0:04

When was the last time that you,

0:06

like, took a stroll

0:08

through an American city's

0:11

downtown? Well,

0:13

in April, I was in Chicago, and I actually

0:16

went around downtown Chicago with the

0:18

specific ambition of

0:20

diagnosing

0:22

what was going on in downtown

0:24

Chicago.

0:28

That slates Henry Gabbar. He

0:30

writes about cities and infrastructure, and

0:33

he used to live in Chicago. But

0:35

this story is not about his time

0:37

as a resident. It's about something happening

0:40

in American downtowns right now, a

0:42

kind of hollowing out, one

0:45

that has left office vacancy rates higher

0:47

than they've been in decades. Henry's

0:50

walk in Chicago is just the start

0:52

of our story. It was the kind of aimless

0:54

walk that you take. I feel

0:56

like you only take as a reporter where you're like, all right,

0:59

I'm just going to get to the bottom of this and chat

1:01

with some people. What did it look like? Well,

1:05

I went twice. And the first day,

1:07

it was absolutely beautiful.

1:10

Spring day in Chicago, the

1:13

tulips on Michigan

1:16

Avenue were just in full

1:18

bloom, and it was gorgeous and it felt

1:21

like there was plenty of street life. And

1:23

then the second day, it was kind of like windy and rainy and it

1:25

was pretty empty. And I walked into

1:27

one of the troubled malls

1:29

there in downtown Chicago,

1:32

Watertower Place, which has lost

1:34

a bunch of its big tenants.

1:37

The vacancy rate

1:37

was rising before the pandemic,

1:39

but climbed much faster once COVID-19

1:41

struck. It's now more than 26

1:44

percent in Chicago's loop and also

1:47

on the rise in the Michigan Avenue corridor.

1:49

The mall Henry had wandered into forms

1:52

the base of a skyscraper. The

1:54

Macy's in it had closed. So would

1:56

the Food Hall, the Gap,

1:58

and the Banana Republic. And on the

2:00

fourth floor of Water Tower Place, I found

2:02

this guy who

2:04

was preparing to put

2:06

on Chicago Fashion Week. And

2:08

I just thought, why are you doing this

2:10

on the fourth floor of this rundown mall?

2:13

And he was saying, well, it was an easy, cheap space

2:16

and everybody knows where it is and all that. And

2:18

I was just thinking, man, like, what a loss

2:20

for the city of Chicago that this truly

2:23

only in Chicago event, like local designers,

2:26

trans models, like this is the kind of stuff you don't

2:28

get in the suburbs. It's

2:31

happening on the fourth floor of this

2:33

kind of abandoned mall rather

2:35

than out where everybody

2:37

can see it

2:38

in some storefront of Michigan Avenue. But

2:41

of course, it's not just Michigan

2:43

Avenue and it's not just Chicago. Remote

2:46

work is cutting the value of New

2:48

York City office space in half. We

2:50

turn now to San Francisco, a major

2:52

mall downtown pulling out of the city, setting

2:55

sharply declining sales, fewer shoppers

2:57

and more.

2:58

The city has seen the exit of more than

3:00

a dozen national retailers from downtown

3:03

since just the start of the year.

3:05

Cities around the U.S. are grappling

3:07

with a serious problem. Those skyscrapers

3:10

that were once at the heart of downtowns

3:13

are nowhere near

3:14

full. Today on the

3:16

show, how the most prosaic symbol

3:18

of work, the office building, is

3:21

a symptom of a larger problem

3:23

and might be hiding

3:25

a coming financial crisis. I'm

3:28

Lizzie O'Leary and you're listening to What Next

3:30

TBD, a show about technology,

3:33

power and how the future will be determined.

3:35

Stick around.

3:45

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5:15

wanted Henry to try to put his walk through Chicago

5:18

into numbers to paint a

5:20

picture in data of what is happening

5:22

to American downtowns.

