Percentage change in duration of one-way commutes from 2019 to 2022 9.8% shorter –8.9 –8.1 –7.7 –7.5 –7.5 –6.6 –6.5 –6.3 –6.1 –6.1 –6.0 Atlanta Washington San Francisco Boston Kansas City, Mo. Chicago Minneapolis New York City Los Angeles Philadelphia Columbus Denver Source: Replica | Note: Change is from autumn of 2019 to autumn of 2022. More
If you have never had the option to work from home because your job must be done in person, tell us how your commute has shifted over the past three years.Cities and workplaces have been upended since the pandemic began. Some people moved from cities to suburbs. Stores and restaurants moved out of busy downtown areas. Train and bus schedules shifted.The New York Times is reporting on how commuting has changed over the last three years for people who have never had the option to work from home because their jobs must be done in person — in health care, hospitality, food service, manufacturing, building maintenance, sanitation, public safety, you name it. We’d like to hear about your experiences. We may use your contact information to get in touch with you, and we won’t use your submission without first confirming with you that it’s OK.Tell us about your commute. More
Before the pandemic, Maz Karimian’s commute to Lower Manhattan was like that of many New Yorkers’: an often miserable 30-minute journey on two subway lines that were usually crammed or delayed.By comparison, when he returned to the office last week for the first time since the coronavirus began sweeping through the city, his commute felt serene: a leisurely bicycle ride from his home in Carroll Gardens to his company’s relocated office about 10 minutes away in Dumbo.“I love the subway and think it’s a terrific transit system but candidly, if I can be in fresh air versus shared, enclosed air, I’ll choose that 10 times out of 10,” said Mr. Karimian, the principal strategist at ustwo, a digital design studio.More than 26 months after the pandemic sparked a mass exodus from New York City office buildings, and after many firms announced and then shelved return-to-office plans, employees are finally starting to trickle back to their desks. But remote work has fundamentally reshaped the way people work and diminished the dominance of the corporate workplace.Companies have adapted. Conference rooms got a makeover. Personal desks became hot desks, open to anyone on a first-come basis. Managers embraced flexible work arrangements, letting employees decide when they want to work in person.And some are taking more drastic measures to make the return to work appealing: picking up their offices and relocating them closer to where their employees live. In New York City, the moves reflect an effort by organizations to reduce a major barrier to getting to work — the commute — just as they start to call their workers back.Before the pandemic, workers in New York City had the longest one-way commute on average in the country, nearly 38 minutes.About two-thirds of ustwo’s employees live in Brooklyn, so it made sense to move the office to Dumbo, on the Brooklyn waterfront, after a decade in the Financial District in Manhattan, said Gabriel Marquez, its managing director.The new space is about 11,500 square feet, slightly smaller than its former office, and was less expensive per square foot to lease than most offices in Manhattan. It is also better suited for when employees do come into the office, featuring an open-air rooftop with Wi-Fi for meetings, he said.“We didn’t need the same relationship with the office and have everyone in five days a week,” said Mr. Marquez, who said that employees are mandated to be there twice a week, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. “It felt like, culturally, it is a good fit and for a lot of companies like ours in our area.”Before the pandemic, the morning commute for Maz Karimian, who works at ustwo, took about 30 minutes on two separate subway lines into Manhattan. Now, his company’s new office in Brooklyn is within biking and walking distance from his home.Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesAs New York City tries to climb out from the depths of economic turmoil, there are recent signs that the city is rebounding despite concerns about crime on the subways and rising coronavirus cases. Tourists are visiting New York at a greater rate than last year, hotel occupancy has increased and earlier this month, daily subway ridership set a pandemic-era record of 3.53 million passengers.Despite those promising signals, a vital piece of the city’s economy remains battered: office buildings.Before the pandemic, office towers sustained an entire ecosystem of coffee shops, retailers and restaurants. Without that same rush of people, thousands of businesses have closed and for-lease signs still hang in many storefronts.Despite pleas for months from Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul for companies to require people return to the office, so far, many have heeded demands by their employees to maintain much of the job flexibility that they have come to enjoy during the pandemic.Just 8 percent of Manhattan office workers were in-person five days a week from the end of April to early May, according to a survey from the Partnership for New York City, a business group.About 78 percent of the 160 major employers surveyed said they have adopted hybrid remote and in-person arrangements, up from 6 percent before the pandemic. Most workers plan to come into the office just a few days a week, the group said.The seismic shift in office building usage has been one of the most challenging situations in decades for New York real estate, a bedrock industry for the city, and has upended