Quarantine (Life and Culture)

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    Work at Home or the Office? Either Way, There’s a Start-Up for That.

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    As more Americans return to an office a few days a week, start-ups providing tools for hybrid work are trying to cash in.SAN FRANCISCO — Before the pandemic, Envoy, a start-up in San Francisco, sold visitor registration software for the office. Its system signed in guests and tracked who was coming into the building.When Covid-19 hit and forced people to work from home, Envoy adapted. It began tracking employees instead of just visitors, with a screening system that asked workers about potential Covid symptoms and exposures.Now as companies begin reopening offices and promoting more flexibility for employees, Envoy is changing its strategy again. Its newest product, Envoy Desks, lets employees book desks for when they go into their company’s workplace, in a bet that assigned cubicles and five days a week in the office are a thing of the past.Envoy is part of a wave of start-ups trying to capitalize on America’s shift toward hybrid work. Companies are selling more flexible office layouts, new video-calling software and tools for digital connectivity within teams — and trying to make the case that their offerings will bridge the gaps between an in-person and remote work force.The start-ups are jockeying for position as more companies announce plans for hybrid work, where employees are required to come in for only part of the week and can work at home the rest of the time. In May, a survey of 100 companies conducted by McKinsey found that nine out of 10 organizations planned to combine remote and on-site working even after it was safe to return to the office.Providing tools for remote work is potentially lucrative. Companies spent $317 billion last year on information technology for remote work, according to the research company Gartner. Gartner estimated that spending would increase to $333 billion this year.An Envoy employee demonstrating how to use the software to book a desk.Lauren Segal for The New York TimesHybrid and remote work have the potential to benefit workers for whom office environments were never a good fit, said Kate Lister, president of the consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics. This includes women, racial minorities, people with caregiving responsibilities and those with disabilities, along with introverts and people who simply prefer to work at odd hours or in solitude.But she and others also warned that the move to hybrid work could make remote workers “second-class citizens.” Workers who miss out on the camaraderie of in-person meetings or the spontaneity of hallway chats may end up being passed over for raises and promotions, they said.That, start-up founders argue, is where their products come in.Rajiv Ayyangar, the chief executive and co-founder of Tandem, leads one of several software start-ups that have created desktop apps that help teams better collaborate with one another and that recreate the feeling of being in an office. He said Tandem’s product was trying to help with “presence” — the ability to know what one’s teammates are doing in real time, even if the worker is not with their colleagues in the office.Tandem’s desktop program, which costs $10 a month for each user, shows what teammates are working on so colleagues know if they are available for a spontaneous video call within the app. The list of user statuses automatically updates to let people know if their co-workers are on a call, writing in Google Docs or doing some other task.Pragli and Tribe, two software start-ups that have been around since 2019, also offer similar products. People can use Pragli’s product to create standing audio or video calls that others can join. It is free, though the company plans to introduce a paid product. Tribe’s software uses busy and available statuses to facilitate in-platform video calls; it is currently only accessible with an invitation.Owl Labs, a start-up founded in 2017, is also trying to tackle “presence.” It makes a 360-degree video camera, microphone and speaker that sits in the middle of a conference table and automatically zooms in on the person who is speaking.Owl’s 360-degree camera, microphone and speaker system is intended to remote workers to attend meetings seamlessly.Owl LabsThe company, which said its customers quadrupled to more than 75,000 organizations over the pandemic, said the $999 camera was a way for remote workers to participate in office meetings by being able to see everyone who is speaking, rather than the limited view enabled by a single laptop camera.Other start-ups, such as Kumospace and Mmhmm, said they were working on improving video communications for hybrid work. Kumospace, a video-calling start-up, structures calls so that users enter a virtual room. They then navigate the room using arrow keys and can talk to people when they are close to them.The design is meant to replicate in-person socializing, where people can mill around and have multiple conversations in the same room. That contrasts with a service like Zoom, where everyone is by default in the same conversation as soon as they enter the video call.Mmhmm, which was created by the founder of the note-taking and