How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO? How are they forcing these companies to renew their leases when they expire?
The big fortune 100 tech companies are also commercial real estate owners and landlords. Look at all the buildings that Amazon owns and subleases in Seattle.
Those executives absolutely have an incentive to be pushing RTO because of their commercial real estate risk.
They also have an outsized bullhorn and the industry tends to watch what they do and report over what they do, and they have PR budgets which can get articles written the way they want. Bezos outright owns the WaPo.
Further down the ladder that PR will land on businesses where it just reinforces the attitudes of management towards RTO and gives them arguments to make in meetings. The people in those meetings don't necessarily have any skin in the commercial real estate game, but if they've spent the past 3 years reading articles about remote work and RTO published in the business press influenced by those who do have a whole lot of skin in the game, how do you attribute causality?
They way I'd look at it is that you can't take it in isolation and you need to step outside of naive root cause analysis that looks at the manager in the company who has no skin in the game and says that they can't possibly be influenced by the commercial real estate issues. For any individual "atom" of a manager in this analysis their own biases will more strongly influence what they're doing, but everyone in that room has been reading the same articles, and industrial propaganda and PR actually is effective at shaping attitudes. They are blowing on the dice, or turning up the temperature, or whatever analogy you like that draws a parallel to statistical mechanics and the bulk behavior of matter in the presence of individual randomness.
Thank you, this is a far more cogent model of the incentives and behaviors in place than all the conspiratorial essays on a boogeyman plurality conspiring against the working class.
According to [0], Amazon owns $40B in real estate. Which isn't a lot compared to a $1.4T market cap. OTOH, if the cost of pushing people to RTO is less than $40B it's still worth it.
What do you mean? Unless they plan to sell, all the real estate value does for them is increase their tax burden. It's the companies that lease out commercial real estate that need to maintain prices.
Once companies are established they also tend to insist all their investments are legitimate barriers to entry. I doubt Sears would have lasted as long as it did if people didn't fear its ultimately worthless real estate investments.
It's literally the subject of the article. Empty Corporate Real-estate, offices, is driving a Return to Work effort by those corporations. So many people here are saying it is a 'conspiracy theory' hence not true. Many financial news outlets have reported on this, the properties are public knowledge.
Even Amazon does check its bottom line from time to time. It is possible they do care about hits to it. They aren't so profitable that they don't care about expenses.
Their market cap has swung by 20x that this year. It’s fun to theorize about creepy ulterior motives but doing some basic arithmetic blows the whole thing up.
In principle it could be straight up targeted propaganda "making" the bosses do that.
I have no idea if the reality is more that, or more the banal "nobody is organising anything like this and suggestions to the contrary are just conspiracy theories, the bosses genuinely believe what they're saying".
I currently have a boss who appears to sincerely want people back in the office; he doesn't want to be the CEO of a 100% remote company.
> In principle it could be straight up targeted propaganda "making" the bosses do that.
More than "in principle", I would be very shocked if many someones were not at least trying very hard to make it happen.
If PR firms can push "suits are cool again" or "maybe chocolate is kinda healthy for you", then they can easily push stuff like "in-office work is better", or "executives like you don't like remote-work".
I feel like often article-writers miss the fact of people like your boss: some people just legitimately like being in an office and there's no conspiracy to speak of.
As someone who likes being in an office, I personally feel that everyone becoming permanent WFH basement gremlins is a bad thing overall. Human contact is a good thing, and my observations of people who are 100% WFH is that they almost never interact with anyone outside of their household.
In a hilarious and ironic turn of events, at my last job in which I was 100% remote from a different continent, I made an effort to meet my boss in-person for the first time while traveling internationally as a break from the grind. We went out for pizza, and it was completely out of the scope of expectations and purely an effort to play that card and get to know one of my colleagues better. The ironic part is that not had the startup been purchased by a commercial real estate behemoth, but I'd face increasing demands and pressure upon arrival back home, then a layoff. He even paid for the meal even though
it wasn't technically a work expense.
Communication got incredibly toxic from his end; every sentence infused with inexplicable resentment. It was a very confusing result, and now I'm even less likely to bother meeting anyone in the future. I'm happy I avoided burnout by simply ignoring the toxicity, as petulant behaviour probably resulting from stresses in his own life, but still.
I have to deal with double faced people at work on a daily basis, and usually I have to play the game against my will. I hate a couple of coworkers, and they had ruined my day more than once.
I don't think that kind of human contact is better than spending more time with my wife and kids.
My personal feeling about people eager to go back to the office is that they have empty jobs, but walking around from meeting to meeting, from the water fountain to the coffee machine, and bikeshedding other people's work makes them feel worthy. Of course, they need other people around to have meetings and "work".