the vast stock of offices in Manhattan, home to the two largest business districts in the country, the Financial District and Midtown.About 19 percent of office space in Manhattan is vacant, the equivalent of 30 Empire State Buildings. That rate is up from about 12 percent before the pandemic, according to Newmark, a real estate firm. Office buildings have been more stable in Brooklyn, where the vacancy rate is also about 19 percent but has not fluctuated much since before the pandemic, Newmark said.Daniel Ismail, the lead office analyst at Green Street, a commercial real estate research firm, predicted that the office market in Manhattan would worsen in the coming years as companies adjusted their work arrangements and as leases that were signed years ago started to expire. In general, companies that have kept offices have downsized, realizing they do not need as much space, while others have relocated to newer or renovated buildings with better amenities in transit-rich areas, he said.Even before the pandemic, it was not uncommon for companies to move offices throughout the city or to open separate locations outside of Manhattan. The city offers a tax incentive for businesses that relocate to an outer borough, with up to $3,000 in annual business-income tax credits per employee.Nearly 200 companies received it in 2018, for a total of $27 million in tax credits, the most recent data available, according to the city’s Department of Finance. But some office developers are betting on neighborhoods outside Manhattan becoming attractive in their own right, luring companies that specifically want to avoid the hustle-and-bustle of Midtown.More than 1.5 million square feet of office space is under construction in Brooklyn, including a 24-story commercial building in Downtown Brooklyn.Two Trees Management, the real estate development company that transformed Dumbo, is turning the former Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg into a 460,000-square-foot office building. Jed Walentas, its chief executive, said he had so much confidence in the project that it was being renovated on speculation, without office tenants lined up beforehand.“You can’t ignore the talent base that has shifted to Brooklyn and Queens,” Mr. Walentas said. “The notion that they will all take the F train or the L train or whatever train into the middle of Manhattan, that’s faulty.”“We didn’t need the same relationship with the office and have everyone in five days a week,” said Gabriel Marquez, the managing director at ustwo, which moved to the Dumbo neighborhood in Brooklyn.Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesTo be sure, the latest outer-borough office trend is still nascent, and the unpredictable whims of the pandemic could change its course in the future.Brian R. Steinwurtzel, the co-chief executive at GFP Real Estate, whose firm largely owns properties in Manhattan, said that office markets in Queens and Brooklyn could attract certain niches of companies, such as biomedical and life science companies in Long Island City, Queens, where GFP has several sites.But overall, Mr. Steinwurtzel offered a curt assessment of the outer-borough markets: “It’s terrible.”Still, just being able to have panoramic views of Manhattan is enough for some companies.When the European advertising firm Social Chain opened an office in the United States before the pandemic, the group settled in the Flatiron area, an epicenter of the marketing world made famous decades ago by advertising giants on Madison Avenue.But after the pandemic struck and the firm decided to revisit its location, the prestige of being in Manhattan lacked the same magnetism — or necessity, said Stefani Stamatiou, the managing director of Social Chain USA.She toured office locations in Manhattan but none felt like the right fit. Then she traveled across the East River into Williamsburg and found 10 Grand Street, also a Two Trees property. It checked all the boxes — unobstructed views of Manhattan, a flexible floor plan and, most importantly, a shorter commute for a large number of Social Chain’s 42 employees.That includes Ms. Stamatiou, who now walks to work from her home in Greenpoint.“There is actual outside activities and restaurants down below us just like in Manhattan but there’s a sense of space,” Ms. Stamatiou said. “It made sense to be where the creative is, where the people are.” More
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesNew York City is beginning to rebound from the economic devastation of the pandemic.But it won’t be easy. Neighborhoods remain pockmarked by vacant commercial real estate, and the city’s unemployment rate remains almost twice the national average.While there are signs that the city is coming back to life, the path forward is anything but clear.New York Faces Lasting Economic Toll Even as Pandemic PassesThe city’s prosperity is heavily dependent on patterns of work and travel that may be irreversibly altered.Nelson D. Schwartz, Patrick McGeehan and As the national economy recovers from the pandemic and begins to take off, New York City is lagging, with changing patterns of work and travel threatening the engines that have long powered its jobs and prosperity.New York has suffered deeper job losses as a share of its work force than any other big American city. And while the country has regained two-thirds of the positions it lost after the coronavirus arrived, New York has recouped fewer than half, leaving a deficit of more than 500,000 jobs.New York City lost greatest share of jobs among 20 largest U.S. citiesThe city had an 11.8 percent decline in jobs from February 2020 to April 2021, almost three times the loss on the national level.