productivity app Evernote, Phil Libin, offers a variety of interactive video backgrounds, tools for sharing slideshows and other features for live conversations and asynchronous presentations. It has a free version and a premium version, which costs $8.33 per employee a month.Some companies said their products can help businesses understand their space usage as fewer workers come in needing desks. Density, a start-up in San Francisco, makes a product that uses custom depth sensors to measure how many people are entering an area or use an open space. Companies can then analyze that data to understand how much of their office space they are actually using, and downsize as necessary.Density also plans to offer other tools for hybrid work. Last month, it acquired a software start-up that provides a system for desk and space reservation.Envoy said its new Desks product had attracted 400 companies, including the clothing retailer Patagonia and the film company Lionsgate.Larry Gadea, chief executive of Envoy, at the company’s headquarters.Lauren Segal for The New York Times“The companies that use us get much more accurate data that’s standardized across all their offices globally,” said Larry Gadea, Envoy’s chief executive. “And then it’s around using that data to inform space planning things. Do we need more floors? Do we need more meeting rooms? Do we need more desks? Do we need more desks for this one team?”Lionsgate said it had used Envoy’s products since before the pandemic. When the coronavirus arrived, it turned to Envoy’s employee-screening software to provide health checks to those entering the office.Now, as more employees return to in-person work, the company is using Envoy to manage where everyone sits, as well as to track who is coming in. Lionsgate said the information can help determine how often teams will need to be in the office.“We’ll be able to know really how much space we need,” said Heather Somaini, Lionsgate’s chief administrative officer. “So I think it’ll be really useful.” More

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    At Sweetgreen, Seeing the Future of Work in a Desk Salad

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    A favorite lunchtime destination of many urban office workers weathered the pandemic thanks to its digital savvy. It’s confident more people will be returning to their offices soon.What can office desk salads tell us about the state of the pandemic?To Sweetgreen, which has been selling $10 to $15 salads to lines of office workers for more than a decade, they say the end is in sight.“Covid’s over,” Jonathan Neman, chief executive of Sweetgreen, said in a recent Zoom interview from Culver City, Calif., where the company is based, and where employees are being asked to return to the office on July 19. “At this point, it’s just getting people back in.”Sweetgreen, which has 129 restaurants across more than a dozen states, is among the businesses that have been obsessively tracking coronavirus case numbers on sites like Axios and The New York Times throughout the pandemic. It has also been monitoring car traffic and OpenTable reservations to gauge consumer activity.The company and its meals are connected to the status of office workers in cities, particularly millennials and those in Generation Z. Sweetgreen has raised more than $450 million in funding since it was founded in 2007 and has cultivated a loyal following thanks to its fresh ingredients, digital savvy and sharp branding, which extends to the design of its stores and celebrity partnerships with the likes of the tennis star Naomi Osaka. But it has also bet heavily on serving many white-collar workers in cities like New York and Los Angeles, a once-ubiquitous slice of urban life that was upended by the pandemic.“It has definitely been challenging, especially in the cities that had a full shutdown,” Mr. Neman said.Before the pandemic, he said, the company had set up more than 1,000 “outposts” — its name for salad pickup locations at places like corporate offices and hospitals. Sweetgreen now has about 250 up and running.With a few dozen Manhattan locations and regular digital ordering, Sweetgreen has had insight into the movements of its customers.Rozette Rago for The New York Times“We’re definitely not fully back from an office perspective,” Mr. Neman said, though he added that the company had experienced a steady rise in business since many mask mandates were dropped in May and the Memorial Day weekend.“You’re starting to see these really nice increases as people are slowly returning to the office,” Mr. Neman said. He said he planned to watch for a similar bump after July Fourth, though Labor Day “is going to be a very big moment.” Many companies have signaled that early September will be when they bring most workers back to the office, at least for part of the week.With more than 30 locations in Manhattan and many customers who order salads digitally, Sweetgreen has had insight into the movements of its customers, even if they are not yet fully back to eating at their desks again.The company has seen neighborhoods “start to really light up, like the Upper East Side and Upper West Side,” Mr. Neman said. “The true Midtown office has been the slowest to return, so we have a store in Rock Center, Bryant Park, those sorts of areas which have definitely been the slowest.”Sweetgreen is also beginning to set up more restaurants outside the city in areas like Westchester County and around Greenwich, Conn., as well as regions of New Jersey and Long Island.