At this point at outdoor soccer games, etc we are at a middle point where there is a hodgepodge of people either wearing masks or not wearing masks.

Being 100% focused on science and reason, I now stopped wearing masks completely outdoors, partly because I like breathing. Plus, unlike all of those WFH snowflakes I literally wear a mask ALL DAY EVERY DAY at work and have been doing it for well over a year, so it lost all of its novelty ages ago. It’s stifling!

Probably over the next few months people will stop wearing their masks outdoors and the only people left still doing so will be those germaphobe types or those weirdos akin to those hermit characters who own 9 cats and yell at people who walk by their house

This is very short sighted. All that needs to happen is more time, when the pandemic fears are mostly behind us and the labor market swings back into employer’s favor. Then the WFH snowflakes will be fucked.

I think that WFH is self-centered and count me in 100% on the side of you are at your employer’s pleasure, and if they want you to be somewhere you need to be there if you want to keep collecting a paycheck.. I see no reason those dynamics will change, except in a few people’s wet dreams.

There’s also a question of who is being tested and when.

If NYC was, as a hypothetical, testing all city workers every day or every other day, then that’s a huge volume of essentially useless testing.

If another jurisdiction has free testing widely available, but people are using it in a targeted way (like when they suspect they might have been exposed or feel symptoms), then you may have fewer tests but still capture the cases.

Then if you’re like England until recently and making people pay £80 for a rapid test or £200 for a PCR test, then no one is going to get a test unless their employer is paying for it.

There has got to be cost savings from not having employees coming into work, with an extreme example of one of these placing going fully online. Maybe in terms of insurance or utilities, with the main one being building leases. On the other end I think it can contribute to employee savings with transportation, but the people with kids have a different situation.

I don't think Florida is deliberately suppressing COVID numbers. New York just tests a LOT. New York is far above the national average, with the fourth highest testing rate in the country. There have been about 2.7 tests administered for every resident of New York, 1.5 for every California, and 1.3 for every Floridian. And by testing so much, New York just understands outbreaks and spread way better than Florida does.

Another way to look at it: Florida has a similarly sized population to New York (state), but New York is currently administering about 200k tests/day versus Florida's roughly 60k/day. By having a much more robust testing apparatus, New York will probably detect outbreaks at an earlier stage than Florida.

it also is a large cost on employees in that they need to maintain a home office with reliable internet.

The office vacancy rate in San Francisco is the highest I can recall ever (40 years) because of companies trying to sublease what they now consider unneeded office space due to employees working at home. Whether they can actually sublease it successfully is another matter but they are trying and will save money if it works out for them.

But here's the other part of it some may not be expecting:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...-of-big-cities

So yeah, the company will save money multiple ways and you may well be making less. For real city-lovers, it could be a double whammy: Losing the fun of big city life (which has admittedly been nowhere to be found during COVID but will be back) and making less money (albeit probably needing less).

I have been applying to several SF based companies (remote) lately so I'm glad the WFH thing for them is taking off as their job market is much better than ours here in Houston.

Papa John's Pizza said last night on CNBC they have lots of openings.

Cool story but I ain't delivering pizzas with four college degrees.

Do 4 college degrees come with a sense of humor? You know I'm kidding you.

Why are you using a politicized, culture-war term like "snowflakes" to insult people who work from home?

Is it because you aren't profiting as much from your urban residential real estate as you did when everyone was physically commuting into the Loop, and you think you can better increase your personal profits by creating a stigma around working from home that induces people to physically commute to an office again?

We are all (well, mostly) urbanists here--fans of a lively urban environment. I assume you are too. And the thing is that if only a minority of workers do return to be working in downtown offices on any given day, it's really going to detract from the vibrancy of the city environment. Economically, it has already (I hope temporarily) pushed the San Francisco commercial vacancy rate higher than I've ever seen it:

https://socketsite.com/archives/2021...n-s-f-now.html

Fewer people working downtown also means the need for fewer lunch places and fewer after-work "watering holes" (at one point, there were places in SF that greatly resembled the picture somebody posted of the London after-work "pub scene") and ultimately could negatively impact things like bars and clubs, and even the Symphony and Opera etc because I believe some of the audience is people who work downtown and stick around in the city to attend performances after work.

If it happens, it's just bad news all around for city life. But I'm a "cock-eyed optimist" and, as I've said, I think while we may well enter a hybrid model where a significant number of employees are allowed to work at home several days a week, many will gradually drift back to the office and there will be (perhaps unintended) incentives to do so.

Meanwhile, are we seeing the beginning of the revival?

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranc...-sf-lease.html

They won't need 100,000 square feet for the CEO to put his feet up and manage a work force that's at home or in Lake Tahoe.

And then:

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranc...san-franc.html

Salesforce has a massive amount of space in downtown SF. Depending on how many of its employees constitute "most of" them, I can certainly see them giving up one or maybe both of the 2 other buildings they own (one building) or lease (one building) at the corner of Mission & Fremont, and we know the lease of even more space they once contemplated in the Oceanwide project is off the table. But my guess is that they will continue, with some spacial modification, to fill up their eponymous tower.

This is correct. I think there is always a need for the more cynical types out there to say that people are motivated by selfish interests....well, duh. Of course we all are to some degree.

But this is SkyscraperPage, NOT Suburbansubdivisiondream.com last time I checked.

Our greatest cities thrive, and must be fed by, human concentration. Transit, density, etc is an absolute vital component to continue to have what this forum seems to celebrate. So yes, for many reasons we should want employees to be returning downtown, in addition to tourists, etc.

Study suggests that COVID fatalities are significantly undercounted both globally and in the U.S.:

^ These guys are an outlier, but of course their study will be highlighted by a certain faction.

Every serious person believes that the death toll is being significantly undercounted. It's pretty obvious that it's happening when you consider how much the total death count has increase year-over-year, and how much that varies from the COVID death count.

If it became an actual problem they should look at converting units, since we already have a housing shortage...plus that would be tight to live in Salesforce Tower.

Yeah I don't see SF magically becoming this place nobody visits when things open :haha:, and I doubt the views or food got worse. What I worry about is how exactly do e-workers (or whatever) pay taxes if they are hired from out of state? The state just had a surplus.