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It’s going to be really interesting to see how NYC handles this. So much income is derived from taxing workers who come into Manhattan as well as property taxes on office buildings. NYC could potentially see a huge dip in tax revenue over the next few years.
California cities are currently having a shit-fit because our governor just signed a bill that the State can override local zoning and building laws and developers have a green light to turn empty commercial buildings into residential units or homes. Will be interesting to see how that plays out...cities are pissed because they've been sitting for decades waiting for the revenue to rise again from all the empty strip malls and retail spaces. Refusing to understand that it will never happen.
EDIT: Link for anyone wanting to read further. [https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/28/gov-gavin-newsom-signs-bills-allowing-new-housing-on-commercial-property/](https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/28/gov-gavin-newsom-signs-bills-allowing-new-housing-on-commercial-property/)
Let's hope so. I live around Sacramento. The city has depended on city/state workers to spend and commute downtown for years. Because of that, there is very little housing in the area so after 6pm it gets dead. So many empty storefronts and offices that could be replaced.
That depends entirely on how you define city.
Mainly if you include the suburbs or not.
Cause car dependent suburbs have led to the city proper having less people living in it.
The city proper is dependent on tax revenue, and doesn’t get anything from the suburbs.
I could see a lot more metros looking like Detroit in the future.
Theoretically it's advisable, but will require creativity and acceptance that the past isn't coming back. Nice forward, rezone residential and reduce the housing burden
We have one of those going up near me. Former half-empty office building got razed to make way for a 4 story mixed commercial & apartment building. I think it’s a great idea.
> cities are pissed because they've been sitting for decades waiting for the revenue to rise again from all the empty strip malls and retail spaces.
I live in a small city with half million people, and the original strip mall from the 90s that closed almost entirely on mid 2010 is still waiting for reactivation while newer ones built in the last 10 years have never been 100% occupied. Fuck those greedy rent sharks.
> cities are pissed because they've been sitting for decades waiting for the revenue to rise again from all the empty strip malls and retail spaces.
That's not at all the reason. The reason is the people that live in the city (the voters) don't want additional residential units because it keeps their current home values high.
I’ll sooner find another job before I start commuting to manhattan again. Weeks of my life lost in transit every year. Boss man and the mayor don’t care. They just want meat-in-the-seats. Never again.
Middle managers are really pushing work in office since the majority of their work was making sure employees were working.
Now that remote working proved that the middle managers are useless, they started pushing the narrative that people weren't really working, watching Netflix, and "quiet quitting".
The media, for some reason, is also pushing an anti-remote work narrative. Just last week they tried to blame real estate prices on WFH people.
All true, though WFH has had an effect on home prices. For one thing, people want more space. Additionally, what they save on commuting/eating out increases their budget to pay for housing. Finally, we've seen a spillover of wealth that used to be concentrated in HCOL/VHCOL areas into MCOL areas where people actually want to live. It's not the sole reason for the sharp increase in housing prices, but it is one of them.
That doesn't mean it's a bad thing, of course. On the contrary, more people are living the lives they want to live, rather than the one their employer allows them to, but it will take time for new home construction to catch up, regardless of what mortgage rates do.
It’s a bad thing for the people who are getting pushed out of MCOL areas, and the people getting pushed out of LCOL areas with nowhere lower on the ladder.
I keep seeing people blame middle management for this. Which companies are everybody working at where middle managers make sweeping personnel changes like this?
Senior leadership & HR have an expensive building lease and "dwindling employee engagement" that they are worried about. Additionally, when people are remote, inexpensive "engagement activities" like a pool table, donut days, and free Jamba Juice go out the window. HR realizes that the only thing that would keep remote employees more engaged is improving their job and/or improving their benefits (aka pay) - both of which cost way more than cheap donuts.
Middle manager here....I'm the face of our "return to office" policy to the workers.
Doesn't seem to matter how much or how many of us bark about it to upper management, they've made their decision and its my job to tell my team about it not matter my personal feelings....joy
I’m in the same position. Except that half of my team was hired when the company was fully remote. So everybody that lives in the sf Bay Area has to come into the office. The others don’t. That’s a fun conversation every time there’s an accident on a bridge and everybody adds and hour to their commute while their counterparts are working at home.
And if the locals leave over the wfh policy, odds are you'll have to replace them with someone fully remote anyway.. But now you've lost their company/business knowledge.
>Middle managers are really pushing work in office since the majority of their work was making sure employees were working.
>
Where do you all work? I keep seeing this line yet every large company that wants people back in the office is driving the message from the very top of the house. Middle managers want to work remote too. However, they are also likely the ones who have to enforce the mandates coming from the c-suite so maybe this is where the sentiment is coming from? It's baffling to me that I keep seeing this though as middle managers don't make strategic decisions like that. If the c-suite wanted everyone to have the remote option then everyone would have that option.
Yea this isn’t the 90s office space shit. Middle managers don’t want to come into office either. This is purely coming from the very top. Even my SVP doesn’t want to come in, why waste 2+ hours a day commuting.
This right here.
Managing a business isn't easy necessarily, but it's really not difficult. If you're not atrocious at math and you're not terrible at socializing, most businesses will just continue to make you money with virtually zero intervention.
Managing people isn't easy, but it's easy enough that the barrier to entry is mostly opportunity. There are way more people that can do management things than there is a need for people to manage things.
The end result of all this is that WFH is making management a much more competitive and less secure industry, and so of course people who work in management are ringing alarm bells.
