Working From Home May Impact Downtown Spending

There is a report out today from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics that predicts due to the post-pandemic work-from-home shift there will be a potential impact on downtowns and retail that formerly relied on office workers as their customers. Just think, even if employees were allowed to work from home just two days a week this might reduce spending on lunchtime meals by 40%. ‘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,” Steven Davis, one of the paper’s authors said, adding what 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.”  I can also see a reduction in dry cleaning, makeup and cosmetics, and business clothes purchases if employees are staying home working in their sweats two or three days a week.