbors can do, building design limits what you can do.

Yes yes, my point was that you're not bound by the same strict zoning laws if you decide to redo things - by either retrofitting or rebuilding or whatever. Not that's it's easy, just easier.

Well, you can have a look at Singapore.

However even we don't have 15+ stories on every last building. (My home in Singapore only has 3 stories and legally no one can change that, because it's under conservation.)

Agree. And you also then should ask, why is it so? It’s usually not because they were after some pedestrian nirvana. It’s because land is so expensive they have to utilize it to a high degree for it to make sense. It does help that once you have the density, public transportation is worth investing in. But most of America is how it is because land has been relatively cheap and available and the development was during the rise of the automobile. I think it’s very narrow minded to assume that most Americans would like living in the European style city (the dense version). We have space, yards, large homes, automobiles are affordable, greater privacy than apartments provide, etc. Sure homes here are have grown unaffordable for young people in many areas, it’s certainly a problem. We’ve also built a ton of new apartments and people still complain about affordability. There’s not really any true affordable housing without subsidies, and that’s just shifting the burden somewhere else. Materials and labor is what it is and they add up to big numbers, meaning many people are perpetually priced out. If this is your problem, I’d suggest looking at the tiny house movement as a solution before expecting any US city to redesign itself for your wants/needs. Maybe prices will come down in a decade or so when all the boomers are selling to go into assisted care facilities.

> yards, large homes, greater privacy than apartments provide

Really? You don’t even have hedges around your yards.

Fences are more common than hedges here. I’m failing to understand how any shared wall apartment tops a single family home in terms of privacy.

The walls are thick, and no one can access the front door of an apartment without going through that of the building first. I still prefer a house though, with a thick hedge around the lawn isolating you from the world. The real privacy downside with apartments is the windows, as they might be facing other apartments or the street.

The door situation is more so security than privacy IMO. The common setup in the US is we drive right into our garage and nobody even sees us enter or exit our car, depending on garage location I suppose. I guess it’s easier to watch a house and know who lives there and see there comings and going than an apartment where you don’t know which apartment people are coming or going from. I was thinking more so about privacy from neighbors wrt noises through the wall, ceiling, or floor.

Come to think of it, Smells also get shared in many apartments.

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest we all have garages but nobody parks their cars in them. Cars wind up parked in front of the garage or on the street, garage winds up being filled with storage junk.

> The walls are thick

They're often quite thin. See all the comments complaining about being able to hear their neighbor take a piss.

I would suggest weighing up other aspects: reinforced concrete was widely used under the assumption that it was eternal, or simply without considering how it would behave over time, and today a massive amount of infrastructure and buildings has simply reached the end of its lifespan. Whether the dense city appeals to those most terrified of change or to the few who need it to extract wealth from the many, it is incompatible with the New Deal. This is based on small, semi-autonomous buildings, resilient for that very reason, with sufficient local photovoltaics, energy and heat storage, and heat pumps which have the highest COPs over short distances. It involves designs with large south-facing glazed surfaces, featuring overhangs and blinds, so that the low winter sun penetrates effectively to provide free heating, while the high summer sun doesn't even touch the facade, all elements that are impossible to implement at scale in dense cities. Not to mention that we are very good at making simple things replicated in huge quantities, and much less so at large-scale, bespoke projects.

Whether you like it or not, the "ecological" city that is both dense and walkable DOES NOT EXIST, and there is no future in general for the current city, with its vast waterproofed surfaces where the soil has already turned to sand, eroded here and there by groundwater, causing the weight of large buildings to lead to slow and irreversible subsidence. Cities built in places where it made sense to be in the past, but makes no sense today.

Right now most people, even the bright ones, being victims of habit and propaganda, cannot bring themselves to admit it or understand it, but when they do, the collapse of urban real estate will have a far greater impact than the teleworking that is currently being denied at a high cost to everyone.

Do you have any thoughts about how to minimize the negative impact of such a massive shift?

I've been thinking that Federal limits on nominal appreciation of real estate could gently decrease real prices via inflation. And if that limit fluctuated like the Federal Reserve rate, it wouldn't completely crash real estate as an investment vehicle, meaning retirements needn't be completely decimated.

But that kind of intervention is just pie in the sky at least for the next few years.

In the current economic system, I don't see any. By changing this, for example, by eliminating bank intermediation in the creation of money, well, that could change things. Those who tried, like Lincoln with the Continentals, ended up getting killed...

I think remote work will create new cities and new urban centers if we allow it to continue. We shouldn’t be forced to be crammed into the same places.

People want to live with their services and things to do. There's a reason why developers are building suburbs around all the existing cities, but they're not going to middle and nowhere places to build suburbs. Even the land would be a lot cheaper. Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere. They want to live close to things they can do. Even if you can work from home, you still want to be able to go to a doctor's office. You won't be able to meet your mates for a softball game, or whatever sport you have to like playing. Maybe you want to go out for a drink or to a restaurant. Cities provide a huge number of valuable things because of the concentration of people that you just can't get in a new small town or new development. Sure, if you can ever get that urban development going, it eventually will develop all those things. But, those things are really hard to get first because they depend on customers. It becomes a chicken and egg. You can't have a new development because there's not things to do, but you can't have things to do until there's people who live there. Build around an existing city and you have all those existing cities. It's worth the things to do.