Source: Center for New York City Affairs at the New SchoolTaylor JohnstonRestaurants and bars are filling up again with New Yorkers eager for a return to normal, but scars are everywhere. Boarded-up storefronts and for-lease signs dot many neighborhoods. Empty sidewalks in Midtown Manhattan make it feel like a weekend in midweek. Subway ridership on weekdays is less than half the level of two years ago.The city’s economic plight stems largely from its heavy reliance on office workers, business travelers, tourists and the service businesses catering to all of them. All eyes are on September, when many companies aim to bring their workers back to the office and Broadway fully reopens, attracting more visitors and their dollars. But even then, the rebound will be only partial.The shift toward remote work endangers thousands of businesses that serve commuters who are likely to come into the office less frequently than before the pandemic, if at all. By the end of September, the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, predicts that only 62 percent of office workers will return, mostly three days a week.Restoring the city to economic health will be an imposing challenge for its next mayor, who is likely to emerge from the Democratic primary on Tuesday. The candidates have offered differing visions of how to help struggling small businesses and create jobs.“We are bouncing back, but we are nowhere near where we were in 2019,” said Barbara Byrne Denham, senior economist at Oxford Economics. “We suffered more than everyone else, so it will take a little longer to recover.”At 10.9 percent in May, the city’s unemployment rate was nearly twice the national average of 5.8 percent. In the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough, the rate is 15 percent. Workers in face-to-face sectors like restaurants and hospitality, many of whom are people of color, are still struggling.“While the recovery has probably exceeded expectations, unemployment remains staggeringly high for Black and brown individuals and historically marginalized communities,” said Jose Ortiz Jr., chief executive of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition, a work force development group.At the same time, hundreds of small businesses, which before the pandemic employed about half of the city’s work force, didn’t survive. And many that did are saddled with debt they took on to survive the downturn and owe tens of thousands of dollars in back rent.“I have a huge amount of debt to pay back because I had to borrow all over the place to stay alive,” said Robert Schwartz, the third-generation owner of Eneslow Shoes & Orthotics. He closed two of his four stores, but kept open branches on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in Little Neck, Queens. “We’ll survive, but it’s going to be a long, slow recovery.”Office buildings in Lower Manhattan. The city depends more heavily than other places on office workers, business travelers, and the service businesses catering to all of them.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesEven if just 10 percent of Manhattan office workers begin working remotely most of the time, that translates into more than 100,000 people a day not picking up a coffee and bagel on their way to work or a drink afterward.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesEmpty sidewalks in parts of the city once filled with office workers make it feel like a weekend in midweek.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesOne crucial factor in the city’s economic trajectory, civic and business leaders say, is addressing safety concerns. Violent crime has risen since the pandemic hit — including a high-profile Times Square shooting in May that wounded two women and a 4-year-old girl — and the police have recently increased Midtown foot patrols.“The negatives of New York life are worse,” said Seth Pinsky, chief executive of the 92nd Street Y, a longtime cultural destination on the Upper East Side.“Crime is going up and the city is dirtier,” added Mr. Pinsky, who served as president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “It’s critical that we get the virtuous cycle going again.”On Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on a radio show on WNYC that the city had more police officers in the subway than at any time in the last 25 years. “We want to really encourage people back, to protect everyone,” he said.Nonetheless, worries about crime are frequently cited by workers who have returned. “There are questions from employees about safety in the city and increased concern,” said Jonathan Gray, president of the financial behemoth Blackstone. “My hope is that as the city fills up there will be less of that.”New York is certainly feeling less deserted than it did a few months ago. Nearly 195,000 pedestrians strolled through Times Square on June 13, more than twice the typical number in the bleak winter days when the coronavirus was raging. That’s a long way from the 365,000 who passed through daily before the pandemic, but the totals are edging higher, according to Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance, a nonprofit group that promotes local businesses and the neighborhood.Change in foot traffic in New York City, by type of location
