Remote Work Is Here to Stay.

Cities and Property Markets Will Never Be the Same.

Looks like we’ll be working from home for a while longer. A lot longer. We’ve learned a lot in the last two years about working remotely and adapted our homes to be functional workplaces. Plus, our employers have upgraded their infrastructure to facilitate remote working, often shedding space in the process.

And perhaps most importantly, we also now better understand both the advantages and difficulties of working from home (WFH). For many more of us than before the pandemic, the benefits are just too compelling to want to go back to the old ways.

I wrote about this WFH trend last year in Emerging Trends in Real Estate, published annually by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and PwC. There was much debate then about the permanence of WFH arrangements. But now we know more, and the odds are even higher that remote work isn’t going away, at least not to the way it was. The hit to office buildings will be enormous.

But the impacts are much broader than just the damage to commercial real estate markets and local businesses and their workers. Here are three other significant trends I see for urban places that may be less obvious and don’t get nearly enough attention: the devastation of public transit, a game-changing break in the traditional link between work and workplace, and hope for more affordable housing in expensive gateway cities.

Read my analysis in Discourse and Dialogue on Medium here.