The office is over
An invisible virus could drain the life of our downtowns, kill corporate culture and cut paycheques.
The Office is Over is a collection of Post stories looking at how the pandemic has shifted the traditional office and the way we work.
The pandemic has hit cities hard, posing an existential threat to downtown urban life. In America, the disaster was in New York. In Spain it was Madrid, in Britain it was London, and in Canada, the pandemic has now become two major outbreaks, in Toronto and Montreal.
Empty city streets in the downtown core on weekday mornings have become a defining image of the pandemic. In April, research suggested half the U.S. labour force was working from home, with similar numbers in Canada, sparked by the pandemic, but spurred by digital trends in which corporate value is divorced from corporate real estate. Some companies barely exist anywhere in particular, but instead float overtop in the cloud.
As Ontario’s government takes steps toward opening the real life economy outside Toronto, there is a strange mood among city dwellers and downtown workers. Looking to the future, with its epidemiological perils of subways and elevators and food courts, has caused concern that some of this might be permanent. Like most apocalyptic visions, it has been received with both fear and hope, dread and longing.
The pandemic has forced out the leisure tourists, business travellers, and conference crowds that keep city hotels and restaurants in business. But the corporate rush to working from home has most dramatically drained the money- fuelled downtown life of the people who once needed to be there every day: the office workers.
The old landmarks of city life are newly diminished, squares empty, shops closed. Some have even predicted the death of the department store, the original anchor tenant for landmark city intersections, noting the bankruptcy of Neiman Marcus, and the 125,000
U.S. workers furloughed by Macy’s.
It might not apply to everyone, certainly not the service industry, but also some financial services workers who need a level of highspeed data capability that they do not have at home. Some kinds of work in advertising and media similarly cannot be done over domestic internet access.
Accommodating this has prompted discussion of new elevator etiquette, possible office shifts to keep workers socially distanced, widespread masking. It has also invited the conclusion that remote working is here to stay. Rather than rebuild the downtown to make it pandemic compliant, why not just keep working from home?
It is a compelling logic that is settling into received wisdom.
“The past few months have proven we can make that work. So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen,” wrote Jennifer Christie, vice president of people at Twitter, May 12, after the company cancelled in- person events for the year, and maybe into 2021.
Facebook expects to have half its staff working from home within a few years, and has signalled its intentions to index pay to the local cost of living, meaning a pay cut if you leave the expensive city.
“We’ll adjust salary to your location at that point,” said Mark Zuckerberg on a livestream with employees. “There’ll be severe ramifications for people who are not honest about this.”
In Ottawa, Shopify will let its employees work from home indefinitely.
“Until recently, work happened in the office,” wrote Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke on May 21. “We’ve always had some people remote, but they used the internet as a bridge to the office. This will reverse now. The future of the office is to act as an on- ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your (working from home) setup.”
“As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over,” he wrote.
This might be so, but when you take the centre out of things in motion, like cities, they tend to go wobbly.
What would cities be without offices? Offices are a main reason cities breathe people, through subways and roads, into the core in the weekday morning and back out in the evening. Sunday lunchtime at Bay and King rightly has a strange and surreal vibe. No one is there. There is no reason to be.
The grand risk is that every day is Sunday in the new downtown future. One of the more common psychological effects of the pandemic has been losing track of time, days, dates. This is because people do not share daily schedules any more. Lunch time, for example, is a personal thing. Lunch hour is communal. No one has a “lunch hour” at their home.
“If pandemics become the new normal, then tens of millions of urban service jobs will disappear. The only chance to prevent this labour market Armageddon is to invest billions of dollars intelligently in anti- pandemic health care infrastructure so that this terrible outbreak can remain a one-time aberration,” wrote Edward Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University, in Foreign Affairs.
Thomas J. Campanella, professor of city planning at Cornell University, similarly speculated that city life will return because elderly and sick people will avoid dense urban places, “yielding a temporarily younger, fitter, more risktolerant downtown population.”
So maybe cities will be redesigned for pandemic management, and purged of the old and weak, refitted with new arterial bike lanes as Toronto’s city council has just voted to install.
“Public transit agencies in many cities face extraordinary dual crises of both confidence and financial sustainability,” wrote Jennifer Keesmaat, former chief planner for Toronto and now an urban development consultant. Still, she predicted cities after the pandemic “will remain vibrant and dynamic centres of economic and cultural activity.”
Smaller cities may stand to benefit from an exodus of workers, with no more reason to pay big city rents.
In the United Kingdom, The Economist reported that firms are reconsidering “what offices are for, and many are concluding that a lot of tasks are better done from home.” They quoted Lee Elliott of Knight Frank, a real estate firm, that “the days of people taking a 74-minute average commute into town to process email, and then 74 minutes back out — they’re gone.”
In Foreign Policy, the Toronto urban theorist Richard Florida argued that urbanization is a greater force than infectious disease, and cities will weather this pandemic as they have in past.
“The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed as many as 50 million people worldwide, and yet New York, London, and Paris all boomed in its wake. In fact, history shows that people often moved to cities after pandemics because of the better job opportunities and the higher wages they offered after the sudden drop in population,” he wrote. “Ambitious young people will continue to flock to cities in search of personal and professional opportunities. Artists and musicians may be drawn back by lower rents, thanks to the economic fallout from the virus. The crisis may provide a short window for our unaffordable, hypergentrified cities to reset and to re-energize their creative scenes.”
But he did not mention the shift to working from home, and how well it has caught on, with so little incentive to go back. The pandemic is making history for cities, but it is unfamiliar and without obvious precedent. It is a history of a different future.