@deilann I feel like the media so often misses this point because it's not made as often, and/or they're not looking at how freaked out commercial real estate owners were when WFH got big (and/or those people tended to be a bit less likely to say anything if asked directly). The only interesting angle I've seen is complaints that WFH puts the costs of working back onto workers which... I guess, but also, scale though.

Just the utility bills for a large office building can come out to hundreds of thousands of dollars per quarter. You can't turn all the lights off at night because security needs to see, you need huge crews of cleaners, do not start me on maintenance costs...

And yes, sure, eliminating the building means putting extra costs on workers like uhhhhhhh they maybe need to pay a little extra for nicer home internet? That's a spit in the ocean in comparison to dropping $100k+ just on electricity bills for an office building. Even if the company paid all its WFH employees' internet bills in full, it'd probably still be cheaper, because a lot of services are automatically more expensive for a commercial building (sometimes justifiably so, sometimes it's a clear cash grab). At worst, this is what we have tax deductions for, and there's still rules about when the company has to provide equipment. Courier services exist.

But as you pointed out, this fucks commercial real estate owners... who nobody has liked for decades anyway. (I guess it also sucks for the handful of companies who do own their buildings outright but I feel like those were the ones who were way more receptive to WFH.)

@dartigen "remote work is killing downtowns" was the go to verbiage, if I recall correctly.

it didn't resonate well

people were like "uh why is it my job to keep downtowns alive?"

@deilann This is very true. And how many office workers really got to experience their downtown areas anyway? A 30 minute lunch break doesn't give you much time for that.

And hell, it's not like commercial real estate was doing shit about it, it was just that people were weirdly not blaming them? Probably because either nobody asked, or again they tend to be awfully cagey about speaking to the media unless they're real estate company blogs who'll uncritically repeat their line about how it's all those dastardly WFH people's fault.

Tenants, on the other hand? I hope the media here learned that as long as you keep identifying details out of it, tenants are always willing to spill about how shitty their landlord is. I'm sure there are some okayish commercial landlords, but I'm equally sure that there are plenty of shitty ones (and shitty in ways that are uniquely bad for people trying to run a business).

But as well, in a lot of cases it turns out that those downtown businesses were barely treading water for years and it was going to take literally one thing going wrong for it to all snowball. It sucks, but COVID was that one thing going wrong for a lot of systems and businesses that were only just keeping it together. I feel like workers not having time to actually go shopping or take enough of a lunch break to patronise an independent cafe instead of a chain (or BYOing lunch) didn't help matters any, but there's likely also a ton of other factors in why so many smaller CBD retail and food businesses were only just hanging in there for so long.

@dartigen and not being paid enough to afford it, yeah

99% of the "millennials are killing thing" headlines could be more honestly written as "low wages are killing thing"

and of course, workers who do buy something at the cafe are then shamed for doing so and being told it's why they're poor

there's no good answer except be pretty and create the fantasy veneer that makes property value line go up