More than half the downtown office space in U.S. cities remains unoccupied after the COVID-19 pandemic, Business Insider reported.
Although 95% of downtown offices were occupied before the pandemic, that number now is about 47% more than 2½ years after coronavirus prompted lockdowns and mask/vaccine mandates, Business Insider reported.
As for the value of office real estate, a study led by New York University professor Arpit Gupta characterized it as an “apocalypse” and estimated that $453 billion in real-estate value would be lost across U.S. cities, a decline in lease revenue of 17 percentage points from January 2020 to May 2022.
The result of unoccupied office space has been fewer people and public-transit use, and more shuttered businesses in downtown areas.
San Francisco has faced office-vacancy rates of 34% to 40% in some parts, while in New York about 50% of workers are back in the office.
Even in cities such as Austin, Texas, and Dallas, where more workers have returned, occupancy rates are still only 60% of pre-pandemic days.
Public-transportation ridership remains stuck at about 70% of pre-pandemic levels.
now our superiors will have much more room to shove us all into cities and force us to use public transportation – see?