Working from home and future of city centres

jkforde wrote: »

If a lot of people choose to opt to work from home post-pandemic, what'll that do to the city centre? that's a lot of cash not being spent in the centre not to mention just the presence of people milling around.. what's the centre going to look and feel like in 5 - 10 years? what opportunities could it enable? just curious what's going to transpire

Just my 2c worth but I think you have to take a look at what the streets were like before covid-19 came in. 20 or 30 years ago we had streets with distinct business, many family owned and operated. Now, if you take shop street as an example, we have a collection of mobile phone shops and souvenir outlets.
Definitely will be opportunities going forward but a program of tax breaks and incentives will be needed, primarily to revitalize the streets and then to encourage development.

biko wrote: »

Lots of smaller shops will have been killed off by the covid restrictions.
High street shops will probably be ok, they have larger reserves.

Not necessarily, if Edward Sq is anything to go by.

A Cork man posting here , as I seen the topic on the main page . The revitalisation of village , town and city centres is going to be dependent on turning the central areas back into living cities where people can both live , work and shop . The days of a shopping only district are dead , the best way to encourage it is approving high quality city centre accomodation that is not allowed of be used for air b&b or similar .

For a lot of people in their 20s and maybe when they get older again they would love to be in the heart of the city.

Part of this will not just be accomodation but making the central areas , pedestrian friendly , minimise air pollution and improve on street dining etc. Taking back these areas from the cars that are just passing through or only in for a monthly shop .

The demise of city centres will likely hit pension funds who have invested in office buildings that no staff now occupy.
Cant see leases on these being a very valuable asset.

To date no company i know of is looking at reducing their city centre office accomodation. What they are actively looking at is changing it over to more of a hot desk type environment where people can come and go alot easier than previous. So they can have more staff than before in a smaller space as they are not all there concurrently.

For alot of industries we are dealing with people in their 40s,50s and 60s who are at high level in management and they have an expectation of meeting rooms and office space to be available

I think city centres will be a lot less busy but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. There could be much more vibrant suburban and rural towns. The convention of loads fo people having to cram into the city centre and then cram back out every evening, competition for housing and business premises sending rents Sky high, was never done because it was good. It was done because it was necessary.

Now I think we have the opportunity to rethink how to structure the whole thing. Working from home will mean people can live where they want and only go to the office a few days a week or month. That means they won’t buy as many coffees and some Costas will close. boo-hoo for Costa - but I do care about the employees who will need support to move or train for other jobs.

I think office parks will suffer more than city centres, if anyone had the misfortune of commuting from Carlow to City West everyday, the thought of doing it again will cause them PTSD

City Centres are already more leisure focused than at any stage in the past and there's a proliferation of apartment building in the docks area where the bulk of modern offices are, so these areas will probably become more lively than they are currently. You might see some of the 'offices' in the georgian core of the city revert to other uses, perhaps fancy period style apartments. I'd expect the leisurification of city centres to increase. More pedestrianisation schemes and generally calmer environments. I do think offices will fill back up again, even with people wfh 2 or 3 days a week economic growth will fill the space, nature abhorrs a vacuum.

turn the office blocks into apartments and sell them off.

_Brian wrote: »

The demise of city centres will likely hit pension funds who have invested in office buildings that no staff now occupy.
Cant see leases on these being a very valuable asset.

This will be a major issue and not one I have seen discussed elsewhere.

Fair points CelticRambler but this conversation would apply to most major towns and cities in Ireland not just Dublin.

Will refrain from comment on your description of the inhabitants of Dublin going forward.

Company i work for, went with a hybrid model a few years ago now. They drastically reduced office space and offered everyone to work from homes pretty much. By all accounts a lot of money has been saved on office space and it has worked out for everyone who works there.

At the start, there were restrictions on how many days we could work from home, but those were ignored after the first couple of years.

I think a lot of wanting to keep an eye on people by older management types, will not be able to justify the attitude in the face of savings, and the fact that most companies already have software to check who is and isn't working. I am not even talking about crazy invasive tools or anything, but simple stuff like ticketing systems, document management etc already track who is doing what when. The tools are already there if needed, and regular meetings deadlines etc on the there own are enough to see if someone is or isn't doing any work.

I think companies that don't at least adopt a hybrid model, will find themselves in a bind, as the best people will go to places that offer them the option of WFH, as even if you largely work in the office, being able to work from home the odd time is very useful, even for the lads who come in pretty much everyday before covid, the WFH option was used by them now and again.

Outkast_IRE wrote: »

But alot of your non tech companies are currently not looking at major changes bar setting their offices up for more hot desking in the future. No need to take on additional space but you can have additional staff.

I work for a chain of hospitals in the US. I worked in the office for a few years. Our CFO became the CEO which of course means financially restructuring. He made the decision before COVID that reducing the physical real estate should be a long term goal. He gave up the lease on a couple of the admin buildings and sold another one. He expected to save about $27 million in the first 2 years just from the operating costs alone.

I would bet companies like Wayfair, SmartBear and others without a physical dependency will at least remain partially remote. They'd be silly not too.

It's becoming a bigger story in the media when a company announces an intention to bring employees back into the office in future like a certain US bank.

wes wrote: »

Company i work for, went with a hybrid model a few years ago now. They drastically reduced office space and offered everyone to work from homes pretty much. By all accounts a lot of money has been saved on office space and it has worked out for everyone who works there.

At the start, there were restrictions on how many days we could work from home, but those were ignored after the first couple of years.

