Cities Shouldn’t Be Built Around Offices

The current state of New York reveals this.

I was scrolling on LinkedIn this morning when I ran across an article titled, “NY’ers plan to slash office time.”

You can read the article by Bloomberg here.

This article states that people working in New York will be spending less than half of the time, and half of the money they would be spending pre-pandemic.

This is going to have a massive effect on the way the city is structured. I’m not even sure if the city will be as safe as it was pre-pandemic. We are all seeing the effects of not having commuters in the city- the crime rate is increasing at an alarming rate.

But we are also seeing the effects of this on small business and real estate values.

There are now old office buildings that are empty and unnecessary.

But there’s a root cause of this problem that we are avoiding;

Cities shouldn’t be built around offices.

Building a City Around Offices and Commutes was Shortsighted.

It was shortsighted because business itself is always changing.

It’s ironic that the usual arbiters of that change- those in the technology sector etc.- failed to notice this trend.

Or maybe they noticed, but didn’t care.