“This is a result of work from home” I agree with you. On the other hand, work from home wasn’t really happening on any scale until the government forced shutdowns. People and companies realized there was no need to have expensive office space in cities. Their workers liked sitting on the back porch with a laptop and they weren’t going back to the two-hour commute through dangerous neighborhoods. The shutdown accelerated the trend away from needing office space. Without the shutdown the need for office space might have declined more gradually and had less of an impact on retail space. There would have been more time for the market to adjust.
Good post.
Before I retired—pre Covid—my commuter bus was filled with people working on their computers on the bus.
They all agreed that commuting to the office was a total waste of their time and that all of their work—mostly insurance industry number crunching—could be done at home.
It was just a matter of time before their big bosses figured it out as well and could save money on office space.