The long term COVID problem

An article at France 24: The end of offices? New York's business districts face uncertain future details a similar thing to what I assume must be happening all over the world - 

Boarded-up stores, shuttered restaurants and empty office towers: Covid-19 has turned New York's famous business districts into ghost towns, with companies scrambling to come up with ways to entice workers to return post-pandemic.

"If they don't come back, we're sunk," said Kenneth McClure, vice president of Hospitality Holdings, whose Midtown bistro pre-coronavirus would buzz with the sound of financiers striking deals at lunch and sharing cocktails after a hard day at the office.

The group has closed its six restaurants and bars in Manhattan, two of them permanently, due to lockdown restrictions that have paused office culture - a culture as intrinsic to the Big Apple as a Broadway show, a yellow taxi or a slice of cheese pizza.

The problem is, turns out that a lot of people quite like working from home, and businesses have found it isn't as bad as they feared:

Seventy-nine percent of employees questioned in a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey published this month said that working remotely had been a success, but the report also found that offices are not about to be consigned to history.

Some 87 percent of employees said the office was important to them for collaborating with team members and building relationships, aspects of working life they felt was easier and more rewarding in person than over Zoom.

As I have been saying to anyone who would listen for the last 9 months, I reckon the big crunch will be over the next few years as businesses come up for lease renewals of office space, and tell the landlord they really only need half of the space in future, as each day about half of their workforce is at home.

This does not augur well for values of commercial office space, and (probably) our superannuation returns.