Office life and commutes have so completely destroyed our ability to have outside social lives that the solution to not being able to socialize is to go back to the office. Brilliant.
Being forced to interact with people one doesn't like, and having to perform work theater to maintain ones livelihood, is not a good thing for many people.
Besides which, WFH means more time with the family (also human contact) and skipping the commute means more time around people whose presence one actually enjoys.
All that said, I tend to agree with your point that people pushing RTO more due to their personal ideology (which clearly I do not share) rather than some grand conspiracy around real-estate.
80% of my friends are ex-coworkers. Some i even made from WFH. So, I think making friends at work is important, but I'm not sure how much being in-person is necessary.
Granted, I've seen how our developers rarely make friends with each other, so it may be more of a sales/HR/product thing than engineering.
I am 100% remote, I socialize after work by playing golf, going to the gym, or going to tech meets. I also get to explore some research topics outside of my day-to-day work by attending some special topic zooms during lunch times. I think the flexibility staves off burnout and helps my problem solving by enabling creativity. If I wasn't remote, I would lose all that to commuting.
The basement gremlin comment is unnecessarily judgemental, especially considering that some people have movie theaters, gyms or marble floored, spa-like basements (yes, even the remote, non-elite ones may have that).
But I respect that other people's way of work is not for me. I just don't mind if someone else goes to the office, and I would just expect the same courtesy.
Have you traced the networks of company boards where execs often sit on other boards. Or have you traced what entities actually invest in VC funds. Have you looked at relation of investment to massive private equity funds also invested strongly into real estate.
If venture funded companies actually wanted to run efficiently to maximize their investment, the the last thing many should do is setup offices in posh downtown areas, yet before all of this they often signed leases in high rent spaces. Why did you think that happened so often before this wave of remote work?
Even companies that do own commercial real estate but aren't in that business must see it as a sunk cost and that employees are volunteering to provide their own office space for free.
Real estate like that is actually (well, in the olden days) an appreciating long-term asset as well as a well-lobbied avenue for balance sheet games. Commercial real estate is subject to yearly depreciation, unlike your home. It can be somewhat arbitarily valued or devalued (see the games that Trump plays with real estate and taxes, sorry to introduce some politics), but generally real estate is tangible and appreciates long term.
Although if a company has a RECENTLY constructed office then it very much is a sunk cost, because the depreciation is on a 10 or 20 year schedule (don't remember exactly) and hasn't appreciated, and of course they haven't gotten the actual "house workers who make money for you" return. SO I agree with that. And of course all the companies don't want to see their already-depreciated by market appreciated values collapse under them. They want more sucker startups to but their appreciated properties once their business model ages.
Now, I guess we'll see how much the author's contention of a bubble/apocalypse plays out, but we'll know if office tower -> housing becomes a recurring thing. It wasn't with dilapidated malls, although it probably should have been.
As hinted at, the masters of office space are very well integrated with local politicians and the pork train. It's one of the pillars of local politics and local corruption. They'll try to find ways to get tax breaks or find a bigger sucker (like the local government!) to take on the burden or bail them out.
Shareholders, local/state governments that are basically in the grip of developers and real estate investors/landlords, Wall Street, cocktail parties, (bad) middle managers rioting, the feeling that if your underlings have all the freedoms you have they're less like underlings and more like peers, the usual class warfare stuff.
Unlike the caricature naive people believe it to be, such real world conspiracies seldom are about some shady guys meeting in a secret underground lair. That's so third world coup style.
More like a huge net, cast by powerful people scratching each other's back, lobbying, advertising, and PR budgets, the media getting on with the program, and of course politicians, middle managers, academics, journalists, and other such types quickly figuring out the right things to say and the right signals to sent that would advance their careers - and trying to whip the majority into going there to.
Anecdotes about "trust fund kids," asserting a "misguided war on inflation," and a vague conspiracy of unidentified landlords make the post seem more like a rant than serious economic analysis.
The "misguided war on inflation" stood out to me too, because I felt the author is uninformed on economics, or some strain of radical belonging to an economic school of thought I'm not familiar with.
I must say, the past few months have been weird with employment numbers stubbornly staying high regardless of the Fed's efforts as fewer jobs are usually a second-order effect when rates are hiked. I am glad fewer people than expected are currently unemployed.
> How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO?
Well, for one thing, the people who own real estate and the people who run Fortune 500 companies are the same people. What do you think the CxOs and board members do with their money after they cash out their outsized stock grants? Hide it under the mattress? No, they invest it, and often they invest it in whatever's "cool" that year - in this case commercial real estate. Even if the exact same person doesn't have feet in both camps, there are likely to be favors going back and forth between them. So, renting isn't the smartest move for chairperson X's company? That's OK, says building-owner Y. We'll make it up with deals from the other companies I own, or you can get a special bonus when you jump ship to join our other friend Z's company because they owe me a favor.