5:24

I think the number that probably

5:27

gets to it best is the fact

5:29

that the commercial vacancy

5:31

rates for downtown offices are

5:33

between 20 and 30

5:36

percent in most major US

5:38

downtowns. That's just in

5:41

terms of leasing, right? That's just

5:43

how much space is empty. That doesn't

5:45

even include offices like Slates

5:48

where it's on the books

5:50

at least but in reality

5:53

there may not be more than a few dozen people

5:55

there every day. What was it like pre

5:57

pandemic? Like is there a comparison number?

6:00

A lot of cities were under 10%. I want

6:02

to say New York during the last recession

6:05

peaked somewhere in the

6:07

teens. And now, as I was saying, we're

6:09

up closer to 30%. So this

6:11

is

6:12

pretty unprecedented. And

6:15

it's led, obviously, to

6:17

a whole host of knock-on

6:19

effects in the

6:22

related economy, which is to say, first

6:25

and foremost, the businesses that

6:27

work with the office workers, so

6:29

downtown lunch spots, shoe repair,

6:32

fancy restaurants, where people go on client

6:35

meetings. All that stuff is suffering.

6:38

Mass transit, obviously, has been

6:40

a casualty of

6:42

this trend. A lot of commuter rail

6:44

services, like BART in San Francisco,

6:47

have seen their ridership totals

6:50

fall pretty significantly since the

6:52

start of the pandemic, and they haven't really come back.

6:54

And then finally, I guess, would be the cities themselves,

6:56

where if they don't figure

6:59

out a way to get these downtown offices

7:01

full again, at some point in the next few

7:03

years, they're

7:04

going to have to reassess all this commercial

7:06

property. And the value is going to be way

7:08

lower than what it was in 2018, And

7:12

that's going to have a serious consequence for city

7:14

tax rolls.

7:15

So that's where I really want to dig

7:17

in, because I think your average person

7:19

might walk by an

7:22

office building, right? And just think of it as a building,

7:24

and not necessarily something that is owned,

7:27

or leased, or subleased, that

7:29

there are all of these financial agreements

7:32

in the background. And I wonder if you

7:34

could explain what's

7:36

going on there, and why

7:39

it

7:40

feels so fragile right now.

7:43

Every time I write about this subject, I get

7:45

all these people yelling at me on social media,

7:48

saying basically, oh, boo-hoo,

7:51

the downtown office owners

7:53

are losing their shirts. And now

7:56

I'm supposed to

7:57

ditch my comfy work from home. to

8:01

save their assets, I

8:03

don't think so. That's like, all right, I get

8:05

it. I don't think that the strategy

8:07

of the early pandemic, which was mayors like Eric

8:10

Adams in New York,

8:12

famously telling people to get out of their pajamas

8:14

and basically come back to work for the good of the

8:16

city,

8:17

that's not gonna work. Nobody's gonna come back to work

8:19

because they're concerned about city tax rules and

8:21

they wanna do their part

8:24

by taking a shift at a desk for 10

8:27

hours a day. But that said, I think

8:29

if you live in a city, you do have

8:31

to be concerned about what's happening here. Offices

8:34

make up about 20%

8:35

of the property

8:37

tax roles in New York City. So

8:40

if office values plummet by a

8:42

significant amount, then that's

8:44

gonna have knock-on effects on the city budget.

8:47

And that's to say nothing of the

8:49

second order effects we were talking about, where

8:52

in many of these downtowns, employment

8:54

hasn't come back to where it was before. And so that

8:56

has a more direct consequence, right? Like anybody

8:59

who's been working in

9:00

downtown office buildings, anything that any

9:02

part of that secondary economy, they're dealing

9:04

also with a part of the economy that hasn't

9:07

bounced back, even as in the suburbs, obviously

9:09

the economy has

9:11

come roaring back and everything's

9:13

going great. So the situation in cities

9:15

right now is you go bankrupt slowly

9:18

and then all at once. And I think

9:20

cities are right now in the slowly phase

9:22

of that and it may not come to

9:24

at once, but what's happening right now is that there's

9:26

this weird standoff between

9:29

the banks

9:31

and who have lent money to

9:34

commercial landlords to buy these big office

9:37

buildings and the commercial owners of these

9:39

big office buildings and the

9:41

cities themselves. And right now, a lot

9:43

of that property is still assessed

9:46

at the value that it was in 2019. And

9:48

in fact, the buildings aren't as empty

9:50

and the rents aren't as low as

9:52

you might expect given how empty

9:54

the streets are. Now, why is that? It's

9:57

because office leases are really long. They

9:59

tend to be 10 years. long. And so

10:01

even though demand has dropped a lot for

10:04

downtown office space, there are many,

10:06

many companies that are still holding onto leases.