“There’s definitely some following customers in their dispersion,” Mr. Neman said. The company had been planning a suburban expansion before the pandemic, but it has accelerated those initiatives.Although Sweetgreen said it had been insulated from some of the shocks of the past year because of its online ordering abilities and its robust delivery service, the future of work matters for its business. The company was recently valued at $1.78 billion, and, according to a report by Axios, it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering. Sweetgreen does not share its financials but has said its revenue exceeded $300 million in 2019.Third-party research firms have found that the company is still recovering from the past year. In the New York metro market, transactions at Sweetgreen were down 20 percent in May relative to 2019, according to Earnest Research, a data analytics company that monitors millions of debit and credit card payments made in the United States.Sweetgreen, which has 129 restaurants across more than a dozen states, is among the businesses that have been obsessively tracking coronavirus case numbers.Rozette Rago for The New York Times“As higher-vaccinated markets continue to drag, the impact of the lunch crowd heading back to the office will likely be a key factor on this I.P.O., especially with fewer folks returning from the urban exodus,” said Zach Amsel, a senior data analytics director at Earnest Research.Mr. Neman is expecting companies to go back to in-office work for three or four days per week, especially after Labor Day.“The office is not dead — I do think that sitting behind a screen all day created burnout,” he said. “I land a little bit more in a moderate world, where the world’s probably not going 100 percent back to where it was, but I also don’t think the world is going full-on work from home.”As for Sweetgreen’s return to office plan this month, the company said it had been encouraging vaccinations but would not mandate them for employees. The topic has been fraught, with companies like Saks and BlackRock requiring vaccines for employees who are returning in person and others hesitating to establish those guidelines.“These decisions get so loaded these days,” Mr. Neman said. “We are trying to find the balance between creating this place that everyone feels safe but also not overstepping in terms of pure personal decisions.” More

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    Manhattan Real Estate Finally Bounces Back to Normal

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    The volume of sales surges back to pre-pandemic levels, but prices are up just slightly.As vaccination levels rise and businesses reopen, residential real estate has finally bounced back to where it was before Covid devastated New York.In Manhattan this spring, the number of apartments that sold was more than double what it was a year ago, when the city was locked down in the early days of the pandemic, according to a half dozen market reports released Thursday.Though in many ways the market had no where to go but up — apartment showings were restricted for most of last spring — the surge in closed deals is even strong by historical standards. Not since 2015, a time of a major boom, has there been a three-month period with comparable activity, the reports show.There was more of a mixed picture in terms of prices, with co-ops and condos trading for an average of $1.9 million and a median of $1.1 million, up slightly from last spring. Brokers say the so-so improvement can be explained by an oversupply of apartments, which has fueled discounts.But the spike in sales volume seems to have the real estate industry wiping sweat from its troubled brow.“The way people were looking at the city a year ago, it would now be a dystopian hellscape with nine people left in Manhattan,” said Jonathan Miller, the appraiser who wrote the report for the brokerage Douglas Elliman, referencing early fears that many New Yorkers would decamp permanently to the suburbs or second homes outside the city. “But it seems that cooler heads have prevailed.”Though the count of total sales varies from firm to firm because of different methodologies, all showed huge spikes in activity, versus spring 2020, but also compared with this winter.There were 3,417 completed deals from April to June, versus 1,357 deals a year ago, according to Elliman, for a gain of 152 percent. Even when measured against the January to March quarter, when Manhattan had 2,457 sales, this spring seemed particularly busy.In the third quarter of 2015 — the most recent high point — there were 3,654 sales, Mr. Miller said.The Corcoran Group’s report showed a similar increase in sales. “A year-and-a-half after the pandemic began, it’s safe to say that New York City has its mojo back,” Pamela Liebman, Corcoran’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.Buyers over the last few months gravitated toward co-ops, a housing type that had seemed to lose some favor in recent years. Co-ops accounted for 49 percent of all deals, versus 37 percent for existing condos, according to Corcoran. And in the frenzy of