The fallacy of return to office mandates
If people can't afford a house near your office, and they're just as productive at home, why make them come back?
When I first moved to San Francisco, I worked for The Atlantic, which did not have an office here at the time. I didn’t know very many people and I didn’t have any nearby co-workers, and I was lonely. I was so desperate for an office that I would take 40 minute bus rides to check out co-working spaces throughout the city that offered free trials. I also paid—out of my own pocket—for an office at the San Francisco’s Writer’s Grotto so I could have somewhere, anywhere, to go a few days a week.
Which is all to say I get why people like offices. But a lot has changed since then, for me and for the world. I switched jobs, got married, had a baby. The world experienced a global pandemic and the cost of everything—gas, food, homes, went up, up, up. And yet employers are calling workers back to work as if nothing has changed, expecting them to either weather very long commutes and be away from their families, or pay an exorbitant amount to live close to work and have more time. My latest story talks about why this is silly and why there’s an upswell of resistance to Return to Office Mandates.
Return to the Office? Not in This Housing Market
As someone who does not own any real estate, and who has been looking into owning real estate, I get particularly irked by Return to Office mandates. Elected officials supposedly want us all to participate in the American Dream—get a job, buy a home, have a family, save money for retirement, etc. But they also want us to come back to downtowns and the office, as Biden said in his State of the Union. Have they looked at real estate prices near downtowns? (A 3 br/2 ba in our San Francisco neighborhood, a 30-minute commute from downtown, is listed for $1.9 million, or $9,225 a month.)
In this story, I talked to people who were priced out of homeownership before the pandemic. Then the pandemic hit, and they bought homes in places in the same metro area, but further than they’d live if they had to commute daily. This includes people without college degrees, who just wanted to access a piece of the American Dream, and would not have been able to afford a home anywhere near their office. One of them got called back to her office, an 80-mile drive one-way, and promptly quit. (she soon found another job.)
I keep thinking of how NPR said, at the beginning of the pandemic, that it had received 20,520 applications for its fall internships in 2020, when in 2019 it had received just 2,597. It suddenly got applications from all the people who wanted to work at NPR—and would be really good at working at NPR—but who couldn’t up and move to expensive real estate markets like New York, LA, or Chicago. Return to office mandates essentially cut all these people off from opportunities once again. They also make it harder for women (who still do the bulk of care giving) to balance work and family, since they’re spending time commuting when they could be cooking dinner or doing laundry.
Yes, some people can’t work remotely, and they are still going to face this affordability problem. But research I cite in the story suggests that if a chunk of remote workers move out of downtowns/closer-in suburbs, real estate could get more affordable for everyone. There’s less demand for the center-city properties that have been so hot for the last decade or so. Commutes could get better too, with fewer cars on the road.
And before you tell me that allowing people to work remotely permanently will ruin downtowns—I disagree. Downtowns change all the time, and you could argue that they’ve become a little too office-centric, with too many chain restaurants serving salads and coffee, and not enough arts or cafes or independent businesses. (Richard Florida has a good essay on this here.) Most people aren’t going to move to the middle of nowhere if they don’t have to go into an office. They still want the amenities of a city. They just want family time, too.