@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?"