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This scene is known to anyone who has seen “The Office” in the last 50 years or worked from 9am to 5pm. Cubicle. Insufficient lighting. And outside the window, you can see the parking lot and the vast green lawn. This is an image of a classic suburban office building that became popular in postwar America.
Due to the days of working from home, many parking lots and partitions are empty. In an article published in the Business section today Sunday, Emily Badger, who covers the city and urban policy of The Upshot, explores the “lonely last day” of a suburban office park, as she says.Below she shares Consider how office closures will affect the local economy, and whether the same fate will come to the Big Tech campus. This interview has been edited and summarized.
How did you come up with the idea for this story?
Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon that downtown was emptied during a pandemic. Earlier this year, I came across data from a researcher named Tracy Hadden Loh at the Brookings Institution. She saw data suggesting that there are actually higher vacancy markets across the country in some suburban neighborhoods than what real estate officials call the Central Business District.
“Oh yeah, there’s this kind of office in America that hasn’t received much attention,” I thought. From the postwar period to the mid-to-late 1990s, it was the main way to build office space in this country. Everyone knows this very well. Either you worked there, your dad worked there, or you watched the movie “Office Space”. It’s everywhere, but it wasn’t really in front of me. “When I put remote work on top of that, what’s happening in these places where the population is already sparse?” I wondered.
I’m surprised that there are few improvements when the open concept became popular.
One of the campuses I focused on was the headquarters of Toys “R” Us in Wayne, NJ. There are many very large companies in the United States with offices in these locations. However, there are also many local accountant and lawyer offices, Dander Mifflin. These buildings served as a functional office space that people could access. It happened that we reached a pandemic and many timelines matched. These buildings are now 30, 40 and 50 years old. They are becoming a kind of obsolete. The nature of the economy has changed. What is now called knowledge labor relies on having all these collaboration spaces and spaces where workers collide with each other, as opposed to cubicle farms. Next, layer the remote work on top of it.
Did you travel to these campuses?
I grew up in Chicago, and I was there early this spring, driving the suburbs on one of the highways. The scenery of this box-shaped corporate office park is lined up one after another along the highway. They all have a large corporate logo on the outside of the building designed for drivers to read. All parking lots are empty. That’s another thing that made me think that this is a really interesting place, especially like America, and something interesting is happening right now.
How do these closures affect the economy of the town in which the building is located?
What’s interesting about these spaces is that it’s happening not only in the office park itself, but also in the identity of the surrounding community. Many places are associated with “Oh, we are home to the headquarters of All State.” The community draws a lot of tax revenue from these offices. Thinking about getting rid of them or turning them into something else, like an apartment building, requires an almost radical rethinking of the identity of these spaces, as well as the communities around them.
How do these offices compare to the Big Tech campus? Are they next?
Apple has built this vast suburban campus. Many other technology companies, especially in Silicon Valley, do this too. In many respects, they have the same problems as this older generation office in that they are isolated, dependent on cars, and not connected to the surrounding community. In some respects, they are intentionally designed to be unconnected. Many of these places have fake main streets built in, so it feels like there’s more activity outside of work. As such, they have more equipment, but still have the fundamental idea that this is a closed space.
How did you pick up a topic that could be dry and find such an interesting entry point?
For me, this is not a real estate story. This is a story about this idea, which has been the center of our culture for 50 or 60 years. Not only are we rethinking the physical office space, we are also rethinking the ideas behind that space. I always want to know, what is the history of this? Where did these ideas come from? In my report, I often talk to historians, in this case architecture and landscaping experts, as well as developers and economists. It turns out that there is a story of this fascinating origin about these places and why they exist. From the moment I thought about the suburban office park, it was clear that this was a topic with other interesting issues that I could bring in when reporting on it.
Was there anything else surprising about your report?
The very central theme of my report was the idea of green and green spaces. It’s this fascinating idea that many employers once had. Sitting at your desk, looking out the window, and the trees, you’ll get great ideas that you wouldn’t get anywhere else. One of the really valuable things in my report was this book by Louise Mozingo, called “Pastoral Capitalism”. It’s all about these places. I think it’s a very interesting and interesting idea. Looking back on how much time I spend working at home, I’m thinking about how to write things while looking out the window.
In retrospect, this very deep belief that lightning will hit you with a great idea if this overall idea of an office building can be seen outside a wooden window rather than something like an air shaft. It’s really interesting to me that it was built on the basis of the office building next to you. There is certainly some value in it, and there is also some value in being able to get out of your building and meet others. As with many, all some of the above combinations are probably pretty healthy.
