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As I understand it, there is now something called hybrid work. The way this works is that on some days you go into the office and on some days you work from home, or from some "third space" near to your home. As a result of this, there are now more people, at least for the time being, that seem to be willing to live further out from large urban centers. And this is reflected in the data that the Financial Times recently published in an article about "how the pandemic transformed Britain's commuter towns":
In-person spending in the City of London has yet to fully recover. It remains below 2019 levels. Whereas a number of places that I am generally unfamiliar with (see chart) are now above where they were pre-pandemic. This, again, makes intuitive sense: more decentralization, more time at home, and less time in the City of London. Though we could also be seeing some low base effect here. Either way, my gut continues to be that a lot of people are still underestimating the stickiness of cities and the importance of in-person interactions.
https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1498709928734826510?s=20&t=5u9z90gEBwu0ebJgKC3Q_w
Some of you might remember my Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index. It has become my crude way of measuring office utilization in Toronto's CBD. Based on this I can tell you that utilization is firmly up this week. Most lunch spots in Toronto's PATH are back to having lines and the people working at these fine establishments are saying things like "finally" and "the people are back." All of this is, of course, anecdotal. And I am not saying that we are back to pre-COVID levels. But there was a clear and meaningful uptick this week, which happens to coincide with the lifting of a number of COVID restrictions.
Now let's consider some actual numbers. I don't know what they are for Toronto's CBD (if you do, please share them in the comments below), but Kastle Systems has what seems like accurate "office swipe card" data for the 10 largest US cities. What this data tells us as of the end of February 2022 is that there has been a "return to normal, but not to the office." Compared to 2019, NBA games are at 93.3%, movie theater ticket sales are at 89.4%, TSA checkpoints are at 87.8%, OpenTable reservations are at 87%, and yet office utilization sits on average at 36.8%.
In this recent post by Naval Ravikant, he argues that innovation seems to like two things: decentralization and a frontier. He starts by giving the examples of more decentralized states (i.e. smaller federal governments) and the Wild West. The American frontier was, as you know, wild. But it was also a place of great innovation.
Naval then goes on to talk about the pendulum that tends to swing between centralization and decentralization. And in the world of technology, the last decade has been one of centralization (big companies). But this pendulum is much broader. Cities, as we have talked about before on this blog, are constantly in tension between centralizing and decentralizing forces.
COVID was a powerful decentralizing force for cities. Everything was closed and we were all supposed to stay home. And so most/all of the benefits of centralizing in a city were suddenly, yet temporarily, turned off. Many people naturally decentralized. But when the dust finally settles, I highly doubt it will be as dramatic as most people initially thought.
We know that cities and urban density encourage innovation. That's why "unicorns" tend to overwhelmingly originate in big cities. But here's the thing: this is a form of centralization. The fact that cities even exist in the first place tells us that their centralizing forces are winning out over the decentralizing ones.
So how do we reconcile this with Naval's argument that new frontiers and decentralization are actually what are needed for innovation? I agree wholeheartedly that one of the key innovations with crypto, for example, is that it is decentralized and permissionless. But what does this ultimately mean for cities and our built form?
Does it encourage a similar sort of decentralization to happen? Or is the irony that decentralized technologies actually still thrive in centralized urban places? We may all be online buying NFTs, but we still want to get together in person to show them off and exchange ideas.
As I understand it, there is now something called hybrid work. The way this works is that on some days you go into the office and on some days you work from home, or from some "third space" near to your home. As a result of this, there are now more people, at least for the time being, that seem to be willing to live further out from large urban centers. And this is reflected in the data that the Financial Times recently published in an article about "how the pandemic transformed Britain's commuter towns":
In-person spending in the City of London has yet to fully recover. It remains below 2019 levels. Whereas a number of places that I am generally unfamiliar with (see chart) are now above where they were pre-pandemic. This, again, makes intuitive sense: more decentralization, more time at home, and less time in the City of London. Though we could also be seeing some low base effect here. Either way, my gut continues to be that a lot of people are still underestimating the stickiness of cities and the importance of in-person interactions.
https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1498709928734826510?s=20&t=5u9z90gEBwu0ebJgKC3Q_w
Some of you might remember my Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index. It has become my crude way of measuring office utilization in Toronto's CBD. Based on this I can tell you that utilization is firmly up this week. Most lunch spots in Toronto's PATH are back to having lines and the people working at these fine establishments are saying things like "finally" and "the people are back." All of this is, of course, anecdotal. And I am not saying that we are back to pre-COVID levels. But there was a clear and meaningful uptick this week, which happens to coincide with the lifting of a number of COVID restrictions.
Now let's consider some actual numbers. I don't know what they are for Toronto's CBD (if you do, please share them in the comments below), but Kastle Systems has what seems like accurate "office swipe card" data for the 10 largest US cities. What this data tells us as of the end of February 2022 is that there has been a "return to normal, but not to the office." Compared to 2019, NBA games are at 93.3%, movie theater ticket sales are at 89.4%, TSA checkpoints are at 87.8%, OpenTable reservations are at 87%, and yet office utilization sits on average at 36.8%.
In this recent post by Naval Ravikant, he argues that innovation seems to like two things: decentralization and a frontier. He starts by giving the examples of more decentralized states (i.e. smaller federal governments) and the Wild West. The American frontier was, as you know, wild. But it was also a place of great innovation.
Naval then goes on to talk about the pendulum that tends to swing between centralization and decentralization. And in the world of technology, the last decade has been one of centralization (big companies). But this pendulum is much broader. Cities, as we have talked about before on this blog, are constantly in tension between centralizing and decentralizing forces.
COVID was a powerful decentralizing force for cities. Everything was closed and we were all supposed to stay home. And so most/all of the benefits of centralizing in a city were suddenly, yet temporarily, turned off. Many people naturally decentralized. But when the dust finally settles, I highly doubt it will be as dramatic as most people initially thought.
We know that cities and urban density encourage innovation. That's why "unicorns" tend to overwhelmingly originate in big cities. But here's the thing: this is a form of centralization. The fact that cities even exist in the first place tells us that their centralizing forces are winning out over the decentralizing ones.
So how do we reconcile this with Naval's argument that new frontiers and decentralization are actually what are needed for innovation? I agree wholeheartedly that one of the key innovations with crypto, for example, is that it is decentralized and permissionless. But what does this ultimately mean for cities and our built form?
Does it encourage a similar sort of decentralization to happen? Or is the irony that decentralized technologies actually still thrive in centralized urban places? We may all be online buying NFTs, but we still want to get together in person to show them off and exchange ideas.
The "best" performing city is Austin with an average utilization of 53.4% as of February 23. And the "worst" performing city is San Francisco with an average utilization of 26.1% as of the same date. This makes intuitive sense given that tech has been pretty much leading the charge when it comes to remote and flexible work. Still, things are heading up and to the right. And as I argued at the beginning of this year with my annual predictions, I continue to believe that the majority of office workers will return at some point. Offices aren't going away. And I think they're going to remain the dominant place of work.
Chart: Bloomberg
The "best" performing city is Austin with an average utilization of 53.4% as of February 23. And the "worst" performing city is San Francisco with an average utilization of 26.1% as of the same date. This makes intuitive sense given that tech has been pretty much leading the charge when it comes to remote and flexible work. Still, things are heading up and to the right. And as I argued at the beginning of this year with my annual predictions, I continue to believe that the majority of office workers will return at some point. Offices aren't going away. And I think they're going to remain the dominant place of work.
Chart: Bloomberg
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