It's not a conspiracy theory when the possibilities are legion. No coordination is required; it's more of an emergent network-effect kind of thing. I've seen people I know[1] make these kinds of deals. In general they fall below the "breach of fiduciary duty" line, but even when they're clearly crooked they're unlikely to be prosecuted. Even the DAs and such who aren't hoping to walk through the same revolving door lack the resources to prosecute such complex and uncertain cases. They have more career-enhancing things to do. We could argue about how much it happens, or how much it's driving the push for RTO, but the ultra-dismissive tone of some commenters here smells just as fishy as anything coming from the other side of the discussion.
[1] No, not friends. I like my friends moral. But I'm not 100% in control of who moves into my neighborhood, who joins the clubs or engages in the activities I do, etc. Sometimes they mention these things directly, because I can pass as a business-savvy person and they don't even realize these things are wrong. Sometimes I overhear them, because braggarts tend to be loud. If you've never moved beyond the semi-rich techie circle and met people in the really-rich business circle, you might not appreciate just how bad these people tend to be.
Companies who own city real estate are getting screwed. This includes all the big tech companies. That real estate is no longer an appreciating asset, and cannot be converted to residential, when the prospect is the collapse of downtowns due to people migrating out to smaller places.
It isn't just companies. For example, one of the most central parts of downtown Seattle is owned by the University of Washington[0], a government institution. Some of their leases are structured as revenue share on the real estate. This is both an asset they borrow against and a source of income.
> “All of our corporate leaders need to get in the room and say, let’s come up with a minimum,” Adams said in an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, referring to how many days a week employees should be in the office. “If it’s four days a week, it’s four days a week.”
You must not have been long on this world if you don't realize by now that of course most CEOs make decisions based on the same cargo cult nonsense you follow to pick the ultimate in SPA build systems.
More content than you might expect, in a variety of “reputable” news outlets as well a veritable plague of blogs, is paid placement. Either through the outlet directly, or through a contributing writer that has (not all that) covert connections to PR firms.
PR pieces are often very subtle and difficult to detect because they tend to be on orthogonal subjects to the intended ”drive by” messaging.
After engaging PR and marketing firms for a few years now and seeing the kind of things that show up on their price lists, I have near zero marginal faith in media as a source of unbiased information. You end up seeing the fingerprints of priming, perverse incentive and commercialised bias in nearly everything.
Why do you think all those article writers write? Few of them are directly compensated.
Maybe funding sources are saying "if our real estate hedges implode your funding dries up, get your workers back in town and spreading our money around"
Some companies are weird about using a co-working address and want a really small office footprint. Enough for a meeting room, a few offices, and a mailbox so when some banker or other business shows up you can put on a dog and pony show in a formal office with your name on the wall.
That's about it.
Many creative companies don’t own real estate and are looking foward to sunsetting their existing leases to go with something much smaller and easier to manage. In addition to the rental square footage NNN leases and increasing energy and insurance will dove that the RTW push is short-lived as it financially makes little sense.
IIRC, prior to the pandemic, Apple implemented a freeze on leasing new office space in the bay area. Big companies are definitely incentivized to cut down on RE expenses.
Google has tons of office real estate that's assigned a certain value on balance sheets. If that tanks, the C-suite compensation plans and (slight conjecture here) the value of Brin's & Page's stock-secured liquidity will take a hit.
Page and Brin are shareholders. A counterexample would be if a worker owned business like Igalia was doing RTO (I think they've always been remote & remain so, so they're not actually a good example for or against, just to illustrate).
Thats just it, outside of the media outlets they control and federal policy, they cannot. Its largely a propaganda campaign and a thinly veiled one at that.
Biden was told by elites this was about to become a trillion dollar shit sandwich for the economy during a rocky period of high inflation and stagnation. He symbolically called all the federal workers back into offices (already owned by the government) as a show of "the right thing to do" but otherwise any company outside the fortune 50 will absolutely use this as an opportunity to tell their landlord to pound sand.
This question should have made the author delete this essay, and is why it has no business being promoted on a supposedly legitimate aggregator like hacker news.
The author is either a straight up liar working to subvert what little is left of American capitalism. Or they're a conspiracy theory whacko who doesn't know the slightest thing about "the elite," or any of the people/factions that comprise it.
