The Future of NYC Real Estate

Unless you have some kind of service job that requires an in-person presence, much of the the future of work will either be fully remote or "hybrid" -- some days in the office, some days at home. I know this first-hand since this is my working situation and, I can tell you first-hand, there's no going back. 

The COVID-19 pandemic merely accelerated this trend and proved that, for many companies, they don't really need a physical office to be successful. And even for companies where people go into the office sometime, they are deserted on Mondays and Fridays and half-empty most of the time. 

This is hammering the real estate industry in NYC. The huge office buildings that create the grand skyline are, in fact, largely empty (as is the case in many cities around the world).

The solution seems obvious -- turn them into apartments. 

The demand for office space in NYC might be crashing but the demand for housing here is greater than ever. While it will take money and has all sorts of legal and political and tax implications, this is the obvious solution. It makes no sense for nearly 9 million people to live in mostly cramped circumstances where there are now vast amounts of barren buildings that could house them easily.

As this 60 Minutes report shows, the nature of life and work needs to be reimagined. Increasingly our homes will become our offices and vice versa so repurposing buildings that serve their tenants as both needs to be developed. They should, in many ways, become communities of life and work with in-building services (like grocery stores, gyms, dry cleaners, hardware stores, restaurants, etc). with resources things like IT. And, most of all, they should be affordable -- and that's where it gets tricky. 

But the future of NYC real estate is now!