NY's empty offices may lead to urban doom loop: Experts
About a year and a half after Mayor Eric Adams chided workers — «You can't stay home in your pajamas all day!» — New York's offices in late August were under 41% of their pre-pandemic occupancy. Just 9% of the city's office workers were going in five days a week at the start of the year, according to the Partnership for New York City.
Remote-work levels crisscrossing the country are more mixed, with just under one-third of America's workdays now done from home.
But in New York, the broad feeling across offices is one that locals know well: It's like sitting on the subway waiting to get somewhere and then feeling the car lurch to a stop.
It sits there. Nobody has any idea when it's going to move again.
Passengers eye one another, feeling fidgety and useless.
That's the limbo that the real estate industry is experiencing now as companies try to fill their offices back up. Building owners are conceding uncertainty as another Labor Day approaches, the third since vaccines rolled out and as executives across major employers again ratchet up calls for a return to the office.
Economists worry that empty offices could lead to an "urban doom loop": Fewer people commute, downtown and midtown businesses suffer, tax revenue dips, and it gets tougher for cities to keep public services running.
Caught in the midst of that stall is Eric Gural, whose family has a commercial real estate empire in New York City, GFP Real Estate, which owns and manages more than 55 properties and 13 million square feet, or some 2% of the city's office real estate.
This isn't the first time Gural's family has seen the real estate market falter. There was 2008, during the Great Recession, when a Cushman & Wakefield senior managing director reported, «The
