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The Birth and Death of the Office

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Re: The Birth and Death of the Office

#61

Post by alistairSH »

vwcx wrote: post #50
alistairSH wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop. Isn’t that just an instance of the broken window parable? There’s nothing to prevent the bagel shop locating adjacent to a residential area instead of an office park - then society sees the benefit of WFH and tasty round breads.

Northern Virginia has seen this with food trucks. Since late 2020, I'm starting to see food trucks posting up in the evenings in various residential neighborhoods (almost like how ice cream trucks trawl the streets in summer). This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago -- not worth it for the truck owner. But now they're moving to where people are , which is the upper-middle-class neighborhoods where every…

Where are these trucks? I’m in Reston, but I imagine the trucks are mostly clustering in Falls Church or Arlington? All I can think of is there’s sometimes a food-truck-event at the local park-and-ride, usually on the weekend, but it doesn’t seem very consistent.

Re: The Birth and Death of the Office

#62

Post by alistairSH »

voisin wrote: post #52
alistairSH wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop. Isn’t that just an instance of the broken window parable? There’s nothing to prevent the bagel shop locating adjacent to a residential area instead of an office park - then society sees the benefit of WFH and tasty round breads.

Presumably if you had bagel shops in every residential neighbourhood, each would sell less and have largely the same fixed costs and so prices would have to be higher.

Possibly, but I imagine they could get by with less square footage, and in a less expensive space, so rent would be substantially less. But, yeah, oven and other cooking apparatus is probably the same regardless of scale (up to whatever size starts requiring duplicates).

And from a societal perspective, saving on commute time/expenses but with $15 bagels is still better than wasting 2+ hours/day, additional car expensises, and only a $7 bagel.

Re: The Birth and Death of the Office

#63

Post by Kerrick »

thwarted wrote: post #18
rhexs wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss offices in reasonable locations. Instead they're all in the same 6-8 cities that all have increasingly bad homeless populations. No, I don't want to live in the Bay, New York City, Boston, Austin, or Denver. Please create small satellite offices in reasonable cities instead of mega campuses in towns that all seem to have public libraries that are now defacto homeless shelters. Tech imports most of the talent t…

> I miss offices in reasonable locations. Instead they're all in the same 6-8 cities... The majority of the US population lives in the same 6-8 metro areas; so it's "reasonable" to put offices in those metro areas. I've worked at places with offices in downtown areas (short public transit ride or walk), in close suburbs (the extent to where public transit goes), and in remote suburbs (that require driving to get ther…

> The majority of the US population lives in the same 6-8 metro areas;

According to [0] that isn't true. The eight most populous metro areas make up less than a quarter of the population in the U.S. You'd need the 48 most populous metro areas, not the 8 most populous. That means including all the way down to... Salt Lake City, Utah, at just over a million people.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sum+of+the+population+o...

Re: The Birth and Death of the Office

#64

Post by 999900000999 »

alistairSH wrote: post #47
999900000999 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is to keep local economies alive. It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop. However, offices are straight up abelist , if you have mobility issues it's absurdly hard to commute. Commuting isn't really needed here, if I was in a wheelchair I'd take this to court. Full tin foil hat time, if remote work was the norm the entire commercial real estate sector w…

It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop. Isn’t that just an instance of the broken window parable? There’s nothing to prevent the bagel shop locating adjacent to a residential area instead of an office park - then society sees the benefit of WFH and tasty round breads.

Correct, but where's all that trillion dollar commercial real estate going ?

Cities don't have much of a reason to exist, at least not in their current form, with WFH.

Re: The Birth and Death of the Office

#65

Post by anamax »

alistairSH wrote: post #62
voisin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably if you had bagel shops in every residential neighbourhood, each would sell less and have largely the same fixed costs and so prices would have to be higher.

Possibly, but I imagine they could get by with less square footage, and in a less expensive space, so rent would be substantially less. But, yeah, oven and other cooking apparatus is probably the same regardless of scale (up to whatever size starts requiring duplicates). And from a societal perspective, saving on commute time/expenses but with $15 bagels is still better than wasting 2+ hours/day, additional car expen…

You forgot labor.

A huge bagel store will use humans more efficiently than a small one.

