https://fortune.com/2023/05/25/office-space-crash-harder-than-expected-remote-work-economy-cre-crash/

“The key takeaway from our analysis is that remote work is shaping up to massively disrupt the value of commercial office real estate in the short and medium term,” the authors wrote.

:sicko-hexbear:

The authors found that higher quality buildings, a.k.a. buildings with higher rents that were built more recently, “appear to be faring better,” which they claim is consistent with the notion that companies have to improve office quality for workers to want to come back.

:porky-scared-flipped:

  • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Oh no! What could we possibly do with millions of square meters of empty and well-connected city real estate in the midst of a housing crisis?!

      • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        There's probably some think tank schmuck in Raytheon acres wracking his brain at the local mission bbq who would be gutted knowing he didn't come up with that first.

        He'd still pretend like he did.

      • im_smoke [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        College dorms with no windows, great thinking! :porky-happy:

    • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      One- and two-bedroom luxury condominiums that are used almost exclusively for money laundering and/or AirBnB rentals.

    • join_the_iww [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I know what you’re implying, but then the problem is that in order for the conversions to be economically feasible, a lot of the new apartments would probably have to be windowless.

      • im_smoke [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Hear me out, apartments and hallway are arranged on the outside like a rectangular donut. Inside of the donut, space for activities:

        • floor 1: gym with no windows
        • floor 2: art space with no windows
        • floor 3: pool with no windows
        • floor 4: um little library with cozy couches but no windows!
        • floor 5: lil movie theater
        • floor 6: empty space this is the austerity floor :(
        • floor 7: another gym with no windows!

        It can go like that on repeat.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      They aren’t built in a way that that works. Refitting the plumbing is nearly as expensive as building a whole new building. And that’s if you can solve the “apartments need to have windows” problem

      • JuneFall [none/use name]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Let people do a lot of that work on their own time and dime and it will be done. Plenty of squats converted office buildings.

  • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    It must be getting bad if the media is saying it out loud. This has been an inevitability since the moment everyone figured out, through firsthand experience, that 90% of the work that gets done in one of these offices can be done from anywhere, but the big commercial real estate groups have been fighting a PR war to get people back to the office.

    And it's no surprise they've been trying. Remote work is pretty much a pure efficiency gain. Workers get more flexibility, more options, and spend less time commuting. Firms also have more flexibility, more options, and lower overhead costs. This is a situation where even the cruelest and/or stupidest employers can't argue with the math. You might want your employees to all be in a big dumb terrarium where you can watch them work, but it's going to cost you money and opportunities, and pretty quickly someone who only looks at spreadsheets is going to tell you that they aren't going to sign off on the new office lease because remote work is going to save a dollar.

    • Victor_Lucas [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Proving that we only need to get lucky once :party-sicko:

      The Chinese working class flexing on American workers will make the supremacy of socialist transition undeniable

      :sicko-spin: :meow-knife-trans:

      Capitalists bombed millions to stop the threat of a good example

      :sicko-speeeeen: :cat-trans:

  • Beaver [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    If I've learned anything from Vicky3, it's that if the Landlords are crying, you're doing something right.

  • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    the notion that companies have to improve office quality for workers to want to come back

    :cap-think:

  • im_smoke [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I've heard from those formerly in city planning that many of these offices were built with tax incentives over retail or housing space to promote high income job growth. If there is a real estate bubble, it's gonna be in the commercial space. They're even trying to spin in the article that newly builts or renovations can save you. :cope:

    Such a shame, we could have had more apartments in place of these desolate office buildings to offset the rise in cost of living. But that sort of thing would require communist thoughts such as "planning for the future of your city."

  • SerLava [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Sleeping and playing video games and fucking are all praxis now

  • wombat [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry

  • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    We built gigantic glass and steel monuments to office work in the cores of our cities, did so in a way that means those buildings can hardly be used for anything besides office work, but they’re also expensive to maintain and an expensive hazardous process to tear them down

  • 4zi [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thoughts and prayers sweetie, maybe they should try talking to the invisible hand of the free market

    • JuneFall [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      How can a state control who has to pay taxes to them when they can work everywhere and don't need to be physically in a building? The remote worker is a threat to (national) state hood as we know it.

      It could be Cybersyn or a global capitalism that destroys even national bonds. Of course there will be plenty people who still have to work in the real, be it to do care work, or reproductive work on one hand or productive work i.e. working with the industrial means of production.

  • culpritus [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    where are all the vertical organic farm startups?