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Across the U.S., office buildings are starting to repopulate, as about 67 percent of the population has received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and the trend toward “working from home” is reversing… so says the mainstream media.
This is good news for business districts in general and for all the restaurants and other businesses that depend on a concentration of office workers.
Why, then, is San Francisco and its environs, despite a higher-than-national-average vaccination rate (76 percent), the area with the nation’s lowest return-to-office figures? Across the country, an average of 32 percent of office workers are back at their desks, whereas in the San Francisco region that figure is a mere 20 percent.
Tech Firms “Pushing Workplace Boundaries”
It could be because of the density of tech companies in the Bay Area. According to the Wall Street Journal, in an article appearing 7 July, those tech companies are populated by younger, highly-skilled but less-conventional employees who have found that they like working remotely and are therefore reticent to return to the office. In Dallas and Houston, for example, where employers are requiring workers to come back, office buildings are back to 50 percent of their pre-COVID use, whereas few San Francisco tech firms are making such demands, preferring to “push workplace boundaries” and remain “flexible.”
As a result, about half the small businesses in San Francisco business districts remain shuttered, and the term “ghost town” is used to describe the look of the place.
TREND FORECAST: Trends Journal has been warning, since the start of the COVID War, of the ramifications of work-from-home policies on commercial real estate, saying, as we did on 5 January in “TRENDS IN REAL ESTATE,” that “Even after COVID fears dissipate in the coming years, the major elements of the work-at-home trend will persist.”
TREND FORECAST: Trends are born, they grow, mature, reach old age and die. The work-from-home trend has just been born. Indeed, as noted in our 22 June 2021 Trends Journal, working from home is a 21st century mega-trend, the implications of which will be far reaching (see “WORK-FROM-HOME: 21st CENTURY MEGA-TREND”).