Offices Were Miserable, Now They’re Empty — What’s Next?
By Andrea Korb & Matthew McEnerney
With the pandemic driving many workers out of the office and into the virtual workplace, the real estate world is all a jabber over the tectonic shifts we may see in the housing and office sectors in the coming years. During the 1918 pandemic, there was much talk about how everything would be forever changed, but things largely went right back the way they were. Humans are adaptable; in the same way we so quickly adapted to the COVID-19 reality (how strange that it took just a matter of months to start flinching at a standard movie scene of a crowd), we may adapt right back to overcrowding strangers and breathing naked air. But what the 19-teens didn’t have was the technology to facilitate remote work, and what 2020 taught most organizations and companies that rely predominantly on thought labor is that remote work works just fine.
In fact, it may even work better! A 2020 study by Stanford sampled 16,000 workers over the first half of the pandemic and found that working from home increased productivity by 13%. This increase in performance was attributed to many factors, but most were environmental. Almost as if humans behave like better versions of humans, when treated like humans. We are happier and more productive in physical spaces that aren’t soul crushing.
One of the urbanist questions du jour is whether remote work will lead to an oversupply of office space, and whether developers can or should convert it to housing. But a recent article from the Urban Land Institute notes that office to residential conversions are in many cases infeasible; many older office buildings are too deep to provide enough access to light and air to meet regulations for residential units (there are also other challenges like the location of plumbing and elevators). A city planner we spoke to confirmed that insufficient access to light, poor ventilation, and asbestos are common issues in dated office buildings. An article from Slate notes the typical rule that in any part of a living space, you should never be further than 30 feet from a window. Meeting this standard in a large, deep office building would leave it with an unusable core.
What these and many articles imply but do not state outright is that some offices are so depressingly unlivable that they cannot be profitably adapted into housing. There remains many an office across our great nation in which workers have been squirreled away in the building’s dark bowels for the majority of their waking, daylight hours. Through the pandemic, many of us have had to contend with working out of tiny apartments, juggling childcare, and being crammed in with housemates, but have you ever felt the mounting, deadening effect of sitting in an artificially chilled, windowless, beige room for seven or eight or nine hours a day? Have you ever been stuck in a broken elevator with ten people in a Manhattan municipal building for so long that one of the passengers has a claustrophobia melt down and begins wailing into the dissipating air? Older office standards allowed flawed design that rippled into the mental health, productivity, and freakin’ humanity of the American worker. There is even a condition known as Sick Building Syndrome. A 2013 report by Gensler found that when it comes to work environments, design and functionality matter! Duh.
We are a capitalist nation, and if converting an older office building to residential doesn’t pencil, a developer won’t do it. Even in places where the code standards for offices have improved, older buildings are protected from current standards as legal nonconforming uses, unless something triggers the requirement to be brought up to code (e.g. a change of use). And while we may see office space downsizing and more flexible work post-COVID, most companies are likely to return to some amount of in-person work, and back to the sad office many of us shall go.
But commercial property owners have a new incentive to improve office space: pandemic proofing for the future. For example, in several of its commercial buildings in Santa Monica, a prominent REIT is submitting plans to add floor-to-ceiling glass windows and doors that can be opened to allow more light and air into offices, plus patios and roof decks, to create workspaces that are not germ colonizers. Pandemic aside, these spaces will be more enjoyable to work in. Perhaps COVID will bring not just more flexible work but also workspaces with more light, fresh air, space, privacy, and cleanliness, even in Class B and C office buildings — maybe not enough to make them livable, but enough to make them more workable than they were before.
And like warehouses that evolved in the post-industrial era to artist flophouses and later to sexy multimillion-dollar lofts, we may see ingenuity we can’t yet anticipate.
If businesses do vacate some or most of their office square footage, what happens to the central business districts in which they were located? Were those districts, like Midtown Manhattan, great to begin with, or were they driven by corporate culture — which is really, if we’re honest, the absence of culture? Are we on the precipice of a new urban revolution? Stay tuned for the next blog post!
Author Bios:
Andrea B. Korb is the Economic Development Manager for Downtown Santa Monica, Inc. She works on policies and programs to bolster the local economy, analyzes and tracks real estate development, and supports recruitment and retention of business in the district. Andrea previously worked as a Senior Advisor in the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity in New York City. She also held roles at the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs’ Office of Financial Empowerment (where she got trapped in an elevator) and at the Washington D.C. Mayor’s Office of Policy and Legislative Affairs. She has a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center and an undergraduate degree in Urban Studies and English Literature from Brown University.
Matthew McEnerney is a Senior Analyst for Stormwater Management for the City of New York. In this role, he is involved in mapping and inspecting stormwater systems, auditing public land, and recommending green infrastructure. He also serves as an adjunct professor of environmental policy at St. John’s University. Prior to this, Matthew held various roles focusing on issues pertaining to housing, infrastructure, and environmental protection in NYC government and as a private consultant. He had the privilege of being mentored by urbanist and political scientist Dr. Benjamin Barber. Matthew completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy and International Relations at St. John’s University and holds a master of science degree in Sustainability Management from The Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Andrea and Matthew first crossed paths in a workplace that is the purgatory of New York City government, but that is a story for a different day. The views displayed in this article are their own and are not reflective of any organization or institution.
They are both fully vaccinated.
