What a great idea: instead of office space, let’s redesign our inner cities so people can live in them
San Francisco City Hall has come up with an ambitious plan to encourage construction and renovation companies to convert post-pandemic unused office space into housing. These are empty properties that stand very little chance of ever being occupied in a country where approximately one third of employees are still working from home and, most likely, will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
The idea, in addition to taking advantage of underutilized assets, is to breathe new life into a city center that is dying on its feet after huge numbers of people refused to return to the office after lockdown. It is believed that the only way to revive these downtown areas is to create a resident population with very different needs from those of nine-to-five officer workers who tended to need only businesses such as restaurants, cafes or laundries, rather than the broad-spectrum neighbourhood commerce usual in residential areas.
The situation in the United States differs greatly from that in other countries, and fundamentally in those with tension in their labor market such as Spain. The battle between supporters of Distributed Work From Home (WFH) and Return To Office (RTO) is not particularly different: while the former claim that they can be more…
