Yet rents won't drop -- the commercial mortgage covenants prevent landlords from dropping rental rates, so they'll just sit there fallow until the market recovers.
That's the monumental social question going unconsidered -- why has governmental regulation not somehow adapted to the new economic reality, so that all that real physical capital is put to at least some productive use?
My pet theory is that the best thing any city could do is having a strict vacancy tax in the downtown core, especially on retail space. Nothing makes a place feel dead like seeing boarded up restaurants or shops, and since the pandemic those have been lasting for years because the landlords don’t want to lower rates. There should be some grace period followed by tax rates ramping up so sharply that, say, they’d pay a food truck operator to use a storefront just to have something going on at every place on the block.
One of the things which helped the early web startup scene was that the amount of startup capital was a lot lower when you could get an old loft for an order of magnitude less than top-tier office space. Cheap money for most of the century skewed towards huge companies (or dreams of becoming one) but cities tend to benefit more from many small to medium sized businesses which aren’t trying to become Google.