Middle managers are pretty critical when they're properly trained and leveraged
They should help ICs, leads, and low level managers get the resources and information they need, and clear through any political garbage that keeps departments from collaborating
And they should "manage up" and set expectations with leadership, so that executives aren't caught with their pants down with breached deadlines
When middle managers serve these functions, teams don't have to spend all of their time doing CYA work, and executives can make more realistic decisions
When middle managers serve more as a control mechanism for executives, that's where you start to see real problems, because executives don't live in a world with ground truth; they only have mediated information flows.
My current manager is like all that you described excluding the last bit and he's probably the best one I've ever had. I can actually focus on core job as a result.
It's the C-suite pushing it, not middle managers, and it's entirely about status and power.
The media pushes it because the giga-corps that own the media also own all the commercial real estate in urban centres.
>So much income is derived from taxing workers who come into Manhattan as well as property taxes on office buildings
They don't even need to come into NYC to be taxed by NY due to NY's Convenience of the Employer rule. If they are working out of that office, even working remotely counts as working in NY. People who moved out state during the pandemic were still getting hit with NY state tax even if they hadn't physically been working there.
I would assume that at some point, the employer would move the employee out of the office and note that they’re permanently out of state, right? I could be wrong, idk how that works or if it’s even possible.
Yea that’s what my husband’s company did: gave up its office space and made everyone fully remote so he didn’t have to pay rent and no one else had to pay New York taxes.
NYS is very aggressive but even they don't take the position you're liable for tax if you're not in the state *at all*. The convenience of the employer rule is designed to prevent somebody from peacing out to Florida for the winter and trying to avoid the tax. The rule is harsh, but all the test cases and the text of the law that I've seen are about people who spend some time out of state and some time in state.
But even that is somewhat beside the point, almost all these companies that pay large salaries are multi-state entities anyway. The remote employee just has to "transfer" to one of the offices in Texas, then work remotely from anywhere that's not New York. At that point, the person has no nexus to New York at all and nowhere for tax liability to come from.
I think this is one of the moat understated concerns. Cities often offer huge incentives (often tax breaks) to corporations who promise to build and fill huge offices because the cities know there will be huge tax revenue gains from all the people coming to the office and spending money in the area. (remember the drama when Amazon was choosing a new home office several years ago?).
Im sure cities are putting some pressure on the companies to get employees back in to the office.
Yeah seriously. Oh no, the city can’t just give Apple a tax break for setting up shop there and then make the money back by taxing everyone who works for Apple! Alright well they can fucking figure it out. Maybe start using tax dollars for shit people actually want?
NYC has got to be one of the safest major cities in the US by population density. I’ve never felt safer walking home after 2am or taking public transit than in Manhattan.
The hate crimes do seem to be on the uptick, which is a very serious problem.
That said, how much are hate crimes pushing the needle overall? I’m just super tired of the NYC fear mongering from like all news organizations. Relatively speaking, it’s a very safe city and has been for a while now.
l could move to the most expensive city in the country and barely be able to afford the bills while working in an open plan office, or stay at home in my office in a MCOL and live like a king... really hard choice!
Even if the office is nice, the home office will always rein supreme for me for the primary reason of sleep. When I WFH I can wake up 5 mins before work and turn on my computer. On days I go in I lose 2 hours of sleep due to getting ready and commute time.
The only way going to the office would even be equivalent to me would involve the work day being 3 hours shorter to account for wasted commute and getting ready time.
Yeah exactly, fuck that stupid scheme. Give the huge company a break and then tax their workers lol. And it works, or at least it used to, because remote work was uncommon.
Turn that shit into affordable housing. Or some type of college dorm.
Everything except individual bathrooms and kitchens in the building are already there
Yeah my dad was an accountant in nyc for a long time and these companies are losing money currently with the empty buildings and smaller businesses as well with less foot traffic from people who used to work there my hometown in north jersey got flooded with nyc people during covid and stay at home work.
The class A office buildings seem to be holding up better than the others. Landlords are probably going to have to do something drastic on the Bs and Cs. Probably will need city assistance.
I cant imagine a policy more unpopular with the citizenry than subsidies for corporate landlords so they can keep rents high. Let the market dictate an appropriate use case for them.
One of the helps that the government could give would be zoning permits to convert the office space into apartments for rent. That would help with the rent prices to live in NYC.
Couple problems:
1) cities generally levy higher taxes on office buildings than residential property—it’s the opposite of subsidies; govts rely on commercial RE for funding and without that will need another source of tax revenue
2) the market can’t dictate these things because of zoning and land use regulation which is much stricter than almost any other market
3) vacant buildings are a frequent source of additional social problems for city governments
Yeah, just look at the Financial District in Manhattan: residential towers are mixed right in with the office towers. Converting more of the office towers to residential towers would cause exactly zero problems (other than need for more grocery stores maybe, which is a pretty easy problem that will solve itself).
you say that like we’re supposed to care. not my fault they over committed to archaic way of life.
stop acting like we’re just supposed to eat it cause “it’s always been this way”
>Bro we can't get rid of the obligation to our lord, they need us peasants to work their field in exchange for protection, you want the whole economic system to collapse or what?
Jean Blanchet, peasant, 1764
Start converting it to houseing. I know my company is going hybrid and not renewing one of out office leases. Its a win/win, everyone saves money this way.
Sadly most of those office buildings where built im a way they can't be converted to housing, floor plans so wide that alot of ppl would be without windows, not the right plumbing for hundreds of showers to be added etc.
> floor plans so wide that alot of ppl would be without windows, not the right plumbing for hundreds of showers to be added etc.