10:08

They signed in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. And as a

10:13

result, the owners of those downtown

10:15

office towers aren't that desperate

10:17

yet to unload those

10:20

assets. That said, the

10:22

values have just gone through the

10:24

floor. In Los Angeles,

10:26

I got this from Bloomberg. Office

10:29

towers have on average $230 in

10:32

debt

10:33

per square foot. And the only

10:36

building to sell this year

10:38

sold for $154 per square foot, which is to say

10:40

almost all of these

10:41

downtown office

10:44

towers are underwater, which is to say they owe

10:46

more money, the owners owe more money to the bank

10:49

than the actual building is worth.

10:51

And so that creates a situation where owners,

10:54

you know, they're going to stick around. But at a certain

10:56

point, if the bank says, you know, we

10:58

need more money from you, they're just going to walk

11:00

away. And that's what's happening.

11:02

I mean, this is I think the accessible

11:05

example is not unlike the

11:07

subprime housing crisis. If

11:09

you, you know, had an interest

11:12

rate on your home, that reset,

11:14

and suddenly you owed a whole lot more

11:16

than your home was worth, people were willing

11:18

to walk.

11:20

Why is this different?

11:22

Like, are commercial

11:25

owners less likely to walk

11:27

away and just say here, bank,

11:29

you own this skyscraper now?

11:32

I'm glad you mentioned interest rates,

11:34

because that is one thing that is happening

11:36

now, that is exacerbating

11:39

the question of downtown's

11:41

viability, because a lot of these places,

11:44

they have loans on them. And if they want to refinance

11:47

their loan, suddenly they're looking at these much

11:49

higher interest rates. And that is true also of selling

11:51

the buildings, right? If they want to find a new buyer, the

11:54

real cost for the new buyer is exacerbated

11:56

by the high cost of interest rates. But to get to your question,

11:59

I think it's a good question. question, what makes this different

12:02

from last time and what makes commercial owners

12:04

different from residential owners, I

12:06

think in the financial crisis, there

12:09

was an understanding that there was a value

12:11

of the underlying asset and that, yes,

12:14

people had paid too much for

12:17

their houses in the exurbs of Tampa

12:19

and Las Vegas, but at the end of the day,

12:21

a house was a house and at

12:24

some point, somebody was going to want to live in

12:26

it.

12:27

And even though the owners couldn't afford

12:29

to keep up with their adjustable

12:32

rate mortgages, when the banks

12:34

took those houses over and put them up for auction,

12:37

they all got swooped up by these savvy

12:39

Wall Street investors who assembled these

12:41

portfolio of houses that they were pretty soon

12:44

able to turn into profitable rental

12:46

assets. And so the question was really

12:49

just one of pricing rather than of the

12:51

value of the underlying asset. And I think

12:53

when it comes to downtown office towers, the situation

12:55

is a bit different because it's just

12:57

not clear these things in some cases

12:59

are worth anything anymore because

13:03

we just don't know how much demand is out there

13:05

for downtown office buildings right now. Because

13:07

people may never come back to the office

13:09

or never come back in the way they were

13:12

in 2018, 2019.