I think a lot of wanting to keep an eye on people by older management types, will not be able to justify the attitude in the face of savings, and the fact that most companies already have software to check who is and isn't working.

This is going to become a big revolution work culture wise, I think. Measuring employee productivity. The concept of starting at 8am and finishing at 5pm is silly. Managers who micro-manage and need to see their staff at all times should go the way of the Dodo. More will be invested in the value of measurable output. Managing based on results rather than hours.

If you look at executives and the goals they set for departments and the company overall for a given year, they never include an expectation of 500k collective employee hours or any of that sh1te. If they can meet or exceed expectations, why would they care how many hours were spent to get them to those goals?

My cousin use to work for a large chain of toy stores in the US. He would manage the team who worked the night/morning shift in the lead up to Christmas. He said most of his workers had other jobs or were in college. He told them "the company expected this much stock stocked on the shelves and this much replenished in the back each night. You guys are all scheduled to work until 6am. I can't let you leave early but if you get the work done before the end of your shift, any time leftover is yours to study if that's what you want to do or find a spot to sleep if that's what you want as long as you stay here and clock out at the end of your shift"

Goal based is best, imo.

deathbomber wrote: »

yes agreed on wanting to keep an eye by some people in management but these people need to adapt, this is really the future. It will also potentially bring life back to rural towns impacted by immigration and younger folk moving to Dublin, Cork etc for work. i see it as a very manageable great opportunity we should embrace

Which goes against what some have said on this forum and also what some politicians have said about urban planning. The broadband rollout is required but it would be less of a pain in the arse if fewer people lived out in the shticks...

I agree with you though. I think it would be great if they could use this to rejuvenate some of the towns and villages around the country. Get class sizes back under control and alleviate some of the pressure on Dublin. I'm living in a small spot, we're lucky we have 1GBps Fibre so I can work remotely just fine. There are only 17 kids in the playschool my son goes to. We moved here from a small town closer to the city where there were more than 30 kids in the playschool. The principal here said in 2001, they almost closed the school entirely due to low numbers. Since then there has been a population boom with young families moving in. It's a great community. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else even if JustEat and Deliveroo don't come out this far :pac:

westgolf wrote: »

Fair points CelticRambler but this conversation would apply to most major towns and cities in Ireland not just Dublin.

Will refrain from comment on your description of the inhabitants of Dublin going forward.

Why refrain? Surely that's the nub of the problem, especially if the context is work-from-home and its impact on city centres? I don't have any hard-and-fast statistics to hand, but personal experience suggests that the vast majority of Dublin residents (can't say how it is in the other Irish cities, as I only know them as an occasional visitor myself) are:
- Irish students, a lot now working from home-home because they don't like their flatmates/Dublin that much;
- Irish singletons working for one or other of the tech/finance companies and only living in Dublin because that's where the job it;
- Foreign students and tech/finance people who are only there until they have no reason to be there any longer
- Long-stay tourists

Sure, you get some couples (again, often keeping an eye on the property market outside the Pale) and even some one-child families; but they're few and far between. Two-child families or more, other than those in social housing, they're practically non-existent in the centre-centre; and even extending the "centre" out as far as the two canals, you'd be hard pressed to find many "big" families - hardly surprising when there's nowhere for them to live. A quick bit of googling shows me that I can get a proper family-home-sized apartment in central Paris (5 bed, 2 living rooms) for less than the cost of a something similar (looking at Hanover Quay).

The same argument that was made above for developing serviced estates close to town/village centres applies to cities too: if there were more opportunities for families to live in the city centre, within walking distance of a place of work, the city would be more resistant to societal shocks such as the one we're experiencing at the moment.

CelticRambler wrote: »

Not being resident in Dublin/Ireland, it's interesting to see how so many of you equate "city centre" with "office work(ers)" with only the odd voice suggesting that the life of city centre could be based on anything other than a grab-and-go coffee shop culture. Here on the continent, while there are some cities that are devoid of human life outside of office hours, for the most part, there is a living, breathing population of permanent city-centre residents. This is especially so in the less touristy cities, but I read an article last year describing how coronavirus purged many European big cities of the infestation of temporary visitors (tourists and commuting workers) and actually enabled life to "get back to normal" for real people.

This does not apply to Dublin, because however much someone might want to live a European-style city-centre life, it is impossible to do so: family-sized apartments never feature in any of the development projects, so either you pay an astronomic price for a Georgian mansion or you have to live in the suburbs or beyond. I would have thought that now would be a great time for the government to claw back commercial property for conversion to good-quality more-than-DINKY-sized accommodation ... but I thought that too just after the Crash of 08 and several times before, and it never happened; so I expect central Dublin to remain inhabited by singletons with no lasting attachment to the place for the foreseeable future.

There's often a dislike and contempt for cities and towns in Ireland from our mostly rural electorate and its representatives in the Dáil. They are seen as a necessary evil really.

They are a handy whipping boy for drumming up votes (opposition to "them up in Dublin" or replace with "them in" the nearest big town or city somehow damaging rural or "real" Ireland).

The local governments (in Dublin anyway) are fragmented + have limited powers. IMO Dublin is run by central govt. as a cash cow for efficiently making money for the state, not with a view of making it a good place where someone would want to live. So we see problems allowed to fester in Dublin for decades (e.g. the hotel building boom & short stay/AirBnB tourism) because there's good money to be made out of it. I think there was about to be a boom of throwing up "bedsit" type accomodation for wealthy foreign students and young professionals (apologies - "co living" or whatever its called) again because there is alot of profit in it but hopefully Coronavirus has done some good & put a spanner in some of that getting built. edit: end moan!