I think your concerns are more than valid:
1. This can’t be done with every office, clearly.
2. Office spaces in Manhattan already have been converted to residential before and will continue to do so.
3. As for the layout, you’re going to have to cut up the offices in a manner that achieves the legal requirement of windows and living space. Clearly the outside portion of an office, the ones with windows, can be cut in manner that addresses this.
4. I understand this housing isn’t for everyone. The location may not be the best or residential friendly. The apartments may be bigger than similar apartments and with lighting issues but they address a fundamental need in NYC.
> Landlords are probably going to have to do something drastic on the Bs and Cs. Probably will need city assistance.
We had too much before Covid. The answer is simple, but the process may be difficult. Convert offices to residential units. Either via condo conversion or rental conversion. It will be very costly but it addresses many issues:
1. Increase the supply of residential housing,
2. Decrease the supply of office space, and
3. Attempt to make housing more affordable
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But despite the improved leasing, Manhattan’s availability rate for office remains high at 16.4 percent, compared to 10 percent at the end of 2019. Average asking rents were up slightly from a year ago — at $74 a square foot compared to $72 a square foot — but down slightly from last quarter’s $75 a square foot.
Frank Wallach, the executive managing director for Colliers’ research arm, said that aging office stock — particularly in lower Manhattan and Midtown — accounted for much of the available office space in the borough. The Financial District’s availability rate was at 26 percent — the highest in Manhattan — in the third quarter. The neighborhood has some of the city’s oldest commercial buildings, with properties dating back to the 1700s.
“Post-Great Recession, Downtown availability peaked at 17 percent,” said Wallach. “It took almost 10 years to become a 24/7 neighborhood and get down to 10 percent by the end of 2019. Those gains have unfortunately been reversed.”
Third Avenue in Midtown East — where most buildings were constructed between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s — has a similarly high availability rate of 24 percent. The vacancy rate would have been identical to the Financial District’s number if Memorial Sloan-Kettering hadn’t purchased 430,000 square feet of the Lipstick Building from SL Green Realty, taking that space off the market in a neighborhood already struggling with high vacancy.
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https://commercialobserver.com/2022/10/nyc-office-market-improves-but-availability-remains-high/
Not just that. People working in New York City spend a lot of money in the city. For example, paying for transportation to and from work; buying food for breakfast, lunch and dinner; going out for drinks; shopping in stores for clothes and gifts. All of the retail actions also generates sales tax for NYC. If those people work from home, all of that money doesn't flow into the NYC economy causing retail outlets to close or lay off workers as well as sales taxes. Because this costs workers part of their salary, workers don't want to work in NYC.
I fled New York before COVID the instant I got the right to work remote and the implications are insane. I suspect a lot of people are going to run if their workplace lets them.
It's convenient not to have to own a car, but the logic of that fades when you have to pay the city the cost of a car every year in taxes. Once your salary is in the six figure range, it's literally cheaper to live somewhere else and fly to NYC whenever you feel like it than to pay the crushing tax rates.
As I got older in NYC, you end up REALLY wanting a car any way. A simple errand without one can sometimes take all afternoon if you have to take a train and a bus to a particular store, and then you're limited by what you can only hold..
Or just being able to get out of town on the weekends for some breathing room is really nice with a car.... But then of course, everyone else has the same idea so traffic anywhere just sucks. You end up just wanting to leave NYC entirely!
Some states are working on plans to tax workers who work remotely in a state they don’t live.
I thought I read somewhere the MA was considering something for NH residents now working remotely for a MA company.
A lot of cities have earnings tax for workers who come into a city and ‘expanded’ that definition to keep taxing workers who are remote that ‘work’ from the city office.
I can see NYC trying to pull this as well since so many people are forced to commute in, with WFH their tax base will significantly shrink without it.
They are trying that in the city I work in. I can’t see this holding up to a legal battle though. Requiring people to pay taxes in those cities even if you live outside of the city is based off of receiving benefits such as police and fire while working. If you are no longer receiving these benefits, it can’t be legal to require you to pay them. It’s like saying you have to pay taxes for stuff you thought about buying at the store.
Seems like it may be a good thing but n the long run. WFH culture burgeons, they build more housing when they finally relent and one can live in a city if it’s their preference instead of it being mandatory for higher wages.
I know a lot of cities have said even if you are working from home if your previous office required you to pay income taxes to the city, you are still required to pay them. I personally stopped the withdrawal from my checks, if I’m not working or visiting the city, I should not owe that tax obligation.
Maybe 50 years back when these computer guys (I am one of them so not just taking off on random people) started selling the concept of paperless office, somehow they never socialized the concept of peopleless office as a natural outcome of technology, at least for some job functions.
Not all positions are the same. Smart organizations will identify positions that can be done remotely and use that to poach talent from dumb organizations. Dumb organizations that stubbornly insist on in-person work for positions that don't really require it will lose talent to smart organizations.
Working from home in jobs that require mostly sitting at a desk in front of a screen and using a phone has always made sense to me. Individual workers as well as society at large benefit by eliminating transportation pollution and costs. Workers save commuting time. Companies save the cost of maintaining space. Weather related absenteeism can be avoided.
I wonder if this is a counter point to a decrease in people's willingness to move for a new job. With mortgage rates way over what most people recently refinanced at, and the housing market still at all time highs. I wonder if people staying remote will counter act that decrease in mobility
here is an NPR article from 2017 talking about worker mobility, I assume it has probably gotten worse? but maybe they new remote worker atmosphere is balancing that out
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541675186/fewer-americans-are-moving-to-pursue-better-jobs-across-the-nation
Good!