13:14

Well maybe some people come back, but maybe the

13:16

people who come back, they

13:18

engage in what

13:19

these downtown analysts are calling the

13:21

flight to quality and they decide if

13:23

we're going to have downtown office space, it

13:26

better be prime space in a perfect

13:28

location in a brand new building with all

13:30

the amenities we want. And so for

13:32

the older buildings, the buildings from the 70s and

13:35

60s that we're kind of getting by

13:39

with these tenants that were

13:41

kind of budget tenants, respective to the broader

13:44

downtown office market, they

13:47

might find that there just simply are

13:49

not

13:49

clients around who

13:51

want to take on that space. And of course there are

13:54

costs of running an office building as well. So

13:56

it's not just a question of can I find somebody to

13:59

buy this, you know, to rent this

13:59

this space for me for a dollar or two dollars. You

14:02

have to be making a certain amount of money to

14:05

make the whole thing worth it. And

14:07

what we've seen in the last couple of months is

14:10

some commercial landlords just simply

14:12

walking away from their buildings and saying

14:15

to the bank, you know what,

14:16

it's your problem now. And

14:19

basically saying, for us as a commercial

14:21

landlord, the reputational

14:24

risk of default, of

14:26

walking away from this loan is worth

14:28

it to us because we think

14:31

that the value of this thing is that much lower

14:34

than the amount of money that we currently owe.

14:40

When we come back, why empty

14:42

offices suck money out of cities?

14:52

There is a scenario

14:54

where these empty offices lead to a cascade

14:57

of negative consequences for cities and

15:00

the people who live in them.

15:01

It's something called the doom loop,

15:04

a term coined by NYU professor

15:06

Arpit Gupta. His argument

15:08

is basically that as the value of

15:13

these commercial assets

15:15

in big downtowns declines,

15:18

it's going to have an effect on city

15:20

tax rules. First through declining

15:23

property tax revenues, but also because

15:26

of declining sales tax

15:28

revenues from all the associated business that's

15:31

tied into that downtown economy. And

15:34

as that city revenue declines, the city

15:36

is in turn gonna cut back on services

15:38

like policing, like mass transit,

15:41

like trash pickup. And as

15:43

those services get cut, downtown

15:45

will become still a less attractive

15:47

place to do

15:48

business and revenues will fall

15:50

further and so on and so on. And this cycle

15:53

between private sector disinvestment and

15:55

public sector disinvestment.

15:57

That sounds scary. likely

16:00

to happen? I think

16:02

on a small scale, it is

16:04

happening. I think you are seeing

16:07

situations in which declining

16:10

revenues are being met by cities

16:13

and transit

16:16

agencies in particular deciding

16:18

that they need to cut back service in

16:21

order to accommodate the new

16:23

normal as it concerns their

16:26

financial balance sheets. Let's talk

16:28

about the transit agency case first, because

16:30

I think transit agencies, even

16:33

more than cities themselves,

16:34

have long been very,

16:36

very dependent on downtown commuters.

16:39

And as downtown dries up,

16:41

transit agencies find themselves having lost,

16:44

in many cases, their most reliable

16:47

and most lucrative ridership paying those peak

16:49

fares and piling in five days a week.

16:51

And their response to this has been, all right,

16:53

well, where can we look to cut service? And

16:56

as you cut service, you find

16:58

that people are still less likely to ride,

17:01

because obviously the service is getting worse and worse.

17:03

And in addition to that, a lot of the

17:05

disincentives to take a car have gone away, because

17:08

there's fewer people downtown, so it might be easier to find

17:10

a place to park, less traffic, and so on.

17:12

And I think with transit agencies, it

17:15

really is tragic to see, because they've

17:17

been so focused on this downtown commuter market that

17:20

as the downtown commuters stop coming,

17:23

they're not really positioned to think

17:25

of themselves as offering a more holistic

17:28

service to a car-free city. I mean, they've

17:31

really, for years, been focused on the 9 to 5

17:34

white-collar workforce, and they absolutely

17:36

need to break out of that pattern if

17:38

they're going to survive this. And unfortunately,

17:41

for now, it seems that

17:43

one of their big reactions has been, all right, well, let's

17:46

just cut service until the riders

17:48

come back. Well, I've got some bad news for you.

17:50

If you cut the service, the riders aren't going to come back.

17:53

You know, listening to you describe all of these things

17:55

and reading your work on it, it made me wonder

17:57

if this is a uniquely

17:59

American. phenomenon,

18:01

sort of central to the way the

18:04

US builds or has built cities,

18:06

right? You have these downtowns that are

18:09

hubs of commercial activity and then a lot

18:11

of

18:12

suburban bedroom communities.