the post-pandemic market, downtown seems to have benefited at the expense of uptown, according to Compass, which reported that neighborhoods like Chelsea, SoHo and the East Village accounted for 31 percent of all deals.For Elizabeth Stribling-Kivlan, a senior managing director at Compass, one of the spring’s most heartening developments was improvement in the financial district, a neighborhood that became a veritable ghost town during the pandemic with the emptying out of office buildings. Median prices there soared 33 percent in a year, the largest increase of any neighborhood, she said.Yes, shuttered stores, sleepy business districts and gun violence make Manhattan feel different than before, she said. But with more workers expected to return to offices this fall and beyond, the borough should soon start to resemble its old self.“People are feeling like they want to come back there, they want to see what will come out of this,” she said. “It’s a new era for us.”Prices, though, may have a ways to go. The price per square foot for resale apartments, which is a useful indicator because it controls for the apartment size, Mr. Miller said, actually declined this spring over a year ago, to $1,408 from $1,461, or 3.6 percent.“Prices are still not at parity with a year ago,” he said. The overall discount that buyers are paying on list prices is at 6.4 percent, which is better than 2020 but still higher than the decade average of 4.9 percent. “There still is a Covid discount out there,” Mr. Miller said, “but it’s easing.”Increased inventory in Manhattan also may contribute to the gap between asking and selling prices. There were 7,880 unsold apartments this spring, up from 6,225 in spring 2020, when many sellers pulled their apartments off the market over fears of having strangers in their homes.And while bidding wars have become the norm in many suburban towns, they accounted for only 6.8 percent of all deals in Manhattan this spring, versus 31 percent in the hot market of 2015. “This market is a return to normal,” Mr. Miller said, “whatever ‘normal’ means.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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    It’s Summer in the Ski Towns, 2.0

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    Last year, mountain resorts were overrun by travelers in search of space and fresh air. The visitors are expected back, but now the towns have expanded activities and plans in place to deal with the crowds.For their vacation this summer, Susan Tyler and her husband have booked a house in the small ski resort town of Red Lodge, Mont., with a group of friends. As they message daily about the trip, the anticipation grows, said Ms. Tyler, a performing arts administrator in Texarkana, Texas. “Being outside with friends is smart and renewing, and it feeds your soul,” she said.True, but not when the trailhead is so packed you can’t find a place to park. Last summer, pandemic travelers, remote workers and an unprecedented number of new full-time residents descended on mountain towns in search of space and fresh air, prompting longtime locals to complain about overcrowding and quality-of-life concerns. This year promises more of the same.The difference? Resort towns are prepared, with on-mountain activities back to operating at full capacity, programs in place to educate visitors on outdoors etiquette, plans to address overcrowding and new attractions that highlight the alpine environment.A mid-May report from DestiMetrics, which tracks lodging in mountain resort destinations, describes bookings as “surging” for this summer, with July, August and September already well ahead of the same time period two years ago, which was itself a record-setting summer for resort visitation and revenue. At the same time, average daily hotel rates were 32 percent higher than they were in summer 2019.“We’re seeing earlier demand than we’ve ever seen before and at higher levels,” said Anna Olson, the president and chief executive of the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce, who noted that lodges in nearby Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks that had closed for most of last summer have reopened, increasing the number of rooms available near the Wyoming resort town; additionally, the Cloudveil, a new Autograph Collection hotel, has opened.Not just for skiingOf course, summering near ski resorts is nothing new. Some towns, like Jackson and Whitefish, Mont., have historically attracted warm-weather visitors because of their proximity to national parks. Others, like Colorado’s Aspen and Telluride, have drawn vacationers with longstanding cultural events, like the eight-week-long Aspen Music Festival and School and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. And many ski areas have long offered scenic chairlift rides to hiking and biking trails. But now resorts are increasingly promoting themselves as warm-weather destinations and adding more outdoors-oriented activities like purpose-built bike parks, forest canopy tours, mountain coasters and via ferratas, a European-derived system that consists of permanent steps and ladders bolted into a rock face; users attach themselves with carabiners to steel cables to prevent big falls.Summer visitors have long been drawn to ski towns for cultural events like