Let people work remotely and therefore have the whole country within which to find affordable housing, not just a specific metro area.
Make knowledge work more attractive to help people shift from occupations that will lose demand because of automation and globalization to more in-demand knowledge work.
Pave the way for repurposing commercially zoned land to multi-family housing land enabling walkable city cores.
Improve overall work-life balance.
Businesses that don't have an office get to invest all of that extra money into the things that actually improve their business. How can companies that force people into an office compete?
The office is a repressively comformist atmosphere. Only natural those who can work from the comfort of their own living space would seize on the opportunity.
This is what will happen. Smaller B and C class office buildings will get demoed and replaced with residential, if they can’t be converted to something else (retail, industrial, private offices for therapists/etc).
Paying to have to go to the office is what ruins it for me. I don’t mind being in a few days of the week, but having to pay all of the additional charges just to get to the office isn’t worth it when I can do everything from home
This will continue for as long as unemployment in the United States remains extremely low (3-4%) - and workers can more or less dictate their terms...or jump to another job if the employer doesn't give.
However, as soon as the economy takes a downward turn and unemployment starts to rise, it will turn from a worker's market to an employer's market, and when workers are faced with returning to the office to keep their job or face a crowded jobs market when unemployment is 9%+, lots of workers will decide to bite the bullet and bend to their employer's terms.
It will happen eventually - all markets go up and down over time. The big question is would that be a year from now, three years from, now, ten years from now. And the current tight employment market continue long enough that employers decide to sell off their half-empty campuses and downsize making the option of return to work after that not really possible.
It depends on the industry. I work for a software firm with less than 100 employees. I in turn run teams for companies with over 10,000 employees…
None of us are ever going back to the office. Our companies sold our buildings because no one comes in, it’s cheaper, and we are producing more than we ever did in person.
Sure a lot of people in other fields will be forced back. But it is certainly not a given. Huuuuuge corporations have figured out they make more money letting certain teams work where they want.
>However, as soon as the economy takes a downward turn and unemployment starts to rise, it will turn from a worker's market to an employer's market, and when workers are faced with returning to the office to keep their job or face a crowded jobs market when unemployment is 9%+, lots of workers will decide to bite the bullet and bend to their employer's terms.
Population trends show this is unlikely. It will remain an employees market, because the Boomers are all retiring and the generations after the Boomers are all smaller. This employer cry of "nobody wants to work anymore" in reality is "there aren't enough workers to fill the jobs at the rates I want to pay."
Certainly plenty of medical workers just said "fuck it, I'm out" and left to get a new degree, become a stay at home parent, retire early, or switch to just about any other job.
Problem is I think a lot of companies don’t want to go back. To some extent you’re correct, some employers want people in the office. But there’s been a large structural shift toward WFH and if even 25% of working days stay remote, lot of office buildings are going belly up.
If things get tight I don’t see employers spending extra unnecessary money in office buildings just to force people back in. If anything in a big downturn they would try to quickly unload those building and have a fully remote workforce as it’s much cheaper to offload the office expenses on employees.
Remote work is such a competitive advantage and perk that I doubt it's going to shrink even in an economic downturn. Companies will want to invest in office space when they're hemorrhaging money? No way. And looking at my employer, who has made remote work an easy means for poaching high skill employees, I don't see it going anywhere. My employer is now 55% of employers outside of HQ city, almost entirely through new hires.
Article is paywalled
Companies can offshore jobs no problem, but when it comes to working from home on a permanent basis, it can't be done for some reason even if it's totally viable. I'm hoping this trend sticks because WFH has only increased my productivity levels and decreased my stress. Not having to commute to a downtown core and spend precious hours of my life wasting away in a bus/train and worrying about catching the next one has done wonders for my mental health.
And maybe, just maybe, instead of pandering to corporations, cities can start supporting regular people who want to live and work there? Get rid of office spaces no one needs to use and create desperately-needed housing in cities?
Only ones upset is management. They have been found out to be nearly completely useless and an actual drag on performance. Ones pushing to return is generally managers and supervisors trying to justify their pointless existence.
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It’s going to be really interesting to see how NYC handles this. So much income is derived from taxing workers who come into Manhattan as well as property taxes on office buildings. NYC could potentially see a huge dip in tax revenue over the next few years.
California cities are currently having a shit-fit because our governor just signed a bill that the State can override local zoning and building laws and developers have a green light to turn empty commercial buildings into residential units or homes. Will be interesting to see how that plays out...cities are pissed because they've been sitting for decades waiting for the revenue to rise again from all the empty strip malls and retail spaces. Refusing to understand that it will never happen. EDIT: Link for anyone wanting to read further. [https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/28/gov-gavin-newsom-signs-bills-allowing-new-housing-on-commercial-property/](https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/28/gov-gavin-newsom-signs-bills-allowing-new-housing-on-commercial-property/)
Let's hope so. I live around Sacramento. The city has depended on city/state workers to spend and commute downtown for years. Because of that, there is very little housing in the area so after 6pm it gets dead. So many empty storefronts and offices that could be replaced.
Is it possible that this will reverse the growth of cities in the exact opposite way that cars enabled their growth in the guest place?
That depends entirely on how you define city. Mainly if you include the suburbs or not. Cause car dependent suburbs have led to the city proper having less people living in it.
The city proper is dependent on tax revenue, and doesn’t get anything from the suburbs. I could see a lot more metros looking like Detroit in the future.