18:15

Is this happening elsewhere or is

18:18

it really an American

18:20

thing? Well, for reasons

18:23

that are a little

18:24

hard to explain, the remote

18:26

work phenomenon has not been

18:29

as dominant in cities

18:31

in Europe and East Asia. And

18:33

I can't really say why that

18:35

is, but I was just reading this morning about how

18:38

Singapore's office market is thriving

18:41

and whether that has to do with smaller apartments

18:44

or easier commutes

18:46

or poor internet connections at

18:49

home. I really don't know, but one

18:51

way or another it does seem like this

18:53

is happening first and foremost in America

18:56

and maybe to a lesser extent in the rest of the Anglosphere.

18:58

I know London is having some

19:01

remote work issues as well and

19:03

in fact HSBC just decided

19:05

they're going to move their headquarters from Canary Wharf,

19:09

which is the sort of big 80s office

19:11

development several miles from central London,

19:14

to a smaller space in a more central

19:17

location. And that represents the kind of flight

19:19

quality that I was

19:21

talking about that would characterize the

19:24

return to office as it happens

19:26

or if it happens, which is office

19:29

holders deciding that they want smaller

19:31

better spaces instead of bigger ones

19:33

in worse locations. But I agree

19:36

with you that America is

19:38

uniquely positioned

19:40

to suffer from this and that's because

19:43

America has this very inequitable

19:45

municipal funding structure where

19:48

we have these cities that are highly fragmented

19:51

and highly dependent on local

19:53

revenues.

19:54

And over the course of the 20th

19:56

century suburbanization has

19:58

taken most

23:43

really

24:00

challenging to convert on an architectural level.

24:03

It just takes a lot of money to do those

24:05

renovations. In some cases, I've been

24:07

told that renovating one of those buildings

24:10

to get it ready for a housing conversion can

24:12

cost about as much as just building an

24:14

apartment building from the ground up. That

24:17

shows you the challenge of making these

24:19

transformations happen. Until

24:22

the value of the office tower drops

24:24

to virtually nothing,

24:26

it's going to be really hard for

24:28

somebody to just buy that building and convert it.

24:30

It's not just landlords and property managers

24:33

struggling with what to do with empty offices.

24:36

Cities are right there with them.

24:38

Every mayor says the same thing

24:40

about converting office to residential

24:42

and getting people back

24:44

downtown and getting people out of their pajamas

24:47

and all that stuff. But there

24:49

hasn't really been that much success.

24:52

I think one place where that's maybe most

24:55

evident is in this question of converting

24:58

offices to housing. Or

25:01

just building housing at all, because

25:03

this is the place where again, cities

25:06

have this opportunity because there

25:08

is all this pent-up demand and housing remains

25:10

are expensive. People want to live there. People want

25:12

to live there. Despite all this talk about the doom

25:14

loop, there is this massive exception to that, which

25:17

is clearly enormous

25:19

demand for housing in cities. Yet

25:22

many cities, the land use rules remains

25:25

so restrictive that it's really,

25:28

really challenging to build new housing on

25:30

an empty lot. Just say nothing

25:32

of undertaking a very complicated office

25:35

to residential conversion.

25:37

Okay. What if

25:41

we just let them fail? Let

25:44

the big office

25:46

buildings fail, banks take

25:49

them over, what then?

25:51

I think there's three potential problems with that.

25:54

One is you're giving

25:57

up on the second.

25:59

secondary services that rely on

26:02

those offices. And banks are notoriously

26:04

bad property managers. They're

26:07

not interested in scrounging

26:09

around for some pop-up tenant that's gonna

26:12

occupy the space for six months or whatever.