the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado. Benko PhotographicsFor one, there’s the desire to create more of a year-round — and less snow-dependent — economy. Additionally, passage of the Ski Area Recreational Opportunities Enhancement Act in 2011, and subsequent policy guidelines issued by the U.S. Forest Service in 2014, eliminated cumbersome aspects of the permitting processes on federal land, making it easier for many mountains to develop summer recreation.Vail Resorts was one of the first to capitalize on the new legislation with its Epic Discovery summer program, introduced at Vail Mountain and Breckenridge in Colorado, and Heavenly in California, starting in 2016. Zip lines, alpine slides, ropes courses and more, along with educational components, aim to let visitors immerse themselves in the mountain environment. Since then, many other resorts have followed suit. This June, for example, Telluride, in southwestern Colorado, introduced its first canopy tour, with zip lines, aerial bridges and rappels.The approach has been working. Some would even say too well. “Now at most mountain destinations in the West, and at many in the Northeast, the summer occupancy is as high or higher than during the winter months,” said Tom Foley, the senior vice president for business operations and analytics for Inntopia, a resort marketing and e-commerce firm. (He adds that lodging prices, however, still lag behind winter’s peak rates.)Even resorts that long had infrastructure in place have benefited. Vermont’s Killington introduced its bike park (which sits on a combination of state and private land) 30 years ago. But from 2016 to 2018, visits surged to 30,000 from 12,000, said the resort spokeswoman, Courtney DiFiore. She attributed the growth to new beginner and intermediate trails, more programming for children and an all-season pass option.This year, resorts expect summer visitation to ramp up several notches, in reaction to the pandemic. “It’s unreal how much demand there is for Jackson right now,” said the ski area spokeswoman, Anna Cole. “Jackson by nature is outdoors and pretty distanced, and people want to get in their cars and drive,” she said. “We fit the bill on all fronts.”In the summer, visitors enjoy the patio of the Piste restaurant at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Teton Village, Wyo.Natalie Behring for The New York TimesThe ski area continues to expand its offerings. The Sweetwater gondola is running for the first time in summer, hauling riders and their bikes to new routes within a growing trail network, and last summer the mountain added to its guided via ferrata routes.Other resorts, like California’s Mammoth Mountain, have also built via ferratas. For some ski areas with rugged winter reputations (including Jackson Hole), offering hikers the challenge and reward of safely ascending rock features is a fitting alternative to more passive experiences. “We’re not looking for zip lines or mountain coasters,” said David Norden, the chief executive of Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico, which added a via ferrata last August. “We want people to engage with the mountain and get that sense of accomplishment.” Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin delves into summer operations for the first time this year with its own via ferrata — topping out at 13,000 feet in elevation, it’s North America’s highest — along with an aerial adventure course.Taos also introduced lift-served mountain biking last year, tapping into another summer growth area, as resorts across the country have introduced or expanded existing bike parks. Though these projects have taken at least a couple of years to plan and construct, they coincide fortuitously with the pandemic-inspired surge in cycling.For instance, New Hampshire’s Cranmore Mountain Resort, near North Conway, opened a family-friendly bike park last year, while nearby Loon Mountain opened its version in fall 2019. In Idaho, lift-accessed mountain biking returns to Sun Valley’s extensive trail network after a year’s hiatus and Snowmass, Colo., continues to add trails to its park. Even Mammoth, which was the world’s first resort to offer lift-served mountain biking back in 1986 and now hosts California’s largest park, is still expanding, adding some e-bike-specific on-mountain trails last summer.Goodbye to the slow seasonBut the increase in visitors has come at a cost, especially in summer, when recreation takes place across more outdoor venues with greater impact. The upsurge of people vying for space on trails and in restaurants in the summer months means resort towns never get a break. “Discussions about overtourism in mountain towns have been going on for a long time,” said Inntopia’s Mr. Foley, who also noted the scarcity of affordable housing for workers, especially given the recent run up in prices as new home buyers have sought refuge from the pandemic in the mountains. “Every problem that existed before the pandemic is still there and probably worse.”Many longtime locals say the growing number of visitors, especially those who may not be familiar with low-impact outdoors practices is having a negative effect — and they are taking their objections public. Perhaps the most notorious instance took place in Lake Tahoe last August, as groups of residents, fed up by the