Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

This is exactly why Mayor Adams wants people to come back to the office in NYC. NYC derives a big chunk of change from taxing corporate offices, and if the value goes down then NYC loses out on a lot of money.

The power and Internet part is easy - a quiet room can be a challenge for some though. At one point in the pandemic, a friend tried coming over and working in my basement because her family was so distracting at home (2 parents + 3 kids in a 3-bedroom house with virtual work and school and a baby crying, etc). I'm told homebuyers are emphasizing having enough space for home offices these days, but that's easier to attain for some than others, especially with the run-up in housing prices over the past couple of years.

So yeah, for some people it's easy ... for others, not so much.

Focusing on "reasons why I don't like the office" is missing the point, IMO. A lot of folks are betting on the long-term results of a short-term dislocation, but ignoring why things were as they were before the dislocation. It's sort of like the commentariat who come up with hot-takes in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and conclude "life will never be the same"...but within a few years life is, almost always, pretty much the same.

Yes, there are obvious upsides to working from home, but there are also fundamental reasons that we used to go into the office, and dismissing them all as "the old way of doing it" is facile. I think, in the "long" run (i.e. the next few years), the same forces that led humans to form cities throughout all of human existence will prevail.

Said differently: offices sucked before the pandemic too. The technology existed for remote work before the pandemic, too. Yet even in the most remote-friendly work environments, we went out of our way to make time for in-person communication. There was no sudden shift in technology or quality here. We did some short-term things to deal with a short-term circumstance, and now we're seeing the hangover of those choices. But the forces at play are largely unchanged.

If I had to wager, I'd bet that being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career. Making on-site visits will be how you get the sale. Having in-person communication will offer productivity gains over video chat. The incentives to in-person communication will therefore accumulate over time, until we're back to where we started.

The NYC subway system doesn't go to Jersey, it's often subway => commuter train, you're lucky if it doesn't involve a bus at some point.