“At the end of the day, I think the problem is that we have too much office relative to our future needs, and a lot of places have too little housing. So I think one way or another, we’re going to have to turn some of that office space into apartments,” said Van Nieuwerburgh. “That might have to partially happen through demolition. But it would be nice if we could have at least some of it through conversion. It’s sort of the environmentally friendly way to go.”
They’re not quite at acceptance yet. This is the next phase, but what’s really going to make them shit their pants is the realization that, for housing, it’ll still be cheaper and more effective to spread density more broadly than to replace their million square foot office buildings with million square foot residential buildings. Those offices only got so big because of the value of those workers being close together (for a variety of reasons). Without the need for those workers to be that close together, there’s no reason that people would pay the necessary prices to live in the downtown cores where those buildings are. Even though some people will still work in the remaining buildings, and some of them would prefer to live close to where they work, they’re not going to pay the same exorbitant prices when in most places they could live a little further away and get much more for their money.
What we are seeing is a permanent, structural drop in the demand for dense commercial real estate, which will have cascading effects on the demand for all types of real estate in these dense urban environments. The demand for premium office space in the core was the primary driver of the rest of the activity. Workers no longer need to be in those offices, so companies will pay less for them and take up less space. That means fewer people in these areas, which means less demand for retail and services, which means even fewer people. If there are fewer jobs, services, and amenities in these downtown cores, then there are fewer reasons to pay top dollar to live there. With the cost of building high-rise residential, it might end up being that there’s no reason for that kind of density to exist at all. I’m sure there will be some projects in some places where the economics work out, but the overall trend will probably be to spread density and activity out, rather than try to put everything on top of everything else.
The urbanization-for-its-own-sake YIMBY weirdos who want everyone to live in an anime cyberpunk dystopia are going to be malding and seething for years to come. Or they’ll snap out of it and become 15-minute city people and somehow be annoying about that, but progress is progress.