But what is the size that provides those things? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? 10,000,000?

Depends. The more niche you're interest the larger you need in general. Everyone needs food so you only need about 1000 to get those basics. Though at that size you are making as monthly trip to the big city where they have better selection and better process. 100,000 probably can't support a unicycle shop, you need millions- but 50k supports a bicycle shop that might have a unicycle or might not.

Less than 100 is needed of your interest is shooting guns of your back deck, so there is no universal answer. There are a lot of other back to nature things on those lines as well.

The cities: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver and Mihwaukee. But NYC and SanFran also mentioned in passing.

They basically said that NYC and SF "threw the curve," and should be excluded from the analysis. Probably, the same goes for Chicago and LA.

What I find amusing, is mean commute times. I know a number of folks that live in the Atlanta and Boston areas, and they would love a 30-minute commute. I think that NYC claims a 27-minute mean commute, but everyone that I know that commutes (and I know a lot of folks that commute; both by car, and by rail), take 90 minutes to two hours.

I think they must include [very expensive] suburbs right on the city limits, to get those means; when the affordable housing is out in the bedroom communities; usually 20-50 miles away.

Also, if the commute is supposed to end at the city limits, or some fixed point, downtown, it's leaving out a significant amount of time. It can take two hours to drive from the Queens/Nassau border, to the Hudson (on a bad day -usually, it's an hour). Subway rides take a certain time, too. These are affected by proximity to stations, and how many stops a train makes.

I don't think it's a useful comparison for any sub-60 minute commute when it's a passive mode of transportation vs active.

When I lived in Manhattan, I had a ~35 minute commute by subway. I read a book every week or two, and it was far more productive than anything that happens in a 20 minute drive by car. My commute now is roughly 20 minutes, driving... and it's very stressful.

Beyond 1 hour, the time lost has greater impact on your life (socializing, household chores, family time, etc). Even still, I'd rather 90 minutes in a train than 60 behind the wheel.

> When I lived in Manhattan, I had a ~35 minute commute by subway. I read a book every week or two, and it was far more productive than anything that happens in a 20 minute drive by car. My commute now is roughly 20 minutes, driving... and it's very stressful

Really just shows how different people's experiences are based on location and density

When I was commuting downtown in Calgary, it was either paying for parking downtown and a 20-30 minute drive, or a 60-90 minute transit ride depending on which bus I caught

A 20-30 minute driving commute is basically the norm here. Unless you live quite outside the city.

> Even still, I'd rather 90 minutes in a train than 60 behind the wheel

The tradeoff between transit and driving has never been within 30 minutes for anywhere I've lived, personally. It's always 40+ minutes difference, and that's assuming your bus even shows up on time

I get the feeling that the majority of folks, here, live in the city, nearby expensive suburbs, or work remote. Maybe they take the "Google buses," in the SV area.

Very few HN folks seem aware of what average mensch suburban commute times are like. I've been flat-out called a liar, when I mention what is common knowledge, all over Long Island, that commutes into the city truly suck. It's on the news. It's in the newspapers. It's a standard topic of discussion at social events. Everyone just knows it. I live in the Huntington area, which is around 40 miles from Manhattan. There's no way, even with a Lamborghini, that I'll make it to Manhattan from here, in less than 40 minutes. During COVID, that was briefly possible.

My daily commute, for over 20 years, was north-south (on Long Island), ten miles (16Km). It took exactly 30 minutes, each way.

But someone made a statistic (I suspect commissioned by folks trying to sell suburban real estate), that it takes 27 minutes to get to Manhattan, and I guess we're numbers people, so the number always wins.

> "Lies, damn lies, and statistics"

-Mark Twain

I do a reverse commute from Queens to the Suffolk border. If I leave by 6:30 I can get to work in about 45 minutes From the Belt to the Southern State, about 26 miles total drive. Meanwhile, the opposite lane is a depressing sea of automobiles slowly pouring into the city. A friend of mine lives in Smithtown and it can take him up to 2 hours to drive into the city if he has to.

> and it was far more productive than anything that happens in a 20 minute drive by car

It seems you haven't discovered podcasts yet :)

Cities being dependent on workers being present at commercial office buildings appears to be a uniquely American problem.

Most of my American friends I know turn to the suburbs as a default for "family" style living once they have kids. Imagine their bemusement when they go to a place like Amsterdam or Tokyo and see plenty of families with small children walking around. Heck, you don't even have to go far to see how a city can be a great place for a family, just look at Boston.

Cities, when done correctly, are a better place to raise a family than the suburbs. And yet, when done incorrectly, are terrible.

"Cities, when done correctly, are a better place to raise a family"

The birth rates say otherwise. Cities universally have very very low rates of childbirth. So low that they usually have to depend on a constant inflow from rural areas just to maintain their population. Its a pattern observed across the entire world. And its remarkably clear from the numbers.