26:15

But from a city perspective, you really don't

26:17

want that building to be empty because

26:20

an empty building means empty sidewalks

26:22

around it. It means fewer customers for the neighboring

26:25

shops and stores. It means fewer people riding

26:27

mass transit, et cetera. The

26:30

idea of these buildings being mothballed is bad

26:32

for the urban environment around the buildings. It's

26:34

also bad for city tax rolls

26:37

because if the value of

26:39

the building gets reassessed

26:42

based on the fact that nobody thinks it's worth

26:44

anything, then that's gonna reduce

26:46

its tax burden. And in the case of the city,

26:48

it's not a burden at all. It's actually a very

26:51

important source of revenue that they'll be

26:53

losing. And then the third thing perhaps

26:56

is that

26:56

local and regional banks

26:59

will be in trouble if

27:01

they have to assume all these

27:03

losses

27:04

on their commercial

27:06

real estate portfolios. Cause then

27:09

they're hanging on to buildings that are worth

27:11

nothing and they go bye-bye. They can't just

27:13

write that down. They thought they had tens of

27:16

billions of dollars in downtown office assets.

27:18

And it turns out all those buildings are

27:20

actually worth like two or $3 billion. That's

27:23

a pretty big write down that

27:26

they are going to be reluctant to make. And

27:28

then once they do, it's gonna have all these knock

27:30

on effects in how they run the rest of their business.

27:33

Now, I don't mean

27:35

to so panic about this question.

27:38

One interesting thing about commercial real estate

27:40

is that while the downtown office tower

27:42

is the biggest symbol perhaps of this

27:44

sector, downtown office space makes

27:47

up a small percentage of the country's

27:49

total office space, most of which is in the suburbs.

27:52

And then office space as a whole makes up

27:54

a small portion of commercial real estate

27:57

as a whole, which includes all kinds of other.

28:00

uses like malls and data

28:02

centers and even multifamily

28:04

housing. So all that is to say, I

28:06

wouldn't count on a rerun

28:09

of 2008 caused by abandoned

28:12

downtown office towers, but it certainly won't

28:14

be good for the downtown neighborhood

28:16

or for the city.

28:18

Other bright spots

28:21

or ideas about fixing

28:23

this cluster of economies

28:28

short of completely changing

28:30

the way cities

28:33

are built and municipal

28:35

tax revenue is collected. I

28:38

think the idea that gives me the most optimism

28:41

is the idea that for a long time,

28:44

cities have designed their economies around

28:47

creating as many incentives for

28:50

white collar office relocations

28:52

and they've been competing for these firms,

28:55

and they've been adjusting their mix of taxes

28:57

and services to best cater

28:59

basically to corporate executives

29:01

to try and get them to relocate their offices. But

29:04

that line of thinking, that

29:07

offering competing incentives to try and lure

29:09

the next Amazon HQ2, that's

29:13

out the window now because there's no

29:15

guarantee that getting the corporate HQ comes

29:17

with any of the employees who are

29:20

going to invest in the housing stock and

29:22

spend their money and hire nannies and all that

29:24

stuff. To me, this

29:26

hints at a new urban paradigm

29:29

where cities are actually more focused simply

29:31

on the people who live there

29:33

and maybe on more basic functions of city

29:35

government, which are providing

29:37

good services and making sure that the people

29:40

who live in the city are getting what they need. I

29:42

think that is the reallocation

29:44

of resources that is going

29:46

to be essential if cities are going to maintain

29:49

their status as attractive places to live

29:51

going forward. Because going forward, they're

29:54

actually not going to be competing for offices

29:56

at all. They're simply going to be competing

29:58

for the workers more. directly. And

30:02

that's a frightening change. And in the short

30:04

run, it might be painful. But in the long

30:06

run, it probably equates to

30:09

an urban policy that is more closely

30:11

aligned with the needs of residents than

30:14

what we've seen for the last few decades.

30:24

Henry Gabbar, thank you so much

30:27

for coming on and talking

30:27

with me. Thanks for having me. Henry

30:33

Gabbar covers cities, architecture

30:35

and the environment for Slate. And

30:37

that is it for our show today. What Next

30:39

TBD is produced by Evan Campbell. Our

30:42

show is edited by Mia Armstrong Lopez.

30:45

Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio

30:47

for Slate. TBD is part

30:49

of the larger What Next family. And

30:52

we're also part of Future Tense, a partnership

30:54

of Slate, Arizona State University and

30:56

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31:12

right. We will be back next week with more episodes.

31:14

I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening.