These are the only types of business that can afford the rents though. Even if you get another lower cost place in there, they have to cut corners on quality and end up going out of business or just being really bad food. How do you overcome that?

It will lower itself naturally.

Less people in office buildings means less foot traffic to stores, which means less fewer stores will be enticed to rent.

If nobody's renting, eventually the owners and investors will have to realize some rent is better than no rent, even if it means they are going to take a loss.

Then rents start dropping back to earth.

I can't tell you how much that cost us because people would just go next door, get a small bottle of something for cheap, down it while they were out on their smoke break and then come back to the show in my place.

It really sucked honestly.

But, yeah, it can be harmful like that or positive in that maybe there are restaurants next door where people eat before they come to your bar for drinks and a show.

The under taxation of land results in land owners squatting on it without doing anything that society benefits from.

Retail rent will fall because nobody is in the offices. Retail business will close because of less traffic, and thus there will be more space.

But, retail leases are typically 5-10+ years. Why would a landlord lower the rent now to a small business and get stuck in a long lease, when they don't know if the office space will recover and the big businesses will want to come back?

It is a game of chicken.

Also, at the beginning of Covid, several big businesses just refused to pay retail rent as a negotiating tactic. It would not surprise me if that happens again.

"Why would a landlord lower the rent now to a small business"

now.

> After a certain point, the building owner will have to choose between lowering rents, or having the building foreclosed on due to having no tenants

the fact that some people let some buildings sit empty for some time doesn't mean most will let most sit empty for most of the time

after all, the next best alternative for building owners is foreclosure or abandonment or sale at a loss, the next best alternative for businesses is 1 of a thousand different places, or just a remote workplace

They might not have the choice. Nobody is going to rent ground floor retail space in an area with no foot traffic. It is a race to zero all around.

of course they will, at a low enough rent, obviously, which is the point: lowering rent is indeed a choice, as is going bankrupt, abandoning the property, or selling it at whatever price

let the owner rent it for a dollar a month and we'll see if it gets rented

the owner probably wants a billion dollars and a pony, too, but what they can have are the options I listed

the reason they don't have tenants is because their asking rent is too high and demand is low

in capitalism, that means they should lower rent

as I said: capitalism

https://twitter.com/bett_yu/status/1685778275975761920

instead of trying to make the conversation about me or you, and instead of citing maybe-true singular anecdotes which don't prove your case (that space is limited, and lowering rent won't increase rentors), try just presenting the aggregate data showing that commercial landlords en masse have lowered rent to a dollar and still have these vacancies

WAIT!!!

Wait.

I fear what you heard was, "argue about your anecdote some more", but what I said was, show us the data

The problem is that would mean that the valuation of the real estate would need to change, which would imply debt repayment, and given higher interest rates: default or finance under onerous terms or being cash rich already.

At the end (as the Fed expects): defaults => lower real estate value ^ rents => cheaper food options.

And that is where usually executive is going to come in to save Government Supported Real Estate (GSE), and throw a wrench to Feds approach.

tl;dr: the government supports this situation it will come to make it worse once again /s.

I feel like these sorts of things are part of "being more productive" though. Having a good rapport with your co-workers, having a chance to talk about side things, having a chance for people whose domains don't normally cross to hear what's going on elsewhere. These are all parts of being a well functioning and productive team. It's a real shame that larger organizations tend to lose sight of that, but it's also a shame in my opinion that this whole fight over remote vs in office work has gotten the workers pretending that nothing but the numbers matter. This really feels like a "be careful what you wish for" moment.

Yeah.

There are some things which can be more difficult when you’re remote. Working through a design—it’s so much better when you have two people in a room with a whiteboard or paper. Onboarding. Going through a gnarly code review (where you really want some major changes to the code before it gets shipped). Debriefing after a meeting, where you and your teammate know that the meeting was a complete waste of time, but you need a chance to kvetch about it offline and off the record.

Every-time I am in the office I remember a scene from the west wing where the quote is "He thinks decisions are made in meetings...." expressing that most decisions are made in informal discussions in hallways, or impromptu mini-meetings standing in someones office door. Meetings are where we tell everyone the decisions that were already made

It is hard to replicate that in a remote work environment, maybe that is better I dont know, but for I see the advantage of both

This is why we've switched to a full week every month, which amounts to 1 - 1.2 days per week of presence. This week is used for planning, discussions, more complex knowledge sharing. We've just found it more effective to plan some things with post-its and a whiteboard. Sure, things like Miro exist, but if you combine the friction from the wonderful video call solution teams, miro, microphones, internet uplinks and such, it becomes a real distraction.

