4 ms·

The Remote Work Challenge: Lessons from 5 Cities

66 points by softwaredoug 2mo ago

dzonga 2mo ago
the best approach & sustainable cities has always been mixed zoning. city buildings at human scale i.e 4-5 stories like in most European cities. shops / retail etc at retail level. then offices / apartments occupy the other levels. make places walkable & dense. then have public Parks etc. then shit like niteclubs etc - should be relegated to basement level. same as parking.
- bluGill 1mo ago
  That is not how Europe is actually built though. You'll see those four to five stories with shops retail on the ground floor and then the others above on the main street. However, if you get off the track and go behind those streets, you discover that there's a lot of places that are just pure apartments with no retail and some offices but very few in between. If you're expecting to find a place where there's ground floor retail and residents and offices above, you need to be looking at places where there's 15 or more stories on every building. And by every building, I mean every building, not just downtown.
  - conductr 1mo ago
    Agree. And you also then should ask, why is it so? It’s usually not because they were after some pedestrian nirvana. It’s because land is so expensive they have to utilize it to a high degree for it to make sense. It does help that once you have the density, public transportation is worth investing in. But most of America is how it is because land has been relatively cheap and available and the development was during the rise of the automobile. I think it’s very narrow minded to assume that most Americans would like living in the European style city (the dense version). We have space, yards, large homes, automobiles are affordable, greater privacy than apartments provide, etc. Sure homes here are have grown unaffordable for young people in many areas, it’s certainly a problem. We’ve also built a ton of new apartments and people still complain about affordability. There’s not really any true affordable housing without subsidies, and that’s just shifting the burden somewhere else. Materials and labor is what it is and they add up to big numbers, meaning many people are perpetually priced out. If this is your problem, I’d suggest looking at the tiny house movement as a solution before expecting any US city to redesign itself for your wants/needs. Maybe prices will come down in a decade or so when all the boomers are selling to go into assisted care facilities.
    - hamper653 1mo ago
      > yards, large homes, greater privacy than apartments provide Really? You don’t even have hedges around your yards.
      - conductr 1mo ago
        Fences are more common than hedges here. I’m failing to understand how any shared wall apartment tops a single family home in terms of privacy.
        hamper653 1mo ago
        The walls are thick, and no one can access the front door of an apartment without going through that of the building first. I still prefer a house though, with a thick hedge around the lawn isolating you from the world. The real privacy downside with apartments is the windows, as they might be facing other apartments or the street.
        vladvasiliu 1mo ago
        > The walls are thick They're often quite thin. See all the comments complaining about being able to hear their neighbor take a piss.
        conductr 1mo ago
        The door situation is more so security than privacy IMO. The common setup in the US is we drive right into our garage and nobody even sees us enter or exit our car, depending on garage location I suppose. I guess it’s easier to watch a house and know who lives there and see there comings and going than an apartment where you don’t know which apartment people are coming or going from. I was thinking more so about privacy from neighbors wrt noises through the wall, ceiling, or floor. Come to think of it, Smells also get shared in many apartments.
        HappMacDonald 1mo ago
  - keiferski 1mo ago
    I don’t know why people use “Europe” as a broad term. The city layouts in Warsaw, Paris, Athens, and Amsterdam are quite different. Even then, I’d say that most larger/capital cities have 5-8 story buildings, with retail or other shops on the ground floor in the majority of central areas.
    - matt727 1mo ago
      I usually dislike using 'Europe' as a broad term, but in this context I think it’s fair. I’ve been to more than half of European capitals, as well as major cities in the US, China, Korea, and parts of southeastern Africa. On a global scale, major European cities really aren't that different from each other.
  - eru 1mo ago
    Well, you can have a look at Singapore. However even we don't have 15+ stories on every last building. (My home in Singapore only has 3 stories and legally no one can change that, because it's under conservation.)
  - soco 1mo ago
    Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but the places with pure apartments and such are not like this because of zoning laws similar to the US, but they just were created like this by their developers. Thus, they could change much easier to whatever else you'd want from them, should need arise.
    - bluGill 1mo ago
      Not really because houses and business have different physical needs that are hard to retrofit after the building is designed. Zoning limits what your neighbors can do, building design limits what you can do.
      - soco 1mo ago
        Yes yes, my point was that you're not bound by the same strict zoning laws if you decide to redo things - by either retrofitting or rebuilding or whatever. Not that's it's easy, just easier.
jmclnx 2mo ago