Yeah maybe, but maybe its helpful to think what the holders of commercial real estate debt do to avoid the catastrophe? Surely, they are not just sitting and waiting. The offices are empty. The companies are doing just fine. There need to be external pressures applied to bring people back to the offices, I'd think.
Sure. They might be commissioning a harvard business professor to write about productivity gains of being in-office. They might lobby for some regulation to force a liability onto companies with remote workers. But what they aren't doing is getting 1000 of the richest people in the world into a room and coordinating a conspiracy to help some corner of the room not go bankrupt.
Since the article is in line with what you said, coordination could be through commissioning a Harvard writer, or lobbying, or regulation, either way it isn't explicitly stated. I get the impression that you are arguing against a point of view that you are assuming.
This is clearly you, reading (a lot) into what she said, and then reacting to your own pre-formed perceptions of an argument you think she made.
Kind of like when people get into internal mental arguments with fictional others, and start talking to themselves. Then getting so wound up they blurt something out of context, or march on the capital.
The only way in which she anything she said could be consistent with mine is if she used the term "the elites" to mean very specifically "CRE investors." This is a definition she never once even implied, let alone stated.
The entire article implied it.
It is literally the subject of the article.
From the article:
>"It’s about real estate"
>"Corporate landlords currently hold $1.2 trillion in loans on office towers all over the country"
It is being a bit pedantic to argue around what a 'CRE Investor' IS. Who 'owns' versus who has a 'lease' since the 'lease' is still a debt obligation. And you don't have to be specifically a 'CRE Investor', you just need to own or lease a lot of CRE to be impacted.
If you think statements like "It’s about real estate" are somehow a redefinition of a different term ("the elites") used elsewhere in the document to make it mean something no one else in the world thinks it means, then we have no business even talking to each other. Your opinion of how reading works is so different from mine that it results in us living in two different worlds. I'm sure I'm right when I say this college professor knows how to communicate clearly, and if she had intended for "the elites" to mean "a small subset of elites who have large interest in CRE prices," that she would have found a clearer term, instead of a Marxist-charged one like "the elites," most often used for the purpose of throwing shit in the fan of corporate America, rather than arguing genuine points.
>> "the elites" to mean "a small subset of elites who have large interest in CRE prices"
That is exactly what is meant. I'm sorry if it really needs to be spelled out like leading a horse to water. It was the point of the entire article, even if there was not a specific sentence clearly equating a=b. There were links to other backing documents. Maybe she could have drawn the line a little more clearly, but it was a short piece, maybe she didn't think she needed to make it a big thesis.
For "elites". Is it "Marxist-Charged"? It is a little funny to be re-defining the term again, given that for 6 years Republicans have been using it as a derogatory term for "educated liberals", not for "Corporate America". Now all of a sudden, if someone uses the term "Elite" to refer to "Corporate America", now that makes them Marxist by besmirching "Corporate America"?
I do agree. It is hard to communicate in this day and age when words change meaning from month to month, and the Left/Right are working with different definitions.
Any definition of 'Elites', in any conversation gets wrapped up in different opinions on who the 'Elite's are. One side thinks the 'Elite's are Socialist, educated liberals, the other side think the 'Elite's are corporate CEO's.
Depending on your side, you get triggered in the opposite direction.
I know you believe this and there's nothing I can do to change your mind. You do you, but nothing you say with your ridiculous leaps of logic and assumptions will change my choice to read it in the most direct and logical way.
But don't think that your ultra-literal reading is more 'correct' for being literal.
When someone says it is a 'blue moon' this month, do you get upset when it isn't blue?
I think we both know you have an axe to grind, and are just as extremely biased in one direction as you think I am biased in the other direction.
Best wishes on becoming more self aware. The world needs it.
>>> "a Marxist-charged one like "the elites," most often used for the purpose of throwing shit in the fan of corporate America, rather than arguing genuine points."
(Actually, I'm beginning to suspect this is a Troll, hard to tell these days. Let me know if this was just a long joke.)
Yeah I don’t think elon musk is sipping whisky with his landlord and the small business chamber of commerce of downtown palo alto or wherever the “X” office is conspiring to bring the workers back into the office.
The currency of elites is deference. One of the reasons why Musk can get away with so much is that other powerful people don't want to check him because they're afraid that other people will check them. By showing deference you preserve deference for yourself.
When other important people line up with Musk it is not because they are sipping whisky together, instead they are lining up like iron filings in the field of a magnet.
Let me tell you how all this works: you see, Team America is funded by the corporations, so they fight for the corporations... while they sit in their corporation buildings... and they're all corporation-y... and they make lots of money!
Someone always playing
Corporation games
Who cares they're always changing
Corporation names
We just want to dance here
Someone stole the stage
They call us irresponsible
Write us off the page
