Commercial real estate owners strike back.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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My manager wanted me to come to the office daily because the laptop I had couldn't handle the company VPN (which we need to access some systems, the alternative is of course being physically in the office and connecting to the office WIFI).
He gave me some crap about it and reminded me of the 'office first' policy at my workplace.
I looked him dead in the face and said, "You can't force anyone back to the office. You know that it's not going to fly with the employees. You can try but it won't work".
He didn't look too happy about that, but he knows it's reality.
Ended up finally getting an new old laptop for the VPN issue, which some other employee left behind, because the budget was "too tight" even though I couldn't do my work efficiently. And a few days ago I was told I'd be laid off. Also because of the budget.
So hooray!
I prefer work from office. Its better for me having kids & dogs and tons of duties at home. Work from home more than once a week is just a waste of time for me which translates to double workload or sorse when at the office.
Said that, i love WFH because i get things (real things, life things, not work things) done properly and timely... But just doping more than 1 day per week is twice as stressful for me than not.
My commute is 35km each way, so not even a short one.
It isn't propaganda to look at the real-world ramifications of this.
- The hard drop in commercial real estate is going to end in a lot of big loans going unpaid. Might end in some bank failures.
- The drop in assessed value is going to hit cities hard in the pocket as they depend a lot on these property taxes from commercial properties to pay theirs bills (social programs, subsidized public transportation, police, fire, public housing, roads, etc).
- It will increase sprawl as more people can now live anywhere and push into wilderness areas and we lose more open space.
- A lot of small businesses depend on those dense commercial areas. You'll see more contractors, restaurants, etc having to close and downtowns getting deserted like happened in the 70s as people fled to suburbs.
You see a lot of people saying "just turn them into residences!". It is very difficult and expensive to turn buildings designed as open office spaces into residences.
But corporations have achieved very difficult things in a very short span that cost very many billions like - pivoted to AI which was very difficult until ChatGPT became popular.
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Probably has a bit to do with how few people were working remote before versus now.
WFH was absolutely not a common thing for average workers per-COVID. Some did it, sure, but that was not even up for consideration for a huge percent of workers. So since businesses had really no choice, a lot of them just went along for the ride and tried it out. The media went along with it and played it up as the Next Big Thing.
But clearly many people abused the policy and aren't being as productive as they once were, so now the media is reflecting that reality and running negative stories..