The cities: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver and Mihwaukee. But NYC and SanFran also mentioned in passing.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  They basically said that NYC and SF "threw the curve," and should be excluded from the analysis. Probably, the same goes for Chicago and LA. What I find amusing, is mean commute times. I know a number of folks that live in the Atlanta and Boston areas, and they would love a 30-minute commute. I think that NYC claims a 27-minute mean commute, but everyone that I know that commutes (and I know a lot of folks that commute; both by car, and by rail), take 90 minutes to two hours. I think they must include [very expensive] suburbs right on the city limits, to get those means; when the affordable housing is out in the bedroom communities; usually 20-50 miles away. Also, if the commute is supposed to end at the city limits, or some fixed point, downtown, it's leaving out a significant amount of time. It can take two hours to drive from the Queens/Nassau border, to the Hudson (on a bad day -usually, it's an hour). Subway rides take a certain time, too. These are affected by proximity to stations, and how many stops a train makes.
  - oneneptune 2mo ago
    I don't think it's a useful comparison for any sub-60 minute commute when it's a passive mode of transportation vs active. When I lived in Manhattan, I had a ~35 minute commute by subway. I read a book every week or two, and it was far more productive than anything that happens in a 20 minute drive by car. My commute now is roughly 20 minutes, driving... and it's very stressful. Beyond 1 hour, the time lost has greater impact on your life (socializing, household chores, family time, etc). Even still, I'd rather 90 minutes in a train than 60 behind the wheel.
    - bluefirebrand 1mo ago
      > When I lived in Manhattan, I had a ~35 minute commute by subway. I read a book every week or two, and it was far more productive than anything that happens in a 20 minute drive by car. My commute now is roughly 20 minutes, driving... and it's very stressful Really just shows how different people's experiences are based on location and density When I was commuting downtown in Calgary, it was either paying for parking downtown and a 20-30 minute drive, or a 60-90 minute transit ride depending on which bus I caught A 20-30 minute driving commute is basically the norm here. Unless you live quite outside the city. > Even still, I'd rather 90 minutes in a train than 60 behind the wheel The tradeoff between transit and driving has never been within 30 minutes for anywhere I've lived, personally. It's always 40+ minutes difference, and that's assuming your bus even shows up on time
kkfx 2mo ago
I would suggest weighing up other aspects: reinforced concrete was widely used under the assumption that it was eternal, or simply without considering how it would behave over time, and today a massive amount of infrastructure and buildings has simply reached the end of its lifespan. Whether the dense city appeals to those most terrified of change or to the few who need it to extract wealth from the many, it is incompatible with the New Deal. This is based on small, semi-autonomous buildings, resilient for that very reason, with sufficient local photovoltaics, energy and heat storage, and heat pumps which have the highest COPs over short distances. It involves designs with large south-facing glazed surfaces, featuring overhangs and blinds, so that the low winter sun penetrates effectively to provide free heating, while the high summer sun doesn't even touch the facade, all elements that are impossible to implement at scale in dense cities. Not to mention that we are very good at making simple things replicated in huge quantities, and much less so at large-scale, bespoke projects. Whether you like it or not, the "ecological" city that is both dense and walkable DOES NOT EXIST, and there is no future in general for the current city, with its vast waterproofed surfaces where the soil has already turned to sand, eroded here and there by groundwater, causing the weight of large buildings to lead to slow and irreversible subsidence. Cities built in places where it made sense to be in the past, but makes no sense today. Right now most people, even the bright ones, being victims of habit and propaganda, cannot bring themselves to admit it or understand it, but when they do, the collapse of urban real estate will have a far greater impact than the teleworking that is currently being denied at a high cost to everyone.
- yesfitz 1mo ago
  Do you have any thoughts about how to minimize the negative impact of such a massive shift? I've been thinking that Federal limits on nominal appreciation of real estate could gently decrease real prices via inflation. And if that limit fluctuated like the Federal Reserve rate, it wouldn't completely crash real estate as an investment vehicle, meaning retirements needn't be completely decimated. But that kind of intervention is just pie in the sky at least for the next few years.
  - kkfx 1mo ago
    In the current economic system, I don't see any. By changing this, for example, by eliminating bank intermediation in the creation of money, well, that could change things. Those who tried, like Lincoln with the Continentals, ended up getting killed...
cactusplant7374 2mo ago
I think remote work will create new cities and new urban centers if we allow it to continue. We shouldn’t be forced to be crammed into the same places.
- bluGill 1mo ago
  People want to live with their services and things to do. There's a reason why developers are building suburbs around all the existing cities, but they're not going to middle and nowhere places to build suburbs. Even the land would be a lot cheaper. Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere. They want to live close to things they can do. Even if you can work from home, you still want to be able to go to a doctor's office. You won't be able to meet your mates for a softball game, or whatever sport you have to like playing. Maybe you want to go out for a drink or to a restaurant. Cities provide a huge number of valuable things because of the concentration of people that you just can't get in a new small town or new development. Sure, if you can ever get that urban development going, it eventually will develop all those things. But, those things are really hard to get first because they depend on customers. It becomes a chicken and egg. You can't have a new development because there's not things to do, but you can't have things to do until there's people who live there. Build around an existing city and you have all those existing cities. It's worth the things to do.
  - bombcar 1mo ago