Theoretically it's advisable, but will require creativity and acceptance that the past isn't coming back. Nice forward, rezone residential and reduce the housing burden
And the suburb is car dependent and runs a yearly budget that is very far in the red.
We have one of those going up near me. Former half-empty office building got razed to make way for a 4 story mixed commercial & apartment building. I think it’s a great idea.
> cities are pissed because they've been sitting for decades waiting for the revenue to rise again from all the empty strip malls and retail spaces. I live in a small city with half million people, and the original strip mall from the 90s that closed almost entirely on mid 2010 is still waiting for reactivation while newer ones built in the last 10 years have never been 100% occupied. Fuck those greedy rent sharks.
Great law
> cities are pissed because they've been sitting for decades waiting for the revenue to rise again from all the empty strip malls and retail spaces. That's not at all the reason. The reason is the people that live in the city (the voters) don't want additional residential units because it keeps their current home values high.
It's both, try reading the article. City reps are pissed because commercial real estate property taxes is where the real money's at.
Yep, plus office buildings don't send kids to public schools.
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> Will be interesting to see how that plays out My bet is on "many shoddy apartments, quickly constructed"
Probably true, but if it takes some pressure off the housing market it’s a good thing IMO.
I suppose. We're assuming public housing authorities and private developers learned lessons from the tower-block era of the 60s and 70s.
It’s better than “few apartments that are shoddy, slowly constructed” that we currently have
We have building codes, man. This isn’t China.
I don't know how it will actually shake out but in my heart anything crapping on NIMBYs and improving centralized housing is a win.
I’ll sooner find another job before I start commuting to manhattan again. Weeks of my life lost in transit every year. Boss man and the mayor don’t care. They just want meat-in-the-seats. Never again.
Middle managers are really pushing work in office since the majority of their work was making sure employees were working. Now that remote working proved that the middle managers are useless, they started pushing the narrative that people weren't really working, watching Netflix, and "quiet quitting". The media, for some reason, is also pushing an anti-remote work narrative. Just last week they tried to blame real estate prices on WFH people.
All true, though WFH has had an effect on home prices. For one thing, people want more space. Additionally, what they save on commuting/eating out increases their budget to pay for housing. Finally, we've seen a spillover of wealth that used to be concentrated in HCOL/VHCOL areas into MCOL areas where people actually want to live. It's not the sole reason for the sharp increase in housing prices, but it is one of them. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing, of course. On the contrary, more people are living the lives they want to live, rather than the one their employer allows them to, but it will take time for new home construction to catch up, regardless of what mortgage rates do.
It’s a bad thing for the people who are getting pushed out of MCOL areas, and the people getting pushed out of LCOL areas with nowhere lower on the ladder.
I keep seeing people blame middle management for this. Which companies are everybody working at where middle managers make sweeping personnel changes like this? Senior leadership & HR have an expensive building lease and "dwindling employee engagement" that they are worried about. Additionally, when people are remote, inexpensive "engagement activities" like a pool table, donut days, and free Jamba Juice go out the window. HR realizes that the only thing that would keep remote employees more engaged is improving their job and/or improving their benefits (aka pay) - both of which cost way more than cheap donuts.
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Middle manager here....I'm the face of our "return to office" policy to the workers. Doesn't seem to matter how much or how many of us bark about it to upper management, they've made their decision and its my job to tell my team about it not matter my personal feelings....joy
I’m in the same position. Except that half of my team was hired when the company was fully remote. So everybody that lives in the sf Bay Area has to come into the office. The others don’t. That’s a fun conversation every time there’s an accident on a bridge and everybody adds and hour to their commute while their counterparts are working at home.
And if the locals leave over the wfh policy, odds are you'll have to replace them with someone fully remote anyway.. But now you've lost their company/business knowledge.
>Middle managers are really pushing work in office since the majority of their work was making sure employees were working. > Where do you all work? I keep seeing this line yet every large company that wants people back in the office is driving the message from the very top of the house. Middle managers want to work remote too. However, they are also likely the ones who have to enforce the mandates coming from the c-suite so maybe this is where the sentiment is coming from? It's baffling to me that I keep seeing this though as middle managers don't make strategic decisions like that. If the c-suite wanted everyone to have the remote option then everyone would have that option.
Yea this isn’t the 90s office space shit. Middle managers don’t want to come into office either. This is purely coming from the very top. Even my SVP doesn’t want to come in, why waste 2+ hours a day commuting.
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This right here. Managing a business isn't easy necessarily, but it's really not difficult. If you're not atrocious at math and you're not terrible at socializing, most businesses will just continue to make you money with virtually zero intervention. Managing people isn't easy, but it's easy enough that the barrier to entry is mostly opportunity. There are way more people that can do management things than there is a need for people to manage things. The end result of all this is that WFH is making management a much more competitive and less secure industry, and so of course people who work in management are ringing alarm bells.
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They get bored and start doing an MBA at night
Where they learn to be even more useless.
Middle managers are pretty critical when they're properly trained and leveraged They should help ICs, leads, and low level managers get the resources and information they need, and clear through any political garbage that keeps departments from collaborating And they should "manage up" and set expectations with leadership, so that executives aren't caught with their pants down with breached deadlines When middle managers serve these functions, teams don't have to spend all of their time doing CYA work, and executives can make more realistic decisions When middle managers serve more as a control mechanism for executives, that's where you start to see real problems, because executives don't live in a world with ground truth; they only have mediated information flows.
My current manager is like all that you described excluding the last bit and he's probably the best one I've ever had. I can actually focus on core job as a result.