onslaught of tourists and an avalanche of litter, staged protests at several busy intersections.The Taos Ski Valley Via Ferrata, situated at 11,500 feet in a sub-alpine ecosystem, features beginner-through-advanced climbing route challenges, a 100-foot skybridge and a double-cable catwalk. photo via Taos Ski Valley.As a result, mountain towns are planning to greet this summer’s visitors with messages about how to encounter wildlife and engage with other people, especially given the ever-changing Covid regulations and staffing shortages in the hospitality industry. “We need the summer of courtesy and kindness,” said Rose Abello, the director of Snowmass Tourism.Remember to be niceWhitefish, home to a large ski area and a gateway to Glacier National Park, encourages visitors to Be a Friend of the Fish by limiting social media tagging on popular trails, staying calm in lines or traffic, packing out trash and keeping a safe distance from wildlife. Similarly, Sun Valley’s Mindfulness in the Mountains campaign asks visitors and newer residents to practice good environmental stewardship and adjust their pace and expectations to the area’s “modest, unpretentious, down-to-earth feel.” Jackson Hole’s Wild Rules tool kit provides expectation-managing emails and social media posts for businesses to share with guests, ideally before they arrive. And Breckenridge touts its new B Like Breckenridge program, which emphasizes respect for wildlife, using good trail etiquette, consuming less and walking more.The town of Mammoth Lakes, home of Mammoth ski area, opted to fund a community host program, with both paid and volunteer ambassadors answering questions and handing out maps that show where dispersed camping is allowed and list important backcountry basics, like how to douse a campfire and bury or pack out human waste. At many resorts, hikers will be encouraged to cut down on trailhead crowding by going midweek or earlier or later in the day or by choosing less-frequented but still rewardingly scenic trails.How travelers will respond and whether or not this new outreach will have a positive effect could go a long way toward decreasing friction between residents and tourists. “We’re a resort town but also a tight-knit community,” said Laura Soard, the marketing director for the Steamboat Springs Chamber, in Colorado. “It’s newer for us to be giving visitors behavior expectations, saying we want you to come visit us, but we want you to follow our rules and respect our community.”The return of signature summer events, from outdoor concerts to food festivals, may mean fewer people all heading to the trail at the same time. Last summer, “we saw trailheads being stacked with cars, camping sites full and recreation stores sold out of gear,” said Ray Gadd of Visit Sun Valley. “This summer will have much more of a feeling of normalcy,” he said, mentioning annual gatherings like a multiday wellness festival and well-known writers’ conference that are once again on the schedule.At New Hampshire’s Cranmore Mountain Resort, a new bike park features lift-serviced, beginner-friendly downhill mountain biking.Josh BogardusAs for traffic, road trips will likely still be a popular form of travel this summer, but resorts hope to alleviate congestion by encouraging visitors to return to public buses and shuttles or to bike around town. New transportation options that make a rental car unnecessary have special appeal this summer, when cars are in short supply. Taos Ski Valley’s airline, Taos Air, offers new direct flights from Texas and California to a small nearby airport, and then shuttle service to the resort. Travelers to Breckenridge can book a United Airlines package that offers seamless transfer to the resort: They’ll board a 35-seat motor coach directly on the tarmac at Denver International Airport, along with their luggage, for the drive to their final destination.Among the most important messages mountain towns hope to convey this summer: Plan and book well in advance, whether for lodging, restaurant reservations or guided outdoor activities. “Booking early helps us prepare and makes for a more relaxed experience for guests,” said Abe Pacharz, the owner of Colorado Adventure Guides in Breckenridge. You’ll get a spot on a trip, and perhaps advice on acclimating to the altitude, what gear you’ll need and what activities are the most appropriate.“You have to have a reservation,” said Ms. Olson from the Jackson Hole Chamber. “The idea that you can come to national parks or ski area destinations and find somewhere to stay or camp is very limited. It may not be their vision of being on the open road and making last-minute decisions, but the reality of coming to these beautiful places with limited resources is that people have to be planners.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2021. More

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    'I Quit My Job' Is a Signal of Economic Recovery