But yeah, during these weeks, we don't do much technical work beyond keeping the lights on and pushing the simple service requests through the queue.

While we'd spend time working, we'd also plan things like field trips (hiking, kayaking, museum visits), we'd go out and get lunch and dinner, bring our Switch consoles and have Mario Kart tournaments in the conference room, and other things like celebrating birthdays, births, anniversaries, and so on.

For remote teams, using the together time to focus on productivity and work is a broken model. Glad that your founders get it!

Every other reason eventually boils down to this very point.

Turns out, specialized districts were a massive city planning mistake.

I searched for Whole Foods locations and they seem to have about 13 in Manhattan itself. There’s a Costco in Manhattan. And there are several other major grocery stores some unique to New York. There are also large independent grocery stores and independent online grocery stores that will do hourly deliveries (the 15 mins deliveries thankfully seem to have largely died out).

And that’s before you get to the hundreds of farmers markets.

And how about all the butchers, seafood stores, cheese shops, spice stores, etc.

And then you get the international grocery stores with Korean, Japanese, Indian, Chinese grocery stores.

Ah, and you have 24/7 bodegas on newrly every corner if all those don’t work for you.

They work in Manhatten because of population density, the grand parent clearly said they do not work in "spread out neighborhoods"

So now we are shifting the goal posts from "walk-able neighborhoods" to walkbale high density neighborhoods. Not only do I oppose walkablity I also oppose High Density, I like my Single Family home on .75 acres of land or less.

I do not want to live stacked on top of others, if you want that stay in NYC. thanks

as do most people that live in the suburbs which is why suburbs are not "walk-able" because people leave the cities to escape walkablity

I dont want to walk anywhere but from my front door to my car

Neighborhood stores will not have the volume to support a 100-300,000 sqfoot store, with all the selections I get at my local supermarket that services many many neighborhoods

There’s a lot in between those two extremes.

My favorite neighborhood I’ve lived in was on the Northside of Chicago where I had a medium-sized, independent grocery down the block on the local arterial road and a neighborhood of single family homes in the blocks surrounding it. The arterial roads have commerce, and the side streets have homes. You can walk, you can drive, take transit.

> I dont want to walk anywhere but from my front door to my car

I’m sorry for you.

And these days state laws and building codes do much to prevent these anyways.

I don’t see any cement plants in Manhattan and I don’t think many cement plant employees work remotely.

Isn't this a problem even for coming into the office 2 days a week?

My experience is that I work on a team which is really distributed. We have people in nearly every continent (including Africa and South America, but not Antarctica), so getting to an office 2 days a week is not an option. We have regular video conferences though.

I presume the interactions and such you describe increase your net productivity, much as taking the time to study something does. Neither show up directly in Taylorist metrics like “PRs closed”

As an autistic person with ADHD, office environments are 'difficult' to say the least. Thankfully I've been fully remote for about a decade as well. Wouldn't go back, and thankfully I don't need to. There are plenty of remote jobs available and I don't see that changing short of some type of short-sighted government regulation.

Smaller companies have realized that office space and the infrastructure to support it is a huge money sink compared to just having employees work from home.

I make sure to socialize on zoom in every call, my focus is through the roof as well as my productivity.

They sound like great leaders. I also work for a great company which is very pro-remote work.

I have been working from home for several years before pandemic. I lived near office, so every once in awhile I would go in to take a break from programming and socialize. It is great for those purposes especially once you are out of college, it is really hard to make new friends. And this is the one aspect about office work that I miss. But it is not a company's job to provide friends.

Also I realized people who lacked real skills but were good at socializing were the ones who went to office often and they were the ones who were climbing corporate ladders faster.

And I have tried hard to understand why return to office is good for business but don’t see any point. Only explanation that makes sense to me is that people who are good at politics are having hard time playing politics in remote world. They have no other skills, technical or business. But they have already climbed corporate ladder and feeling powerless. Now they need people in offices for their personal benefits, not for company’s.