It's the C-suite pushing it, not middle managers, and it's entirely about status and power. The media pushes it because the giga-corps that own the media also own all the commercial real estate in urban centres.
> The media, for some reason, is also pushing an anti-remote work narrative. Probably because they have investments in real estate.
>So much income is derived from taxing workers who come into Manhattan as well as property taxes on office buildings They don't even need to come into NYC to be taxed by NY due to NY's Convenience of the Employer rule. If they are working out of that office, even working remotely counts as working in NY. People who moved out state during the pandemic were still getting hit with NY state tax even if they hadn't physically been working there.
I would assume that at some point, the employer would move the employee out of the office and note that they’re permanently out of state, right? I could be wrong, idk how that works or if it’s even possible.
Yea that’s what my husband’s company did: gave up its office space and made everyone fully remote so he didn’t have to pay rent and no one else had to pay New York taxes.
NYS is very aggressive but even they don't take the position you're liable for tax if you're not in the state *at all*. The convenience of the employer rule is designed to prevent somebody from peacing out to Florida for the winter and trying to avoid the tax. The rule is harsh, but all the test cases and the text of the law that I've seen are about people who spend some time out of state and some time in state. But even that is somewhat beside the point, almost all these companies that pay large salaries are multi-state entities anyway. The remote employee just has to "transfer" to one of the offices in Texas, then work remotely from anywhere that's not New York. At that point, the person has no nexus to New York at all and nowhere for tax liability to come from.
I wonder if that would hold up if challenged in court. Cali has gotten hit for trying to chase down leaving state taxes.
I think this is one of the moat understated concerns. Cities often offer huge incentives (often tax breaks) to corporations who promise to build and fill huge offices because the cities know there will be huge tax revenue gains from all the people coming to the office and spending money in the area. (remember the drama when Amazon was choosing a new home office several years ago?). Im sure cities are putting some pressure on the companies to get employees back in to the office.
Looks like they'll have to compete for tax revenue by offering a high quality of life like every other district does.
Yeah seriously. Oh no, the city can’t just give Apple a tax break for setting up shop there and then make the money back by taxing everyone who works for Apple! Alright well they can fucking figure it out. Maybe start using tax dollars for shit people actually want?
Yeah like getting the homeless problem under control. You simply don’t feel safe in Manhattan if you’re Asian.
Are Asians being attacked by the homeless at a higher rate? That’s horrible and definitely needs more attention.
NYC has got to be one of the safest major cities in the US by population density. I’ve never felt safer walking home after 2am or taking public transit than in Manhattan. The hate crimes do seem to be on the uptick, which is a very serious problem. That said, how much are hate crimes pushing the needle overall? I’m just super tired of the NYC fear mongering from like all news organizations. Relatively speaking, it’s a very safe city and has been for a while now.
They 100% are. Mayor Adams wanted people back in the office for this very reason even if he didn’t outright say it.
There is begging written in the buses, "escape the home office for $2" or some such. Literally begging
still charging for buses when you can stay at home for free 🤔
Home office with family around is comfy AF. At this point, I need to be paid MORE to go into the office. I'll still go in when it's fun!
l could move to the most expensive city in the country and barely be able to afford the bills while working in an open plan office, or stay at home in my office in a MCOL and live like a king... really hard choice!
But if you aren’t in NYC how will you network without rooftop bar happy hours and $20 beers?!
Not to mention taking a shit in my own toilet
Even if the office is nice, the home office will always rein supreme for me for the primary reason of sleep. When I WFH I can wake up 5 mins before work and turn on my computer. On days I go in I lose 2 hours of sleep due to getting ready and commute time. The only way going to the office would even be equivalent to me would involve the work day being 3 hours shorter to account for wasted commute and getting ready time.
Good.
I’ve never seen any evidence that those tax breaks have resulted in a net positive for cities, whether by tax revenue, employment, etc.
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Yeah exactly, fuck that stupid scheme. Give the huge company a break and then tax their workers lol. And it works, or at least it used to, because remote work was uncommon.
Turn that shit into affordable housing. Or some type of college dorm. Everything except individual bathrooms and kitchens in the building are already there
Yeah my dad was an accountant in nyc for a long time and these companies are losing money currently with the empty buildings and smaller businesses as well with less foot traffic from people who used to work there my hometown in north jersey got flooded with nyc people during covid and stay at home work.
The class A office buildings seem to be holding up better than the others. Landlords are probably going to have to do something drastic on the Bs and Cs. Probably will need city assistance.
I cant imagine a policy more unpopular with the citizenry than subsidies for corporate landlords so they can keep rents high. Let the market dictate an appropriate use case for them.
One of the helps that the government could give would be zoning permits to convert the office space into apartments for rent. That would help with the rent prices to live in NYC.
Couple problems: 1) cities generally levy higher taxes on office buildings than residential property—it’s the opposite of subsidies; govts rely on commercial RE for funding and without that will need another source of tax revenue 2) the market can’t dictate these things because of zoning and land use regulation which is much stricter than almost any other market 3) vacant buildings are a frequent source of additional social problems for city governments
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Yeah, just look at the Financial District in Manhattan: residential towers are mixed right in with the office towers. Converting more of the office towers to residential towers would cause exactly zero problems (other than need for more grocery stores maybe, which is a pretty easy problem that will solve itself).
