News Analysis
Office buildings continue to sit mostly empty in major cities across the United States, jeopardizing the future of America’s downtowns more than two years after the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the mass adoption of remote work.
Data from Kastle Systems, a provider of access control systems for thousands of office buildings, shows that office occupancy averages just 43.8 percent of its pre-COVID baseline across 10 major metropolitan areas. Citywide averages range from 34.7 percent in San Francisco to more than 58.9 percent in Austin, with New York coming in at 41.2 percent. All told, the selected metro areas represent some 80 million people.
An accompanying chart published by Kastle dramatically depicts the slow and halting return of American employees to their fluorescent-lit workplaces since April 2020, with a huge dip in occupancy this past December corresponding to the Omicron “surge.”…