[pstuart]

There were a lot of downstream effects as well -- local businesses that depended upon those office workers being in the area. Those ripples hurt a lot of people.

That said, it shouldn't be the driver of RTO, it should be the need to actually have in-person collaboration.

[swed420]

True. Many large cities also depended on that tax revenue.

It's almost as if we should find an economic system that doesn't rely on forced consumption, waste, etc in order to be "prosperous."

[pstuart]

A win-win in this regard would be to repurpose the empty office space into living spaces so that the local businesses would have local people and those tenants would be able to possibly abandon the need for car ownership if the density of the area fosters all the necessary services.

The smackdown of this idea is that office spaces have different requirements than living spaces and the conversion of those buildings is too expensive to make it viable. As an unrepentant optimist, I would hope that could be mitigated by supporting those transitions via tax rebates, collaborative zoning and permitting processes, and investing in methodologies that could address the infra needs (plumbing, etc).