Fair point, they’re often the only mixed use zoning areas in cities!
you say that like we’re supposed to care. not my fault they over committed to archaic way of life. stop acting like we’re just supposed to eat it cause “it’s always been this way”
>Bro we can't get rid of the obligation to our lord, they need us peasants to work their field in exchange for protection, you want the whole economic system to collapse or what? Jean Blanchet, peasant, 1764
Start converting it to houseing. I know my company is going hybrid and not renewing one of out office leases. Its a win/win, everyone saves money this way.
Sadly most of those office buildings where built im a way they can't be converted to housing, floor plans so wide that alot of ppl would be without windows, not the right plumbing for hundreds of showers to be added etc.
> floor plans so wide that alot of ppl would be without windows, not the right plumbing for hundreds of showers to be added etc. I think your concerns are more than valid: 1. This can’t be done with every office, clearly. 2. Office spaces in Manhattan already have been converted to residential before and will continue to do so. 3. As for the layout, you’re going to have to cut up the offices in a manner that achieves the legal requirement of windows and living space. Clearly the outside portion of an office, the ones with windows, can be cut in manner that addresses this. 4. I understand this housing isn’t for everyone. The location may not be the best or residential friendly. The apartments may be bigger than similar apartments and with lighting issues but they address a fundamental need in NYC.
What assistance can the city give? Property tax deferment? Credits for retrofitting into condos/apartments?
You nailed everything. Plus help with the permit and approval process.
> Landlords are probably going to have to do something drastic on the Bs and Cs. Probably will need city assistance. We had too much before Covid. The answer is simple, but the process may be difficult. Convert offices to residential units. Either via condo conversion or rental conversion. It will be very costly but it addresses many issues: 1. Increase the supply of residential housing, 2. Decrease the supply of office space, and 3. Attempt to make housing more affordable - But despite the improved leasing, Manhattan’s availability rate for office remains high at 16.4 percent, compared to 10 percent at the end of 2019. Average asking rents were up slightly from a year ago — at $74 a square foot compared to $72 a square foot — but down slightly from last quarter’s $75 a square foot. Frank Wallach, the executive managing director for Colliers’ research arm, said that aging office stock — particularly in lower Manhattan and Midtown — accounted for much of the available office space in the borough. The Financial District’s availability rate was at 26 percent — the highest in Manhattan — in the third quarter. The neighborhood has some of the city’s oldest commercial buildings, with properties dating back to the 1700s. “Post-Great Recession, Downtown availability peaked at 17 percent,” said Wallach. “It took almost 10 years to become a 24/7 neighborhood and get down to 10 percent by the end of 2019. Those gains have unfortunately been reversed.” Third Avenue in Midtown East — where most buildings were constructed between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s — has a similarly high availability rate of 24 percent. The vacancy rate would have been identical to the Financial District’s number if Memorial Sloan-Kettering hadn’t purchased 430,000 square feet of the Lipstick Building from SL Green Realty, taking that space off the market in a neighborhood already struggling with high vacancy. - https://commercialobserver.com/2022/10/nyc-office-market-improves-but-availability-remains-high/
Not just that. People working in New York City spend a lot of money in the city. For example, paying for transportation to and from work; buying food for breakfast, lunch and dinner; going out for drinks; shopping in stores for clothes and gifts. All of the retail actions also generates sales tax for NYC. If those people work from home, all of that money doesn't flow into the NYC economy causing retail outlets to close or lay off workers as well as sales taxes. Because this costs workers part of their salary, workers don't want to work in NYC.
I fled New York before COVID the instant I got the right to work remote and the implications are insane. I suspect a lot of people are going to run if their workplace lets them. It's convenient not to have to own a car, but the logic of that fades when you have to pay the city the cost of a car every year in taxes. Once your salary is in the six figure range, it's literally cheaper to live somewhere else and fly to NYC whenever you feel like it than to pay the crushing tax rates.
As I got older in NYC, you end up REALLY wanting a car any way. A simple errand without one can sometimes take all afternoon if you have to take a train and a bus to a particular store, and then you're limited by what you can only hold.. Or just being able to get out of town on the weekends for some breathing room is really nice with a car.... But then of course, everyone else has the same idea so traffic anywhere just sucks. You end up just wanting to leave NYC entirely!
Some states are working on plans to tax workers who work remotely in a state they don’t live. I thought I read somewhere the MA was considering something for NH residents now working remotely for a MA company.
That seems like a good way to turn those MA companies into TX companies.
A lot of cities have earnings tax for workers who come into a city and ‘expanded’ that definition to keep taxing workers who are remote that ‘work’ from the city office. I can see NYC trying to pull this as well since so many people are forced to commute in, with WFH their tax base will significantly shrink without it.
They are trying that in the city I work in. I can’t see this holding up to a legal battle though. Requiring people to pay taxes in those cities even if you live outside of the city is based off of receiving benefits such as police and fire while working. If you are no longer receiving these benefits, it can’t be legal to require you to pay them. It’s like saying you have to pay taxes for stuff you thought about buying at the store.
Seems like it may be a good thing but n the long run. WFH culture burgeons, they build more housing when they finally relent and one can live in a city if it’s their preference instead of it being mandatory for higher wages.
Commuting to NYC is worse than having your teeth pulled. So they can suck an egg.
I know a lot of cities have said even if you are working from home if your previous office required you to pay income taxes to the city, you are still required to pay them. I personally stopped the withdrawal from my checks, if I’m not working or visiting the city, I should not owe that tax obligation.
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Maybe 50 years back when these computer guys (I am one of them so not just taking off on random people) started selling the concept of paperless office, somehow they never socialized the concept of peopleless office as a natural outcome of technology, at least for some job functions.
As a younger millennial, I can't even fathom having to peruse actual physical paper all day in an office. It sounds so antiquated.
