The Remote Work Challenge: Lessons from 5 Cities

> "As office building vacancies jeopardize urban fiscal health and downtown vitality, here’s how cities and states are adapting."

The distress over remote work comes not from employers, but from owners of commercial real estate.

Here's a view of that from a lending broker in the commercial real estate sector. [1] The high vacancy rate is all too real, and papering it over with "extend and pretend" lending tricks is mostly over. A lot of loans renew in 2026-2027, and they won't have the near zero interest rates from last time. Vacancy rates are higher than generally reported, because many landlords are making concessions.[2] San Francisco has about a 30% office vacancy rate, by the way. All this means foreclosures, distressed property, markdowns, and bankruptcies. "A January 2026 Morningstar DBRS analysis, reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Real Deal, found that more than half of the roughly $100 billion of securitized commercial mortgages coming due in 2026 are unlikely to pay off at maturity."

The loud "return to office" pronouncements did not result in an increase in office space in use. Despite all the noise, remote work has not really decreased much in recent years. "Less than 1/3 of companies requiring fully in-person work in 2026."[3]

[1] https://fidentcapital.com/the-2026-maturity-wall-what-the-en...

[2] https://www.cbcworldwide.com/blog/buyers-sellers-are-making-...

[3] https://founderreports.com/return-to-office-statistics/

the best approach & sustainable cities has always been mixed zoning.

city buildings at human scale i.e 4-5 stories like in most European cities. shops / retail etc at retail level. then offices / apartments occupy the other levels.

make places walkable & dense. then have public Parks etc. then shit like niteclubs etc - should be relegated to basement level. same as parking.

I think remote work will create new cities and new urban centers if we allow it to continue. We shouldn’t be forced to be crammed into the same places.

I would suggest weighing up other aspects: reinforced concrete was widely used under the assumption that it was eternal, or simply without considering how it would behave over time, and today a massive amount of infrastructure and buildings has simply reached the end of its lifespan. Whether the dense city appeals to those most terrified of change or to the few who need it to extract wealth from the many, it is incompatible with the New Deal. This is based on small, semi-autonomous buildings, resilient for that very reason, with sufficient local photovoltaics, energy and heat storage, and heat pumps which have the highest COPs over short distances. It involves designs with large south-facing glazed surfaces, featuring overhangs and blinds, so that the low winter sun penetrates effectively to provide free heating, while the high summer sun doesn't even touch the facade, all elements that are impossible to implement at scale in dense cities. Not to mention that we are very good at making simple things replicated in huge quantities, and much less so at large-scale, bespoke projects.

Whether you like it or not, the "ecological" city that is both dense and walkable DOES NOT EXIST, and there is no future in general for the current city, with its vast waterproofed surfaces where the soil has already turned to sand, eroded here and there by groundwater, causing the weight of large buildings to lead to slow and irreversible subsidence. Cities built in places where it made sense to be in the past, but makes no sense today.

Right now most people, even the bright ones, being victims of habit and propaganda, cannot bring themselves to admit it or understand it, but when they do, the collapse of urban real estate will have a far greater impact than the teleworking that is currently being denied at a high cost to everyone.

The cities: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver and Mihwaukee. But NYC and SanFran also mentioned in passing.