Office Spaced
This is Shutdown Corners, a newsletter about how coronavirus is reshaping urbanism
When is the next time you’ll embark on a daily commute and walk into an office, and what will that workday look like? These more mundane parts of daily life have, in a era of post-corona prognostication and widespread working from home, become the subject of fevered speculation about the future of just about everything.
Why is the choice to return to the shared desk or take a Zoom call from your kitchen table so important to cities? Think of it as a mode shift on multiple levels. Fewer daily commuters could lead to radically different transit systems, less need for offices means entire networks of restaurants and support staff lose jobs, and a trend away from in-office work means commercial real estate crashes. Ultimately, why should workers pay the premium associated with city life when you can do your job anywhere? Before COVID-19, just 7 percent of civilian workers in the U.S. had an option to work from home, per a May report by the Pew Research Center; researchers estimate 40 percent could do so, with many now giving the concept an unexpected trial run.
There’s already talk of workers fleeing to the suburbs en masse, and stories of newly-WFH Silicon Valley tech workers trading California rents for something more reasonable. I think we’re too early to declare that the high-earners who flocked downtown will suddenly decentralize, deciding they’re going to climb the corporate ladder from a broadband-enabled cabin in the countryside. But we’re not too early to worry about it, and how behavioral changes we think are temporary begin calcifying.
The attraction of cities for many office workers over the last decade has been about three Cs: culture, careers, and community (cost being the big trade-off). Post-COVID population shifts will depend on how much of these things cities can preserve. The sales pitch for living in cities may change, so cities and their leaders who don’t change are choosing to fail.
Seize the Chance for an Urban Utopia…
Let’s start with the optimistic prediction: cities boot out cars while building more equitable transit systems, and help save local retail by creating more walkable commercial corridors, which leads to more engaging, attractive, and navigable neighborhoods. Yeah, I’m pretty skeptical, too, but at least with the first part of that utopian vision, cities are moving fast.
It’s hard to miss the opportunity to repurpose streets. Shelter-in-place orders have decreased traffic by 60% nationally since February 29, according to Inrix. Even if driving returned to pre-coronavirus volume in June, total vehicle miles traveled would only hit 1998 levels, when there were 42 million fewer drivers in the U.S., per a Brookings analysis. Four more months of stay-at-home, and “the country could easily be driving the lowest number of miles since the 1980s or even 1970s.” Recent surveys of commuters across the globe have found that not only do they predictably hate spending rush hours in their cars, but more importantly, more are open to alternatives such as biking and walking. Some of the bike-curious have invested in electric bikes, which are seeing a sales boom as urban commuters seek new everyday transit options.
To make these temporary transit shifts permanent, cities need to respond with new plans, policies, and infrastructure—don’t waste a good crisis. Many cities have stepped up, with increasingly bolder plans to add bike lanes, create car-free streets, and turn public streets and squares into large, open-air cafes. Tiffany Chu, CEO of Remix, a firm that builds and operates travel planning software, says cities are moving at a rapid clip, rolling out tactical urbanism-style solutions in weeks, changes the would have “taken months or years to implement before.”
The exact solutions and ambitions, vary. Taken together, these changes make social distancing easier in the short-term. Long-term, they mean more car-free options, less pollution and emissions, and more space for commerce. As Curbed urbanism editor Alissa Walker told me last week, cities need to focus on jobs during an economic crisis. Strategically reclaiming streets, instead of just making them emergency running tracks, means more restaurants have room to operate, close neighborhood ties have space to develop, and local business can thrive (walkability is a good business model).
…or Arrive at a Driving Dystopia
Of course, the flip side is that cities don’t act fast enough to permanently change habits, public transit continues to suffer—very likely, since the American Public Transit Association just asked for $23.8 billion in additional emergency funding from Congress last week, on top of the $25 billion from the CARES Act—and we eventually reach carpocalypse. The head of San Francisco’s transit agency, Jeffrey Tumlin, told Streetsblog SF, “if San Francisco retreats in a fear-based way to private cars, the city dies with that, including the economy.”
Laura Bliss’s look at COVID commuting changes for CityLab laid out the disastrous results of trading a seat on the train for a solo commute:
For example, if just one in four transit and carpool commuters start to drive alone, San Francisco could witness a 20-minute increase in daily vehicle travel times. That shoots up to a 40-minute increase if three in four of those commuters switch.
And, due to insane discounts, cars are still selling. What if urban workers, especially those who decamp to satellite suburbs or further afield, are required to come into the office, and eschew transit?
But increased traffic concerns may just be the start for cities. What’s the long-term impact if working from home becoming more engrained, relocation starts picking up, and cities become less favorable destinations? In past months, single-family rental homes have seen a small uptick in rentals, due in part to city dwellers looking to get out of town. In Seattle, one of the first cities hit by the pandemic, home values across the metro region have dropped and new listings are down sharply year-over-year. Nationally, Zillow found that less than 46 percent of current households have a spare bedroom for an office, a figure that drops 10 percent in dense, expensive metros such as Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, San Francisco and San Diego.
Saving space and money may mean moving out of cities, especially if workers are given the choice to work remotely or take daily trips into a dystopian office nightmare (this poll suggests many won’t pick the later). A number of stories suggest temperature-checking cameras, one-way hallways, and isolating desk setups, designed by a new generation of “social distancing consultants,” may the new norm; real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield is pitching a “Six-Feet Office” concept featuring plexiglass dividers between desks and circles on the floor to indicate how far apart workers should be.
Working at home, or away from downtown, creates disastrous ripples in the local economy. As the Manhattan Institute laid out, that includes budget troubles, falling property tax revenue, and small businesses in dire need of relief. COVID-related budgets cuts will harm vital city services, especially safety net programs, but also the funding for parks or education initiatives that represent long-term strategic investments. City, and just as importantly regional, governance needs to rise to this challenge.
As Henry Grabar wrote in Slate, “American cities are turning back the clock … It will have to be something more creative than letting gridlock swallow the metropolis as residents avoid transit or flee for the ’burbs.” His story was focused on cars, and while the politics of cars in cities—an issue shaped by entrenched interest groups, corporate money, environmental issues, and equity—is one that needs to be solved now, it could apply to so many other issues that require urgent attention and action.
Reading list:
I’ve been thinking a lot about home shopping in this era, specifically, how retail that isn’t Amazon or Walmart survives and evolves during a period of consolidation and bankruptcy. I found the following two stories at 2PM, a newsletter on commerce and media edited by Web Smith, to be thought-provoking: Gilded Age 2.0, from late last year, which offers a necessary primer to our unequal era, and The 2PM Advantage, a treatise on how direct-to-consumer goods should evolve which serves as a manifesto on how brands and startups may rethink this new era.
Thanks for checking out Shutdown Corners, a newsletter written by Patrick Sisson, a freelance writer in Los Angeles covering the trends, tech, and policy shaping our cities. Please consider referring to a friend, and if you were sent this, please subscribe yourself. Send any tips, feedback, suggestions, or questions to patsisson@gmail.com.