While in Miami last week, I made sure to make time for an extensive tour of the downtown Brickell business district. One phrase I heard repeatedly from the locals is that they were trying to create a mini Manhattan on the shores of Biscayne Bay. However, unlike the conventional commentary from New York chauvinists like […]
Everybody wants to be safe. Apparently, the word is out that it may not be safe on the New York City subways, so Governor Kathy Hochul has stepped into the breach and is providing 1000 New York national guardsmen and state police to check bags at the entrance to major subway stations like Grand Central […]
I was pleased to participate in a fascinating report just released in Fast Company. While titled as an eight-point guide for designing an office that office workers actually want to return to, it also contained a discussion of the state of the office market in several major cities and the views of several real estate […]
In another blow to the office industry, co-working giant WeWork finally bowed to the inevitable after a total of $16 billion in losses and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Newark last night. This was a case that had its origins well before the pandemic, but the trend to remote work hastened WeWork’s fall. The […]
As our well-informed readers know, the Wall Street Journal has reported that WeWork expects to file for bankruptcy next week. For now, the WeWork bondholders have entered into a seven-day forbearance of the grace period to declare a default in order to provide additional time for negotiations.
It has been evident for many years that WeWork’s […]
There has been a lot going on lately, so it is possible that even our well-informed readers missed the interesting news that in a special referendum in Paris, local citizens voted overwhelmingly to ban rented e-scooters by 89-11%. Apparently, the chaos and accidents caused by these motorized menaces was too much for Parisian pedestrians to […]
Last week there was an article in the New York Times profiling Columbia Business School professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, who is concerned about a potential “doom loop“ for New York City arising from the decline of the office sector. A couple of days later Bloomberg reported a that a recent study by Stanford work from […]
Many of our readers likely saw today’s excellent lead article in the New York Times discussing the new Penn Station development project which is being spearheaded by Governor Hochul. I was pleased to be quoted in the article (see the click through below).
The project provides for a group of developers led by Vornado Realty Trust to […]
We have been tracking a fascinating trend in the legal industry in which their employees are returning to the office at substantially higher rates than other businesses. According to the widely-followed Kastle Systems back-to-work barometer, employees at law firms nationwide have approximately 80% average occupancy office attendance as opposed to 45% for all industries, a […]
In our last newsletter, we suggested that office employees follow Mayor Adams’ advice and take the subway to work. In light of the recent tragedy in which a Goldman Sachs employee was killed on the Q train, I’d like to supplement my thoughts.
Obviously, in this city of 8 million people there […]