    But what is the size that provides those things? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? 10,000,000?
    - bluGill 1mo ago
      Depends. The more niche you're interest the larger you need in general. Everyone needs food so you only need about 1000 to get those basics. Though at that size you are making as monthly trip to the big city where they have better selection and better process. 100,000 probably can't support a unicycle shop, you need millions- but 50k supports a bicycle shop that might have a unicycle or might not. Less than 100 is needed of your interest is shooting guns of your back deck, so there is no universal answer. There are a lot of other back to nature things on those lines as well.
Animats 2mo ago
> "As office building vacancies jeopardize urban fiscal health and downtown vitality, here’s how cities and states are adapting." The distress over remote work comes not from employers, but from owners of commercial real estate. Here's a view of that from a lending broker in the commercial real estate sector. [1] The high vacancy rate is all too real, and papering it over with "extend and pretend" lending tricks is mostly over. A lot of loans renew in 2026-2027, and they won't have the near zero interest rates from last time. Vacancy rates are higher than generally reported, because many landlords are making concessions.[2] San Francisco has about a 30% office vacancy rate, by the way. All this means foreclosures, distressed property, markdowns, and bankruptcies. "A January 2026 Morningstar DBRS analysis, reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Real Deal, found that more than half of the roughly $100 billion of securitized commercial mortgages coming due in 2026 are unlikely to pay off at maturity." The loud "return to office" pronouncements did not result in an increase in office space in use. Despite all the noise, remote work has not really decreased much in recent years. "Less than 1/3 of companies requiring fully in-person work in 2026."[3] [1] https://fidentcapital.com/the-2026-maturity-wall-what-the-end-of-extend-and-pretend-means-for-borrowers/ https://fidentcapital.com/the-2026-maturity-wall-what-the-en... [2] https://www.cbcworldwide.com/blog/buyers-sellers-are-making-concessions-to-close-deals-expect-activity-to-rise-in-2h-2025 https://www.cbcworldwide.com/blog/buyers-sellers-are-making-... [3] https://founderreports.com/return-to-office-statistics/ https://founderreports.com/return-to-office-statistics/
- silisili 1mo ago
  > San Francisco has about a 30% office vacancy rate, by the way. All this means foreclosures, distressed property, markdowns, and bankruptcies. Hmm, a city in desperate need of housing has an oversupply of office space. I know it's not a simple conversion, but it feels like a natural fit.
  - alemanek 1mo ago
    It is likely we need to see it crash first. I am not in this industry but it does make sense to me that it gets easier after the current owner gets wiped out, banks take possession, value gets marked down, and then money gets spent on the conversion. With the loan under water or the fear of it going that way it is probably hard to fund additional debt for a multi-year construction effort when no one is sure which way the market will go. Also may mean that they miss out on a govt bailout that could make them whole. Just a theory on why we haven’t seen much of this.
mvdtnz 2mo ago
5 American* cities.
waterTanuki 2mo ago
Cities being dependent on workers being present at commercial office buildings appears to be a uniquely American problem. Most of my American friends I know turn to the suburbs as a default for "family" style living once they have kids. Imagine their bemusement when they go to a place like Amsterdam or Tokyo and see plenty of families with small children walking around. Heck, you don't even have to go far to see how a city can be a great place for a family, just look at Boston. Cities, when done correctly, are a better place to raise a family than the suburbs. And yet, when done incorrectly, are terrible.
- johnnyanmac 1mo ago
  That's the big monomer: "walking" around. Many American cities (especially on the western end) aren't made to have families walking around. They aren't unwalkable, but they aren't welcoming you to walk. Among several other factors in US urban environments. And to add the final nail to the coffin: even if you tried to make it walkable, real estate prices drive you back out. The biggest draw to suburbs is simply one of cost. $2200 median rent in downtown LA (1 room) vs. $1450 for a suburb 20 miles north?
  - waterTanuki 1mo ago
    The real cost of suburbia has been aggressively hidden for decades and is only now becoming realized as even gen-Z buyers with college degrees are getting priced out of starter suburban homes. The solution is to aggressively tear down draconian zoning laws that force businesses to build obscenely large parking lots and forbid mixed-used developments. More American-style suburban homes with 2 yards, a 2 car garage, and 3 bedrooms is not going to help with prices at all, in fact, it's likely to make the housing crisis in every country worse. The rent itself is not the only cost but the utilities as well. When you build another 100 spread out homes in suburbia, even if the city subsidizes the cost of all that piping, wiring, drainage, and asphalt, it comes back to you in the form of tax or cuts to amenities like parks, museums, and other public goods. Suburbia isn't "cheaper" than the city, it just shifts the cost from rent/mortgage elsewhere. This isn't just abstract wish-listing by the way. It's real policy proposal that has been tested, and demonstrated to work. https://www.planning.org/planning/2022/spring/a-business-case-for-dropping-parking-minimums/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.planning.org/planning/2022/spring/a-business-cas...
Ozzie-D 1mo ago
[flagged]
aurareturn 1mo ago
How is San Francisco downtown nowadays? Before covid, it was vibrant and alive. During rush hours and lunch time, the streets were filled. In 2024, I went to SF downtown during the work day and it was absolutely dead compared to pre-Covid. How is it in 2026?
- pastel8739 1mo ago
  Not great

66 points by softwaredoug 2mo ago

the best approach & sustainable cities has always been mixed zoning. city buildings at human scale i.e 4-5 stories like in most European cities. shops / retail etc at retail level. then offices / apartments occupy the other levels. make places walkable & dense. then have public Parks etc. then shit like niteclubs etc - should be relegated to basement level. same as parking.

bluGill 1mo ago
That is not how Europe is actually built though. You'll see those four to five stories with shops retail on the ground floor and then the others above on the main street. However, if you get off the track and go behind those streets, you discover that there's a lot of places that are just pure apartments with no retail and some offices but very few in between. If you're expecting to find a place where there's ground floor retail and residents and offices above, you need to be looking at places where there's 15 or more stories on every building. And by every building, I mean every building, not just downtown.
- conductr 1mo ago
  Agree. And you also then should ask, why is it so? It’s usually not because they were after some pedestrian nirvana. It’s because land is so expensive they have to utilize it to a high degree for it to make sense. It does help that once you have the density, public transportation is worth investing in. But most of America is how it is because land has been relatively cheap and available and the development was during the rise of the automobile. I think it’s very narrow minded to assume that most Americans would like living in the European style city (the dense version). We have space, yards, large homes, automobiles are affordable, greater privacy than apartments provide, etc. Sure homes here are have grown unaffordable for young people in many areas, it’s certainly a problem. We’ve also built a ton of new apartments and people still complain about affordability. There’s not really any true affordable housing without subsidies, and that’s just shifting the burden somewhere else. Materials and labor is what it is and they add up to big numbers, meaning many people are perpetually priced out. If this is your problem, I’d suggest looking at the tiny house movement as a solution before expecting any US city to redesign itself for your wants/needs. Maybe prices will come down in a decade or so when all the boomers are selling to go into assisted care facilities.
  - hamper653 1mo ago
    > yards, large homes, greater privacy than apartments provide Really? You don’t even have hedges around your yards.
    - conductr 1mo ago
      Fences are more common than hedges here. I’m failing to understand how any shared wall apartment tops a single family home in terms of privacy.
      - hamper653 1mo ago
        The walls are thick, and no one can access the front door of an apartment without going through that of the building first. I still prefer a house though, with a thick hedge around the lawn isolating you from the world. The real privacy downside with apartments is the windows, as they might be facing other apartments or the street.
        vladvasiliu 1mo ago
        > The walls are thick They're often quite thin. See all the comments complaining about being able to hear their neighbor take a piss.
        conductr 1mo ago
        The door situation is more so security than privacy IMO. The common setup in the US is we drive right into our garage and nobody even sees us enter or exit our car, depending on garage location I suppose. I guess it’s easier to watch a house and know who lives there and see there comings and going than an apartment where you don’t know which apartment people are coming or going from. I was thinking more so about privacy from neighbors wrt noises through the wall, ceiling, or floor. Come to think of it, Smells also get shared in many apartments.
        HappMacDonald 1mo ago
- keiferski 1mo ago
  I don’t know why people use “Europe” as a broad term. The city layouts in Warsaw, Paris, Athens, and Amsterdam are quite different. Even then, I’d say that most larger/capital cities have 5-8 story buildings, with retail or other shops on the ground floor in the majority of central areas.
  - matt727 1mo ago
    I usually dislike using 'Europe' as a broad term, but in this context I think it’s fair. I’ve been to more than half of European capitals, as well as major cities in the US, China, Korea, and parts of southeastern Africa. On a global scale, major European cities really aren't that different from each other.
- eru 1mo ago
  Well, you can have a look at Singapore. However even we don't have 15+ stories on every last building. (My home in Singapore only has 3 stories and legally no one can change that, because it's under conservation.)
- soco 1mo ago
  Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but the places with pure apartments and such are not like this because of zoning laws similar to the US, but they just were created like this by their developers. Thus, they could change much easier to whatever else you'd want from them, should need arise.
  - bluGill 1mo ago
    Not really because houses and business have different physical needs that are hard to retrofit after the building is designed. Zoning limits what your neighbors can do, building design limits what you can do.
    - soco 1mo ago
      Yes yes, my point was that you're not bound by the same strict zoning laws if you decide to redo things - by either retrofitting or rebuilding or whatever. Not that's it's easy, just easier.

jmclnx 2mo ago

The cities: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver and Mihwaukee. But NYC and SanFran also mentioned in passing.

ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
They basically said that NYC and SF "threw the curve," and should be excluded from the analysis. Probably, the same goes for Chicago and LA. What I find amusing, is mean commute times. I know a number of folks that live in the Atlanta and Boston areas, and they would love a 30-minute commute. I think that NYC claims a 27-minute mean commute, but everyone that I know that commutes (and I know a lot of folks that commute; both by car, and by rail), take 90 minutes to two hours. I think they must include [very expensive] suburbs right on the city limits, to get those means; when the affordable housing is out in the bedroom communities; usually 20-50 miles away. Also, if the commute is supposed to end at the city limits, or some fixed point, downtown, it's leaving out a significant amount of time. It can take two hours to drive from the Queens/Nassau border, to the Hudson (on a bad day -usually, it's an hour). Subway rides take a certain time, too. These are affected by proximity to stations, and how many stops a train makes.
- oneneptune 2mo ago
  I don't think it's a useful comparison for any sub-60 minute commute when it's a passive mode of transportation vs active. When I lived in Manhattan, I had a ~35 minute commute by subway. I read a book every week or two, and it was far more productive than anything that happens in a 20 minute drive by car. My commute now is roughly 20 minutes, driving... and it's very stressful. Beyond 1 hour, the time lost has greater impact on your life (socializing, household chores, family time, etc). Even still, I'd rather 90 minutes in a train than 60 behind the wheel.
  - bluefirebrand 1mo ago
    > When I lived in Manhattan, I had a ~35 minute commute by subway. I read a book every week or two, and it was far more productive than anything that happens in a 20 minute drive by car. My commute now is roughly 20 minutes, driving... and it's very stressful Really just shows how different people's experiences are based on location and density When I was commuting downtown in Calgary, it was either paying for parking downtown and a 20-30 minute drive, or a 60-90 minute transit ride depending on which bus I caught A 20-30 minute driving commute is basically the norm here. Unless you live quite outside the city. > Even still, I'd rather 90 minutes in a train than 60 behind the wheel The tradeoff between transit and driving has never been within 30 minutes for anywhere I've lived, personally. It's always 40+ minutes difference, and that's assuming your bus even shows up on time

kkfx 2mo ago

I would suggest weighing up other aspects: reinforced concrete was widely used under the assumption that it was eternal, or simply without considering how it would behave over time, and today a massive amount of infrastructure and buildings has simply reached the end of its lifespan. Whether the dense city appeals to those most terrified of change or to the few who need it to extract wealth from the many, it is incompatible with the New Deal. This is based on small, semi-autonomous buildings, resilient for that very reason, with sufficient local photovoltaics, energy and heat storage, and heat pumps which have the highest COPs over short distances. It involves designs with large south-facing glazed surfaces, featuring overhangs and blinds, so that the low winter sun penetrates effectively to provide free heating, while the high summer sun doesn't even touch the facade, all elements that are impossible to implement at scale in dense cities. Not to mention that we are very good at making simple things replicated in huge quantities, and much less so at large-scale, bespoke projects. Whether you like it or not, the "ecological" city that is both dense and walkable DOES NOT EXIST, and there is no future in general for the current city, with its vast waterproofed surfaces where the soil has already turned to sand, eroded here and there by groundwater, causing the weight of large buildings to lead to slow and irreversible subsidence. Cities built in places where it made sense to be in the past, but makes no sense today. Right now most people, even the bright ones, being victims of habit and propaganda, cannot bring themselves to admit it or understand it, but when they do, the collapse of urban real estate will have a far greater impact than the teleworking that is currently being denied at a high cost to everyone.

yesfitz 1mo ago
Do you have any thoughts about how to minimize the negative impact of such a massive shift? I've been thinking that Federal limits on nominal appreciation of real estate could gently decrease real prices via inflation. And if that limit fluctuated like the Federal Reserve rate, it wouldn't completely crash real estate as an investment vehicle, meaning retirements needn't be completely decimated. But that kind of intervention is just pie in the sky at least for the next few years.
- kkfx 1mo ago
  In the current economic system, I don't see any. By changing this, for example, by eliminating bank intermediation in the creation of money, well, that could change things. Those who tried, like Lincoln with the Continentals, ended up getting killed...

cactusplant7374 2mo ago

I think remote work will create new cities and new urban centers if we allow it to continue. We shouldn’t be forced to be crammed into the same places.

bluGill 1mo ago
People want to live with their services and things to do. There's a reason why developers are building suburbs around all the existing cities, but they're not going to middle and nowhere places to build suburbs. Even the land would be a lot cheaper. Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere. They want to live close to things they can do. Even if you can work from home, you still want to be able to go to a doctor's office. You won't be able to meet your mates for a softball game, or whatever sport you have to like playing. Maybe you want to go out for a drink or to a restaurant. Cities provide a huge number of valuable things because of the concentration of people that you just can't get in a new small town or new development. Sure, if you can ever get that urban development going, it eventually will develop all those things. But, those things are really hard to get first because they depend on customers. It becomes a chicken and egg. You can't have a new development because there's not things to do, but you can't have things to do until there's people who live there. Build around an existing city and you have all those existing cities. It's worth the things to do.
- bombcar 1mo ago
  But what is the size that provides those things? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? 10,000,000?
  - bluGill 1mo ago
    Depends. The more niche you're interest the larger you need in general. Everyone needs food so you only need about 1000 to get those basics. Though at that size you are making as monthly trip to the big city where they have better selection and better process. 100,000 probably can't support a unicycle shop, you need millions- but 50k supports a bicycle shop that might have a unicycle or might not. Less than 100 is needed of your interest is shooting guns of your back deck, so there is no universal answer. There are a lot of other back to nature things on those lines as well.