You could argue there are a couple of exceptions. If the child is going to be a musician then perhaps a city is better. But I suspect you are confusing being born with millions in a trust fund with living in a city. Those aren't the same thing.

You're conflating the opportunity cost of having a child with the actual logistics of raising a child.

Cities are by definition economical logistical hubs. It's where the jobs and opportunities are. Most people aren't saying "gee I better pack up and move to suburbia before having a child" it's more like "having a child could cost me my high-paying job so I better not". And that issue is exacerbated in the U.S. with the worst parental-leave policy among developed nations. Regardless though, the trend will still exist in countries with generous parental-leave policies because having a child is an opportunity cost in an urban environment. That doesn't mean the environment itself isn't conductive to raising the child. Completely different stories.

> And that issue is exacerbated in the U.S. with the worst parental-leave policy among developed nations.

NYC's TFR was 1.55 in 2021. London's TFR was 1.35 in 2024. Paris TFR was 1.27 in 2024. Other US cities are not really comparable to the European ones, but the broader point is that parental leave has nothing to do with TFR. Norway and Sweden have TFRs around 1.44 while the US has it 1.6-1.8

> it's more like "having a child could cost me my high-paying job so I better not"...having a child is an opportunity cost in an urban environment

At least in the US and speaking generally, people with high incomes in urban areas move to suburbs once they have kids. I would like to see a citation for your "opportunity cost" claim, because high income jobs also come with good benefits like generous parental leave policies.

Counterpoint. The US has a higher birth rate than any country in Europe. Many of which have your parental-leave policies. BTW, there is absolutely no correlation between governmental policies and birth rate. You can't bully people into have kids. Population density is the most strongly correlated factor with birth rate.

That's the big monomer: "walking" around. Many American cities (especially on the western end) aren't made to have families walking around. They aren't unwalkable, but they aren't welcoming you to walk. Among several other factors in US urban environments.

And to add the final nail to the coffin: even if you tried to make it walkable, real estate prices drive you back out. The biggest draw to suburbs is simply one of cost. $2200 median rent in downtown LA (1 room) vs. $1450 for a suburb 20 miles north?

The real cost of suburbia has been aggressively hidden for decades and is only now becoming realized as even gen-Z buyers with college degrees are getting priced out of starter suburban homes.

The solution is to aggressively tear down draconian zoning laws that force businesses to build obscenely large parking lots and forbid mixed-used developments. More American-style suburban homes with 2 yards, a 2 car garage, and 3 bedrooms is not going to help with prices at all, in fact, it's likely to make the housing crisis in every country worse. The rent itself is not the only cost but the utilities as well. When you build another 100 spread out homes in suburbia, even if the city subsidizes the cost of all that piping, wiring, drainage, and asphalt, it comes back to you in the form of tax or cuts to amenities like parks, museums, and other public goods. Suburbia isn't "cheaper" than the city, it just shifts the cost from rent/mortgage elsewhere.

This isn't just abstract wish-listing by the way. It's real policy proposal that has been tested, and demonstrated to work.

https://www.planning.org/planning/2022/spring/a-business-cas...

I grew up in Boston. My parents took the train to work, my brother and I took city buses and/or trains to school, or walked when we were younger (elementary school).

I cannot afford to raise a family in Boston now however. I live in a different, cheaper (but still great in many ways) city and it's mostly automobile oriented. I would LOVE to live in a European style city, hell I'd love to live in actual Europe but that just isn't feasible for me.

Please know that not every American is war mongering monster truck driving redneck. I am aware of what the oil and auto industries did to the US in the 20th century. I can't simply wish it away by snapping my fingers.

As someone who pushed to raise our family in the city only to eventually end up in the suburbs, the suburbs are better for kids - which is why we move there.

Amsterdam and Tokyo are lovely cities but they both suffer from extremely low fertility, so it doesn't seem like people chose them to have a family. Walkable is great but having a little more room with a nice backyard and a car to take the kids places is great.

Kids are happy and well im cities. Adults dont want kids in the first place.

I think a better split would be between city mice and country mice.

I live close to the Boston light pollution bubble. I've worked within Boston, have had friends in suburban Boston, and it's a place to raise a family if you are a city mouse and can live with the noise and crowds and have plenty of cash, because everywhere you go, somebody has their hand out for money.

I'm a country mouse, and if I have to deal with more than 5 or 10 people a week, it's getting close to too many people. When I spent a few days in Vermont under really dark skies and with not many people, I felt the best I had in months.

I think instead of trying to proclaim which is the better space for raising families or living, make it possible for someone to live in a place that's best for them, be it a country mouse or a city mouse. One size does not fit all. Heck, it doesn't even fit many.

How is San Francisco downtown nowadays? Before covid, it was vibrant and alive. During rush hours and lunch time, the streets were filled.

In 2024, I went to SF downtown during the work day and it was absolutely dead compared to pre-Covid.

How is it in 2026?

Not great

5 American* cities.

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