Business Times reports on the oversupply of office space in America’s big city downtown cores. Values are down dramatically as the work-from-home movement really begins to seem permanent.
People got a taste of work-from-home during Covid, and they loved it. Nobody missed the hours of commute time and expense. Many loved the more relaxed child care situation, reduced wardrobe costs, etc. And many learned they could be as productive as before, or even more so, when the lost commute time was regained.
One guesses bosses miss being able to surveil their workers at work. Automated keystroke monitors aren’t quite the same experience. Apparently some bosses have demanded a return to the office and heard “hell no” coming back at them, loud and clear.
Eventually those empty towers will be converted to some use, but exactly what use isn’t clear. Preliminary surveys suggest the cost to convert to dwellings may be higher than the cost to demolish and rebuild as purpose-built apartment blocks. If that doesn’t pencil out, perhaps they will be abandoned and eventually stand like the ruins at Chaco or Mesa Verde, monuments to a life that exists no longer.
Our population is declining, I activate my science fiction honed imagination and picture a pastoral society living in small hamlets and rural settings, connected seamlessly by electronics while automated factories produce what is required and route it to where people choose to live. Not in my lifetime, that is for sure.
Maybe what we are seeing is the beginning of a trend which explains why we’ve never been visited (as far as we’re aware) by spacefaring creatures. At some point intelligent creatures stop the endless striving and hustling and never get around to true spacefaring, but become happy hobbits in the shire.