Animats 2mo ago

> "As office building vacancies jeopardize urban fiscal health and downtown vitality, here’s how cities and states are adapting." The distress over remote work comes not from employers, but from owners of commercial real estate. Here's a view of that from a lending broker in the commercial real estate sector. [1] The high vacancy rate is all too real, and papering it over with "extend and pretend" lending tricks is mostly over. A lot of loans renew in 2026-2027, and they won't have the near zero interest rates from last time. Vacancy rates are higher than generally reported, because many landlords are making concessions.[2] San Francisco has about a 30% office vacancy rate, by the way. All this means foreclosures, distressed property, markdowns, and bankruptcies. "A January 2026 Morningstar DBRS analysis, reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Real Deal, found that more than half of the roughly $100 billion of securitized commercial mortgages coming due in 2026 are unlikely to pay off at maturity." The loud "return to office" pronouncements did not result in an increase in office space in use. Despite all the noise, remote work has not really decreased much in recent years. "Less than 1/3 of companies requiring fully in-person work in 2026."[3] [1] https://fidentcapital.com/the-2026-maturity-wall-what-the-end-of-extend-and-pretend-means-for-borrowers/ https://fidentcapital.com/the-2026-maturity-wall-what-the-en... [2] https://www.cbcworldwide.com/blog/buyers-sellers-are-making-concessions-to-close-deals-expect-activity-to-rise-in-2h-2025 https://www.cbcworldwide.com/blog/buyers-sellers-are-making-... [3] https://founderreports.com/return-to-office-statistics/ https://founderreports.com/return-to-office-statistics/

silisili 1mo ago
> San Francisco has about a 30% office vacancy rate, by the way. All this means foreclosures, distressed property, markdowns, and bankruptcies. Hmm, a city in desperate need of housing has an oversupply of office space. I know it's not a simple conversion, but it feels like a natural fit.
- alemanek 1mo ago
  It is likely we need to see it crash first. I am not in this industry but it does make sense to me that it gets easier after the current owner gets wiped out, banks take possession, value gets marked down, and then money gets spent on the conversion. With the loan under water or the fear of it going that way it is probably hard to fund additional debt for a multi-year construction effort when no one is sure which way the market will go. Also may mean that they miss out on a govt bailout that could make them whole. Just a theory on why we haven’t seen much of this.

mvdtnz 2mo ago

5 American* cities.

waterTanuki 2mo ago

Cities being dependent on workers being present at commercial office buildings appears to be a uniquely American problem. Most of my American friends I know turn to the suburbs as a default for "family" style living once they have kids. Imagine their bemusement when they go to a place like Amsterdam or Tokyo and see plenty of families with small children walking around. Heck, you don't even have to go far to see how a city can be a great place for a family, just look at Boston. Cities, when done correctly, are a better place to raise a family than the suburbs. And yet, when done incorrectly, are terrible.

johnnyanmac 1mo ago
That's the big monomer: "walking" around. Many American cities (especially on the western end) aren't made to have families walking around. They aren't unwalkable, but they aren't welcoming you to walk. Among several other factors in US urban environments. And to add the final nail to the coffin: even if you tried to make it walkable, real estate prices drive you back out. The biggest draw to suburbs is simply one of cost. $2200 median rent in downtown LA (1 room) vs. $1450 for a suburb 20 miles north?
- waterTanuki 1mo ago
  The real cost of suburbia has been aggressively hidden for decades and is only now becoming realized as even gen-Z buyers with college degrees are getting priced out of starter suburban homes. The solution is to aggressively tear down draconian zoning laws that force businesses to build obscenely large parking lots and forbid mixed-used developments. More American-style suburban homes with 2 yards, a 2 car garage, and 3 bedrooms is not going to help with prices at all, in fact, it's likely to make the housing crisis in every country worse. The rent itself is not the only cost but the utilities as well. When you build another 100 spread out homes in suburbia, even if the city subsidizes the cost of all that piping, wiring, drainage, and asphalt, it comes back to you in the form of tax or cuts to amenities like parks, museums, and other public goods. Suburbia isn't "cheaper" than the city, it just shifts the cost from rent/mortgage elsewhere. This isn't just abstract wish-listing by the way. It's real policy proposal that has been tested, and demonstrated to work. https://www.planning.org/planning/2022/spring/a-business-case-for-dropping-parking-minimums/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.planning.org/planning/2022/spring/a-business-cas...

Ozzie-D 1mo ago

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aurareturn 1mo ago

How is San Francisco downtown nowadays? Before covid, it was vibrant and alive. During rush hours and lunch time, the streets were filled. In 2024, I went to SF downtown during the work day and it was absolutely dead compared to pre-Covid. How is it in 2026?

pastel8739 1mo ago
Not great