Posted on 08/05/2023 6:30:01 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
For many across the U.S., hour-long transit rides and traffic jams to work have been replaced by roll-out-of-bed commutes and stand-up desks at home, leaving vacant offices behind.
Long story short, more and more offices in major U.S. cities are empty.
As Visual Capitalist's Avery Koop details below, at the end of March 2023, the national average vacancy rate of U.S. offices had climbed as high as 18.6%.
So how have different cities in the U.S. been impacted? This ranking uses data out of fDi Intelligence to rank the top 10 cities that have seen the biggest increases in office vacancy rates from Q4’2019 to Q1’2023.
It is anticipated that by 2030, over 300 million square feet of U.S. office spaces will be obsolete.
According to Pew Research Center, around 35% of U.S. workers who can work from home in 2023 are already doing so all the time. In short, unless trends begin to reverse, offices in many cities will stay empty or continue getting emptier.
Here’s a closer look at the cities with the fastest growing vacancy rates in percentage points (p.p.) terms since just before the COVID-19 pandemic:
San Francisco has been hardest hit, with vacancy rates climbing by 19.8 p.p. in just over three years. Meanwhile, New York City has added over 16.8 million square feet, equivalent to 293 football fields, of new office space since Q4’2019 between its three most vacant neighborhoods.
However, not all of the cities with the most vacant offices are huge metropolises. Urban areas like Austin, Columbus, and Raleigh-Durham have also seen massive increases in their office vacancies, but their increasing rates may be blamed more on new construction and oversupply than to falling demand.
At the national level, the supply of new office real estate has been dropping steadily since Q1’2022, down by a whopping 67% year-over-year.
Overall, it looks like U.S. office buildings are not as bustling as they once were, but there still may be opportunities for the office real estate market in growing cities.
American liberalism tends to be based around the philosophy of using government and regulation to better control how people interact, while American conservatism tends to be based around reducing government intervention, leaving people alone, and allowing and expecting people to handle things on their own.
In urban environments, where people live at close quarters, and their impacts on their neighbors is obvious. This makes it natural to see rules as important to allow people to live together in relative peace and harmony.
In rural environments People feel more independent and less impacted by those around them. There’s a sense that you have to fend for yourself, that you can rely on your family and close friends, and that’s about it. And how other people live doesn’t obviously impact your life, to the same degree.
Also we have positive reinforcement, so conservative rural areas become more conservative as that is all you hear while liberal areas become more liberal as that is all they hear.
once urbanites start to become more liberal, and rural people become more conservative, that feeds on itself. Conservative people in big cities and liberals in small towns tend to keep their opinions to themselves, which means they have less opportunity to influence others, and promotes the idea that the local politics are universal, and no one you can understand would think differently. And people who either can’t keep their mouths shut, or don’t want to live in that environment, have a lot of incentive to get out. Rural people who are inclined to liberalism have particular motivation to move to an urban area where they can be around like-minded people. Urban conservatives aren’t quite as likely to move to the country, but it does happen. Particularly when people retire or are otherwise no longer so tied to employment.
And so political views get tied to geography and community, and eventually people think of the other political party as not just an opposing set of ideas, but as a different tribe, of people who are fundamentally different from us. Democrats don’t just disagree with us, they’re a bunch of effete, latte-sipping left coast academics who don’t know what real work is. Republicans don’t have different political beliefs, they’re a bunch of uneducated racist hicks who aren’t smart enough to know what’s best for them.
Politics goes from being philosophical or practical to being tribal. Which is, I think, one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a country. And yet, here we are.
You see the same in social media only accelerated.
Liberals stick to groups that only post incidents from their point of view, over and over again, so they are surprised when they hear another view.
Yep. We’re in phase II. Phase I was everybody working from home. In this phase companies are trying hard to force everybody back to the office and meeting only very limited success with the companies insisting on it the hardest suffering by losing valuable employees to their more flexible competitors and finding it difficult to recruit the talent they want.
Phase III will be leases expiring and senior managers realizing how badly its hurting them to try to force everybody back to the office when people don’t want to go back and just accepting that remote work is the norm now.
I wonder if Austin mis read the high migration into the city. Many high tech companies moved to Austin and were ok with work from home. Did Austin build too many spec office buildings when the incoming did not demand the space?
A good and thoughtful analysis about how populous areas tend to go Left.
The bedrock issue is a spiritual battle I believe. The Spirit of the Lord (TRUSTING IN THE LORD who made us to be free individually, supported by the Constitution which created a very limited government) vs. the spirit of antichrist (TRUSTING IN MAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT which is subject to the wiles of Satan, to unconstitutionally interfere with individuals and attempt to control every aspect of our lives the ultimate goal being Worldwide Totalitarian Government.)
Your analysis also highlights that close-quarters cities are analogous to the modern-day speed of communication so, like living in the close-quarters of the city, the ideological aggressor (generally the Left) may more effectively influence and corral people into their thinking.
Man without God is weak and quite subject to Satan who is stronger than man but weaker than God. Man with God and trusting in God is strong and is able to withstand the aggressive Left. That the crux of the “culture war” and toady’s battle for America’s survival.
Generally, I think the large part of the population doesn’t know what to think, faith and TRUE education being on the wane these days. Those are ripe for the aggressive Left.
Thanks for sharing.
Try again...
That IS the crux of the “culture war” and TODAY’S battle for America’s survival.
bkmk
Having been in manufacturing since birth practically, I never understood why there are huge sky scrapers and what people actually do in them.
“That agency just got approval to use (WTC) office space as low income housing”
In five years it will be the world’s largest dumpster!
The skyscrapers were originally built because downtown land was so valuable/expensive—for that investment developers needed lots of lease revenue—which meant they had to go vertical.
As downtown land values reduce over time the need for skyscrapers will be less as well.
I would also add that Christianity for the first few centuries spread primarily in cities.
that’s why we term “pagans” as pagans - namely rural dwellers.
The cities, right from the time of Eridu in 6000 BC, were places where people exchanged ideas and built on ideas.
This is important - we need this collection of people together as that leads to development:
> the development of the written scripture - this started in Mesopotamia, but then due to the merging of this with the egyptian hieroglyphics meant that in the Sinai the scribes came up with an abugida to write phonetically.
Then the Canaanites created the true alphabet.
The Canaanite script is what then spread both west (Greek, Latin etc.) and west (Devanagri etc.)
this couldn’t have happened without cities.
Guessing the brainwashed, zombie-fied sheeple will be to stupid to see how the bread got sliced to give the trophy to San Fran shit pan.
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