One of the consequences that seemed clear that the pandemic would leave behind was the rise of teleworking. Even three years ago, in the early phase of COVID, it was pretty clear to us. That has finally been a soufflé that has had to be lowered compared to the expectations we had set, but it is true that there are signs that to a certain degree there is no longer a return to 2019: teleworking, to a greater or lesser extent, has arrived for stay.
One of those signs is the increase in empty offices in the United States, a common canary in the mine for the technology sector in the rest of the world. There, the pandemic arrived with 12% of the available offices. In 2023, when the pandemic is little more than a bad memory, that figure has risen to 16%.
Nevertheless, San Francisco is the one who takes the cake, going from 10% to 23%… and evaluating measures that we could soon see replicated here.
11,000 potential homes
No other large American city has had as marked an effect as post-pandemic San Francisco: from just one in ten free square meters… to almost a quarter.
The increase in teleworking has another cause partner: layoffs in the technology sector, although they have been in many cases, especially in large companies, barely a fraction of the hiring they did between 2020 and 2021.
There is no need to go to companies that have switched to remote work 100% of the time or those that have reduced the size of their workforce: hybrid teleworking gives way to formulas in which many permanent jobs are lost. Where before there were 200 employees, now there are only 120… and therefore there is a lot of space to free up. A formula that we already warned could arrive when we had barely been in the pandemic for two months.
A situation that has led San Francisco to consider converting empty offices into residential landsomething that can’t be done to this, but regulations through. And among those measures, they consider softening certain conditions to be able to convert office land to residential land, such as requirements for exposure to natural light or bicycle parking.
It is also raised the abolition of certain fees for residential development To ease this transition, would achieve some 11,235 new homes for the city according to the estimate of what it would mean if 40% of the available office land (not 100%) were reclassified. A more conservative estimate puts at 4,200 homes that could be added to a city that developed a serious problem of access to housing in the last decade.
San Francisco is not, in any case, the only American city studying these conversions. Chicago o NY They are on a similar path. If we learned anything from the real estate bubble we are experiencing in Spain, it was that the real problem is building homes where no one wants to live, not doing it where demand is always high.
Featured Image | Ferdinand Stoehr in Unsplash
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