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Why Work-from-Home Will Remain a New Culture

People will give up a raise in pay to WFH.

In March of 2020, people in business and government were told to go home and keep working. In one case, I heard someone say their executive director announced, “if you are on your way to work, turn around and go home.”

The great work-from-home (WFH) experiment began with little thought and no studies as to the impact that these decisions would have on individual organizations and the places where they operate from.

Now, there is a study by the Becker Friedman Institute in Chicago: Why Working From Home Will Stick.

Quoting from the Puget Sound Business Journal that had an article on the above study: “The trend could have multimillion-dollar implications for commercial real estate, labor market trends, city government budgets and the culinary sector, among others.

“‘Cities like San Francisco, New York and Chicago and so on have long been big destinations for inward commuting,’ David said, adding that with fewer people commuting, fewer people would be spending money. ‘Commercial property values will probably decline for office buildings but even more so for retail space. That means lower property tax revenues and lower sales tax revenues.’

“Cities will have to adjust, David said. Those options could include transforming areas that were once purely office space to mixed-use, and encouraging more residential development in areas that previously had little.

“But David said cities will feel the short-term loss of revenue they normally gained from the lost commuters – an issue many cities have been grappling with for the past 14 months.
Eric Holdeman is a nationally known emergency manager. He has worked in emergency management at the federal, state and local government levels. Today he serves as the Director, Center for Regional Disaster Resilience (CRDR), which is part of the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER). The focus for his work there is engaging the public and private sectors to work collaboratively on issues of common interest, regionally and cross jurisdictionally.