Foot traffic data was aggregated and anonymized by Foursquare from smartphone apps that shared location data. Data as of June 18, 2021.Source: FoursquareTaylor JohnstonWhen Mr. Gray returned to Blackstone’s Midtown headquarters last summer, there were just 16 other people spread over 19 floors. Today, there are more than 1,600, and Blackstone is asking all employees who have been vaccinated to return.“It’s gone from feeling super lonely and now it’s feeling pretty normal,” Mr. Gray added.Wall Street and the banking sector are pillars of the city’s economy, and they have been among the most aggressive industries in prodding employees to go back to the office. James Gorman, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, told investors and analysts this month that “if you want to get paid in New York, you need to be in New York.”Many firms, including Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, have huge real estate holdings or loans to the industry, so there is more than civic pride in their push to get workers to return. Technology companies like Facebook and Google are increasingly important employers as well as major commercial tenants, and they have been increasing their office space. But they have been more flexible about letting employees continue to work remotely.Google, which has 11,000 employees in New York and plans to add 3,000 in the next few years, intends to return to its offices in West Chelsea in September, but workers will only be required to come in three days a week. The company has also said up to 20 percent of its staff can apply to work remotely full time.The decision by even a small slice of employees at Google and other companies to stay home part or all of the week could have a significant economic impact.Even if just 10 percent of Manhattan office workers begin working remotely most of the time, that translates into more than 100,000 people a day not picking up a coffee and bagel on their way to work or a drink afterward, said James Parrott, an economist with the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.“I expect a lot of people will return, but not all of them,” he said. “We might lose some neighborhood businesses as a result.”The absence of white-collar workers hurts people like Danuta Klosinski, 60, who had been cleaning office buildings in Manhattan for 20 years. She is one of more than about 3,000 office cleaners who remain out of work, according to Denis Johnston, a vice president of their union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union.Ms. Klosinski, who lives in Brooklyn, said that she had been furloughed twice since last spring and that she had been idle since November. She said she feared that if she were not recalled by September, she would lose the health insurance that covers her husband, who suffered a stroke and a heart attack.“I’m worried about losing everything,” she said.Also weighing on the city’s outlook is the decline in visits by tourists, who are venturing back in dribbles, not in droves.Performers in Times Square, which saw nearly 195,000 pedestrians pass through on a recent day. That’s a long way from the 365,000 who passed through daily before the pandemic.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesAn ice cream vendor waited for customers at Bryant Park in Midtown.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesPassengers aboard a cruise to the Statue of Liberty. City officials expect that it will take at least a few years to draw as many visitors as in 2019.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesIn 2019, New York welcomed over 66 million out-of-towners, and they spent more than $45 billion in hotels, restaurants, shops and theaters. City officials expect that it will take years to draw so many visitors again, especially the bigger-spending foreign tourists and business travelers on expense accounts.Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History, said domestic tourism was rebounding faster than she had expected. “The local population is out and about and happy to be so,” Ms. Futter said. But the scarcity of international visitors “is going to tamp down the pace of recovery,” she said.That lag will spell prolonged pain for many businesses. Employment in hotels and restaurants is about 150,000 lower than it was before the pandemic, while the number of jobs in the performing arts is down about 40,000.To be sure, there are signs of a strengthening economy. After many residents fled the city last year, high-priced condos are again being snapped up, and the rental market is showing signs of firming after price drops.Rudin Management, the real estate giant, is trimming back the concessions it offered to attract tenants at the height of the pandemic. “I’m getting calls from people saying their son or daughter or grandson or granddaughter is graduating and asking for an apartment,” said William C. Rudin, the firm’s chief executive. “We didn’t get those calls for a year.”New Yorkers are also getting out more. When the Rockaway Hotel in Queens opened in September after years of planning, a hip destination in a historically working-class beach neighborhood, “people who lived four blocks away would take hotel rooms for the night because they wanted a staycation,” said Terence Tubridy, a managing partner.Since indoor dining resumed in February, the 53-room hotel’s weekend occupancy rate has been 80 percent, Mr. Tubridy said. Along with more visitors recently from California and the Midwest, he reports a flood of inquiries about weddings and birthday parties.As the hotel prepares for its first opportunity to serve the bustling summer crowds at Rockaway Beach, Mr. Tubridy is looking to add 100 employees to his current staff of 180.Amy Scherber is also seeing signs of better days. When the pandemic struck, she was forced to close all but two of her Amy’s Bread shops in New York City and lay off more than 100 employees. She wound up making cakes and pastries herself in a kitchen in Long Island City, Queens.But now, Ms. Scherber has rehired some of her employees, and a crew of four bakers is handling the pastries while she oversees the steadily increasing production of baguettes and other loaves. She has reopened her store in Chelsea Market, a Manhattan tourist destination, and is preparing to reopen other retail locations. Her wholesale business is also rebounding as restaurants that were closed for months are again ordering dinner rolls.“In the last couple of weeks, we finally have seen the business starting to pick up a bit,” said Ms. Scherber, who started her operation 29 years ago. She is hopeful about a strong recovery, she said. But she added, “I see the city taking several years to be the economy it was.”The Empire State Building and One World Trade Center.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times More
LATHROP, Calif. — They had a down payment. They were prequalified for a mortgage. They were willing to move almost an hour’s drive eastward. But the number that really mattered was “32.” More