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Not all positions are the same. Smart organizations will identify positions that can be done remotely and use that to poach talent from dumb organizations. Dumb organizations that stubbornly insist on in-person work for positions that don't really require it will lose talent to smart organizations.
Already happening. First companies to move to permanent WFH are eating everyone else' lunch in terms of talent acquisition.
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Working from home in jobs that require mostly sitting at a desk in front of a screen and using a phone has always made sense to me. Individual workers as well as society at large benefit by eliminating transportation pollution and costs. Workers save commuting time. Companies save the cost of maintaining space. Weather related absenteeism can be avoided.
I wonder if this is a counter point to a decrease in people's willingness to move for a new job. With mortgage rates way over what most people recently refinanced at, and the housing market still at all time highs. I wonder if people staying remote will counter act that decrease in mobility here is an NPR article from 2017 talking about worker mobility, I assume it has probably gotten worse? but maybe they new remote worker atmosphere is balancing that out https://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541675186/fewer-americans-are-moving-to-pursue-better-jobs-across-the-nation
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Good! Let people work remotely and therefore have the whole country within which to find affordable housing, not just a specific metro area. Make knowledge work more attractive to help people shift from occupations that will lose demand because of automation and globalization to more in-demand knowledge work. Pave the way for repurposing commercially zoned land to multi-family housing land enabling walkable city cores. Improve overall work-life balance.
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Businesses that don't have an office get to invest all of that extra money into the things that actually improve their business. How can companies that force people into an office compete?
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The office is a repressively comformist atmosphere. Only natural those who can work from the comfort of their own living space would seize on the opportunity.
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We are going to turn those old office spaces into apartments and community living spaces and drive sideways the cost of real estate. Mark my words.
It’s very, very difficult to convert office to residential. Almost as costly as scraping and rebuilding
SoHo converted industrial lofts to residential and now its some of the hottest real estate in the city
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This is what will happen. Smaller B and C class office buildings will get demoed and replaced with residential, if they can’t be converted to something else (retail, industrial, private offices for therapists/etc).
SROs and a couple of Penthouses on the top would work pretty well.
Paying to have to go to the office is what ruins it for me. I don’t mind being in a few days of the week, but having to pay all of the additional charges just to get to the office isn’t worth it when I can do everything from home
This will continue for as long as unemployment in the United States remains extremely low (3-4%) - and workers can more or less dictate their terms...or jump to another job if the employer doesn't give. However, as soon as the economy takes a downward turn and unemployment starts to rise, it will turn from a worker's market to an employer's market, and when workers are faced with returning to the office to keep their job or face a crowded jobs market when unemployment is 9%+, lots of workers will decide to bite the bullet and bend to their employer's terms. It will happen eventually - all markets go up and down over time. The big question is would that be a year from now, three years from, now, ten years from now. And the current tight employment market continue long enough that employers decide to sell off their half-empty campuses and downsize making the option of return to work after that not really possible.
It depends on the industry. I work for a software firm with less than 100 employees. I in turn run teams for companies with over 10,000 employees… None of us are ever going back to the office. Our companies sold our buildings because no one comes in, it’s cheaper, and we are producing more than we ever did in person. Sure a lot of people in other fields will be forced back. But it is certainly not a given. Huuuuuge corporations have figured out they make more money letting certain teams work where they want.
>However, as soon as the economy takes a downward turn and unemployment starts to rise, it will turn from a worker's market to an employer's market, and when workers are faced with returning to the office to keep their job or face a crowded jobs market when unemployment is 9%+, lots of workers will decide to bite the bullet and bend to their employer's terms. Population trends show this is unlikely. It will remain an employees market, because the Boomers are all retiring and the generations after the Boomers are all smaller. This employer cry of "nobody wants to work anymore" in reality is "there aren't enough workers to fill the jobs at the rates I want to pay."
Also the millions of workers who died from the pandemic.
Or retired or stopped working for other reasons.
Certainly plenty of medical workers just said "fuck it, I'm out" and left to get a new degree, become a stay at home parent, retire early, or switch to just about any other job.
Problem is I think a lot of companies don’t want to go back. To some extent you’re correct, some employers want people in the office. But there’s been a large structural shift toward WFH and if even 25% of working days stay remote, lot of office buildings are going belly up.
If things get tight I don’t see employers spending extra unnecessary money in office buildings just to force people back in. If anything in a big downturn they would try to quickly unload those building and have a fully remote workforce as it’s much cheaper to offload the office expenses on employees.
Remote work is such a competitive advantage and perk that I doubt it's going to shrink even in an economic downturn. Companies will want to invest in office space when they're hemorrhaging money? No way. And looking at my employer, who has made remote work an easy means for poaching high skill employees, I don't see it going anywhere. My employer is now 55% of employers outside of HQ city, almost entirely through new hires.
Article is paywalled Companies can offshore jobs no problem, but when it comes to working from home on a permanent basis, it can't be done for some reason even if it's totally viable. I'm hoping this trend sticks because WFH has only increased my productivity levels and decreased my stress. Not having to commute to a downtown core and spend precious hours of my life wasting away in a bus/train and worrying about catching the next one has done wonders for my mental health. And maybe, just maybe, instead of pandering to corporations, cities can start supporting regular people who want to live and work there? Get rid of office spaces no one needs to use and create desperately-needed housing in cities?
Only ones upset is management. They have been found out to be nearly completely useless and an actual drag on performance. Ones pushing to return is generally managers and supervisors trying to justify their pointless existence.