Comment by monch1962

Comment by monch1962 3 days ago

13 replies

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I work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia.

The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration.

It's not like we home-based workers stopped going out to buy lunch on workdays. We still go to the local shops most days for coffee and food; as those shops aren't paying CBD-type rents, their food and coffee is generally cheaper and/or better quality, the service is friendlier and the local school kids have a lot more job opportunities. The past 4 years has seen a real community feel spring up around where I live, whereas before it was just another dormitory suburb where nearly all the workers disappeared during the day.

From my perspective, we moved from pre-COVID, in-office work arrangements to post-COVID, remote arrangements, and that genii is now out of the bottle. We've all conclusively proved we can be productive working from home, and any attempt to roll that back is going to hit resistance in one form or another. It's gonna take a recession where the supply of workers exceeds the demand for everyone to come back into the office each day, and even then I don't think it'll stick long term.

onlyrealcuzzo 3 days ago

> Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels

It's more like downtown property prices are based on those levels, and property is leveraged, and if banks collapse do to commercial property prices plummeting, you're in for a bad time.

Also, although downtown is a very small part of the city - in many cities, downtown property taxes make up a relatively large chunk of total property tax revenues.

You either death spiral downtown property prices by keeping taxes steady while values decline, or you increase tax everywhere else to make up the difference.

Either of those options leads to a bad time for politicians.

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goosedragons 3 days ago

Here in Canada the federal government has started forcing federal public servants back to the office. Everybody thinks it's just to prop up the capital city businesses and commercial landlords. Their union has actually called for them to buy local in their neighborhood rather than in downtown. Ottawa has a pretty terrible downtown with many businesses having awful hours like 8a.m-2p.m M-F because they got so used to relying just on civil servants.

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  • brandon272 3 days ago

    That same federal government, who wants to put tens of thousands of employees on the road in commutes to their offices, is simultaneously communicating to the public that carbon fuelled climate change is an existential threat and that carbon consumption is immoral and wrong, thus requiring end use carbon taxes, and even going so far as the current party's health minister saying that families taking summer road trips is sacrificing "the future of the planet". [1]

    [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10542273/holland-road-trip-questi...

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downrightmike 3 days ago

The internet has allowed remote work for a long time, and in office work was dead walking until the pandemic finally put it in the ground. It needs to stay dead. These local shops don't deserve to lose their business either. if the CBD businesses want to compete, then they need to move. This is a sunk cost. You don't throw good money after bad

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  • hn72774 3 days ago

    I think a big part of this math is avoiding huge balance sheet write downs on unoccupied real estate.

    When Amazon was heavily investing in SLU in the 2010's they purchased all of their leased offices from the developer, Paul Allen's company.

    It's the GE-ification of Amazon. Financial engineering with little care about employees or customers.

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    • downrightmike 3 days ago

      Then the C suite can just make coffee at home and stop eating avocado toast

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HenriTEL 3 days ago

I agree, unless other exceptional conditions, having to go 5 days a week to the office is a strong no-go for me, FAANG or not.

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fundad 3 days ago

This is such corporate welfare BS. I especially don’t get it for tech companies whose employees eat lunch on campus.

With big tech, I think it has more to do with real estate holdings being part of the portfolio and they would have to write down the value. Then the hedge funds where executives invest would also have to write down their real estate holdings and lose value.

I am dying for commercial real estate to be written down so hard in the US that the Federal Housing Administration buys it and converts it to public housing.

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