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I refuse to be miserable in an office just for someone else's building value.
I know from my previous company who are huge in the US who were very candid and honest about it saying they had signed several years worth of leasing and couldn't pull out of those contracts and basically the middle management didn't want to appear to have these expensive contracts on them when nobody was using the offices and the infrastructure that was also involved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed they're not asking ...
If a company wants someone to come back to the office, it isn't for their landlord's property value. If they have lots of free space they can sublease it out, it doesn't make any sense to force people in to an office just to burn money and miss out on revenue.
You can argue that it is somehow better when everyone is typing on keyboards and exchanging air pressure fluctuations in close physical proximity but you cannot argue it is necessary. Furthermore you cannot make any conclusive claims regarding the relative effectiveness of WFH vs WFO. You can, on the other hand, conclusively make claims that commuting is time/energy consuming while largely being an externality for most companies (as they do not have to pay for roads, cars, time, ambulances, carbon emissions, etc.). You can also make conclusive claims regarding lease costs, building maintenance, etc. Offices are plainly irrational from a first principles perspective.
The building i currently live in is a 20+ storey apartment block that was made out of a converted office building built in the 60s. Given the housing prices in [checks notes] cities, it feels like a wave of residentializing is on the horizon.
Not an expert but I've read it's not easy to add all the necessary plumbing to provide showers and toilets if you redistribute office space into apartments. A lot of times office buildings will have one large bathroom per floor.
Malls are also on the table for conversions these days. That is a much simpler transformation.
I refuse to be miserable in an office just for someone else's building value.
I refuse to be miserable in an office just for someone else's building value.
This is the weirdest conspiracy theory that HN has gotten obsessed with of late.
>New Jersey and Texas are states that stand out for spelling out exactly how often employees must work from the office to qualify for tax breaks. Before the pandemic, several New Jersey tax programs required workers to show up at least 80% of the time, and one Texas program set the threshold at 50%.
>Miami, which has seen an influx of new businesses throughout the pandemic, created a program in 2021 that requires companies to sign a minimum five-year lease for office space. The city of Sugar Land, Texas, outside of Houston, launched a new incentive in November that requires businesses to renew their existing leases for five to 10 years and invest a minimum of $1 million in office improvements.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
And therein lies the push from big companies to force back-to-office working. I know from my previous company who are huge in the US who were very candid and honest about it saying they had signed several years worth of leasing and couldn't pull out of those contracts and basically the middle management didn't want to appear to have these expensive contracts on them when nobody was using the offices and the infrastru…
"Remote work risks wiping $800 billion" No guesses which angle this is coming from. "Attendance still is 30% lower than what it was before the pandemic and only 37% of people are back at the office every day." And yet the world has not stopped. In fact everything seems to be going faster than ever.
Still, live goes on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not an expert but I've read it's not easy to add all the necessary plumbing to provide showers and toilets if you redistribute office space into apartments. A lot of times office buildings will have one large bathroom per floor.
Luxury conversions - 2 apts max per floor? — could address the single shared utility risers/core of the typical office building. Schematically: [ a | util | b ]. Malls are also on the table for conversions these days. That is a much simpler transformation.