One big problem with "lots of shops" is that they require lots of retail workers, workers who spend much of their paid time not working. Prices reflect that.

It's unclear to me why urbanists think that wasting humans on retail is so important.

Re: The Birth and Death of the Office

#67

Post by kwijybo »

mahathu wrote: post #39
osigurdson wrote: post #21

I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later. Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both be…

i like hanging out and talking to my coworkers, it's fun:)

Do you know if your coworkers like hanging out and talking to you? Are they there to have fun?

I've worked with people who want to have fun and hang and I found them to be a distraction and resented having them around.

Re: The Birth and Death of the Office

#68

Post by bruce511 »

We are in the early stages of a societal upheaval and I for one am not sure how it will play out.

Firstly, it's clear that we've had a massive "short term" upheaval in which we got to clearly find out who could work from home, and who could not. Or perhaps more accurately who can work _at_ home (white collar) and who can work _from_ home (sales etc).

We've learned that those who have space at home did better than those who were already cramped. We've learned that the number (and age!) of others in the house matter. It turns out not all homes, or offices, are created equal. Having small kids around can make life a lot harder.

We've discovered that commuting time and money is a thing - I might live 5 minutes from work, you might easily spend 2 hours a day on transport - clearly we have different experiences with regard to WFH changes.

Some offices are open plan, some have cubicals, some have actual offices with doors and individual climate control.

We've started to learn that once you work at home, home can be anywhere. Time zone, and language, are the only hindrances to you living anywhere, or indeed your job going some where cheaper (without you.)

What's my point? Well I guess that we are right at the beginning. Architecture of both offices, and homes, will adapt. Zoning will hopefully adapt. We'll start acknowledging that school is as much about day care as education. White collar jobs will (I suspect) end up paying less. Perhaps even a culling of "bullshit jobs".

The secondary impact on density, and thus secondary jobs that rely on that density, will be significant. And perhaps in some ways less predictable. New businesses will form - new ways to socialise will emerge - new work boundaries may emerge, or maybe boundaries will disappear.

However it shakes out these are interesting times - one thing is clear, the future doesn't look like 2019.

Remember these times, 30 years from now they'll be as foreign as the 80s, or 50s, are to us now.

Re: The Birth and Death of the Office

#69

Post by hezralig »

mathgladiator wrote: post #40
mertd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urban areas don't have to have lots of petty crime and homelessness. Let's not assume they come as a package. Certain sectors clustering together in a geographic region has nice advantages even for non-23yo non-single folk. One can hop jobs without uprooting the rest of the family.

In Seattle, it became the norm. Honestly, my commute from an island required exiting a ferry terminal. On the way from the terminal to the office, I eventually went dead on the inside after stepping over sleeping homeless and wretched smells.

I used to work in San Francisco and after buying a house on Bainbridge Island, I now work in an office around the Westlake Center.

It really isn't that bad mate. After living around the world (central Europe, SE Asia), Los Angeles, the mid west, I can say that people who complain about smells and the homeless are incredibly sheltered. I find they tell on themselves when they complain about seeing homeless people when the crime rate is down across the board from the last 20 years.

If you are so offended by seeing someone in distress, who is probably more dead on the inside trying to survive in a world whose upward mobility is strongly diminishing, then perhaps you shouldn't be going into that community to begin with.

Re: The Birth and Death of the Office

#70

Post by greggman3 »

osigurdson wrote: post #21

I don't think there is anything else more illogical in modern society than waking up in building A, hopping in a car and fighting traffic for an hour to get to building B just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours (perhaps with a few minimally productive meetings here and there), then commute back to building A 8 hours later. Building B sits empty for 16 hours a day while Building A sits empty for 10 with both be…

I have a friend what has a company with ~20 employees. During COVID they all went WFH. After 12 months or so they announced they'd stay WFH forever and closed the office. 9 months later the president and office manager got new office. They realized they were more productive together than separated, more productive at a dedicated work space than at home with all the distractions, family, kids. They were also happier to be together, to spend time with their "work friends", etc... They have not asked the employees to come back to the office but several are of their own accord, finding their life better than being at home all the time alone or with just the people in their houses, rather than having a larger extended set of people to hang out with.
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