The Time Bomb Lurking in All Those Empty Office Buildings

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Please don’t blame the pandemic. The ridiculousness of commercial real estate and the future of a drop in the need for office space was predicted in exponential organizations years ago.

They made the risky decision, and now taxpayers are going to have to bail them out again?

Funny how the billionaires who expect handouts for their bad investments are the same ones who think everyone with student loans should suffer forever

It’s interesting that the media focuses on the health of the economy more than the health of the citizens that make the economy run

Just because you can add background music to a video doesn't mean that you should. Think of the viewer trying to focus on what is being said.

I was an underwriter in commercial real estate lending in the years right after the great recession, and I remember being told (without actually being told) to try and approve as many loans as possible because we needed the origination income. The institution wasn't making hardly anything from interest income, because of the historically low interest rates, so there was a real pressure to approve as many loans as possible so we could collect the origination fee. The origination fee is a percentage of the loan amount (ours was 1%), so there was also an incentive to approve larger loans. The current situation doesn't surprise me at all. It was inevitable.

The economy was never fixed in 2008 - the companies and state just made a bunch of new dumb decisions as they didn’t want to fix the issues and instead just kicking the can down the road and now it’s all going to come crashing down. And again, it’ll be the regular guy who’ll have to pay the bill, yet the regular guy has not benefited at all since the financial crisis. It’s completely outrageous.

Insane how theres simultaneously a giant commercial real estate crisis going on due to oversupply, while at the same time there's an affordable housing crisis due to undersupply. All without doing anything about changing our archaic zoning laws and no real infrastructure projects for urban areas pertaining to mass transporation. San Fran can't build giant apartment towers because Nimby's don't want their views ruined and New York can't fill up their rent controlled apartments because landlords want market rate rental prices for rent controlled units. This country is a disaster.

Speculators overspeculated? Oh no, we can't let them fail

When homes and rents across the world rise to unsustainable highs, pricing out generations and people in need, they don't say anything. When the few wealthy landlords of office buildings possibly lose out on their rent money, it's the worst financial crisis since 2008

Housing advocates have been saying for years that our cities are full of empty buildings only have value on paper and their owners are propping up their value with debt. We've been told we were crazy this whole time.

After the 2008 bail out, I'm partial to letting the banks fail

Geez, private equity, banks and commercial real estate companies face huge losses on office buildings and they're insisting that we all 'return to the office'! I wonder why? It has nothing to do with productivity, company culture or clients and everything to do with trying to protect bad investments at artificially low interest rates.

We need an Amendment banning the government from bailing out failing lenders.

0% interest rates are turning out to be disastrous in the long run.

What is going on is that bankers think that bankers are the most important people in the world --and tall office buildings to house them are therefore the most important structures to build lots and lots of.

"Office Space" is not an industry.

It pains me to have to drive past acres of empty new-ish commercial buildings with big windows and sweeping architecture, and also see empty commercial skyscrapers in the distance that are sitting vacant. Some for years. canada is still in the midst of the worst housing crisis / housing shortage in the history of the nation. I've been "between rentals" for 3 years as of next month (March). No addictions or mental health issues. My stuff in storage and my home based business still on hold. I want to be housed. I just turned 55, but that means nothing here. If even 5% of these commercial properties were converted into housing, people like me would be overjoyed. At this point, stick a toilet and shower in a windowless storage unit and I'd take it. There's no way it's as complicated to convert at least some commercial space to housing as the politicians claim. Builders, architects, and tradespeople back up that statement. It certainly doesn't take years to "study" the issue. Even a law that every commercial building must have at least 1 (to several floors, depending on height) of housing above it would be a start. It worked in Europe for hundreds of years. Every shop had a living space above it. I don't care if I live above a bagel shop at a mini mall, or above a stand-alone stationery store, or in a converted office space. Real people need housing! Now!

This is the real reason all the CEOs are pushing for their employees to return to the office. The CEOs and their wealthy friends and cronies are the same folks who who own all this commercial real estate. The only thing they care about is propping up the values of their commercial real estate holdings, and all the talk about "Productivity," "Creativity" or whatever other BS they're spouting is just smoke and mirrors to distract from what they really care about, which is protecting the value of their investments. The pandemic proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that workers spending unpaid time sitting in cars or on transit commuting to offices provides exactly ZERO value to the economy, but the wealthy CEOs and bankers who run the world would rather people suffer needlessly than be slightly less rich.