The chicken or the egg? Without people nearby, you’ll have no offices/jobs. Without jobs, you’ll have no people is your argument. I prefer the former cause and effect as more plausible mainly due to simple financial returns. Who is going justify from a financial returns perspective building an office where there are few people? Nowadays offices are even less impactful with technology and a worldwide, scattered workforce facilitating working in homes and/or smaller satellite offices. Large, central office hubs are in big trouble.
> The chicken or the egg? Without people nearby, you’ll have no offices/jobs.
No, that's wrong. Cities develop for painfully obvious reasons. There are two:
1. The government needs an administrative or military hub and constructs a city to be that hub. This is only moderately sensitive to location, but it involves offices being designated to exist in a particular location and a city growing to support them. Note that there are many, many historical examples of this in which the city came into existence by government decree; it was not necessary for anyone to be living there beforehand. Offices were necessary, and sufficient.
2. Work needs to be done in a particular location. Sea trade happens at a port (and San Francisco is just such a city, though the port is now dead); river trade happens along a river; mining happens at a mineral deposit. This case also involves offices coming into existence and a city growing to support them. But unlike the first case, it's pretty sensitive to location; the hub that supports a port needs to be coastal.
Without the offices, there is no reason for a city to exist at all. Some industries may die and be replaced by other industries that take advantage of the local concentration of people in an existing city. But if every industry dies, which is what eliminating the offices means, the city will die too.
That's largely true for the mineral deposits, but not at all for the harbors. Harbors necessarily host warehouses, tax assessors, harbormasters, lighthouses, repair services... and all of those require offices on site (though the lighthouse is capable of containing its own office).
(Offices are of course required at a mine too, but a comparatively tiny number of them.)
But the support has no reason to exist without the offices. The offices are the cause, and everything else is the effect.