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    With new opportunities and a different perspective as the pandemic eases, workers are choosing to leave their jobs in record numbers.At some point early this year, Justin Hoffman concluded that he was being underpaid.The marketing director at an orthopedic practice in Findlay, Ohio, Mr. Hoffman was making $42,000 a year — about $13,000 less, by his count, than people were making in similar jobs elsewhere.But when he asked for a raise in March, he was given only a small bump in pay. “That was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.So after some careful thinking, Mr. Hoffman, 28, did what he had long ached to do: He quit. His last day was June 4.Mr. Hoffman is among millions of workers who have voluntarily left their jobs recently, one of the most striking elements of the newly blazing-hot job market. According to the Labor Department, nearly four million people quit their jobs in April, the most on record, pushing the rate to 2.7 percent of those employed.The rate was particularly high in the leisure and hospitality industry, where competition for workers has been especially fierce. But the number of those quitting registered across the board.Economists believe that one reason more workers are quitting is simply a backlog: By some estimates, more than five million fewer people quit last year than would otherwise be expected, as some workers, riding out the labor market’s convulsions, stuck with jobs they may have wanted to leave anyway. (And the millions of involuntary job losses during the pandemic surely accounted for some of the reduction in quitting.) Now that the economy is regaining its footing, workers may suddenly be feeling more emboldened to heed their impulses.But another factor may be the speed with which the economy has reawakened. As the pandemic has receded and the great reopening has swept across the country, businesses that had gone into hibernation or curtailed their work force during the pandemic have raced to hire employees to meet the surging demand.At the same time, many people remain reluctant to return to work because of lingering fears of the virus, child care or elder care challenges, still-generous unemployment benefits, low wages or other reasons.The result has been an explosion of job openings, despite a relatively high unemployment rate, as businesses struggle to recruit and retain employees — a dynamic that has placed power more firmly in workers’ hands. With employers offering higher wages to attract candidates, many workers — especially in low-wage positions in restaurants and hotels — are leaving their jobs and jumping to ones that pay even slightly more.“There’s a lot of churn in low-wage jobs where people don’t really have a career progression,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter. “If you find a job that offers just marginally more, there’s no cost to you in switching.”More than 740,000 workers quit jobs in leisure and hospitality in April, the Labor Department said, for a rate of 5.3 percent. A vast majority were in accommodation and food service.The pandemic has driven workers to quit for other reasons as well. With fewer opportunities for spending, some people were able to save money and pay down their debts, giving them a cushion to leave jobs with which they were dissatisfied. Other workers, disinclined to give up remote work, are abandoning jobs that are no longer affording them as much flexibility.For Mr. Hoffman, the decision to leave his job was the culmination of months of perceived injustices, which he said he was able to evaluate more clearly because of the pandemic.As coronavirus cases swelled in the fall, he asked to work from home because of the risk he feared he posed to his sister, whose immune system is compromised. His request was denied, he said, crystallizing his sense that he was not respected or valued.Over the last year, with the pandemic limiting his social interactions, he began to network over Twitter with other people in marketing. That was how he determined that he was being significantly underpaid.Mr. Hoffman, who is now looking for work, said he probably would have quit eventually. But the pandemic, he said, hastened his decision.“I think that if the pandemic hadn’t happened, then things wouldn’t have turned out this way,” he said. “It didn’t just change my perspective on my compensation, but I think it’s changed a lot about my understanding of the relationship between employers and employees.”A restaurant in Louisville, Ky., advertised it was hiring. More than 740,000 workers quit jobs in leisure and hospitality in April, the Labor Department said.Amira Karaoud/ReutersOn a more philosophical level, the constant threat of illness, more time with family members, leisure time that gave way to new passions — all may have prompted some workers to reassess how they want to spend their time. Burned out, some people have left their jobs for once-in-a-lifetime experiences, like traveling the world. Others have seen an opportunity to shift careers or branch out on their own.Start-ups surged during the pandemic, particularly in Black communities, as stimulus checks and unemployment benefits helped seed entrepreneurs’ dreams and bolster their confidence.“The pandemic, for a lot of people, was really stressful and caused a lot of uncertainty, so I think what a lot of people did was reflect on their lives,” said Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University who studies employee resignations.Dr. Klotz said people were accustomed to work being at the center of their lives and identities — a reality that may have shifted during the pandemic.“In general, we want a life of contentment and a life that has purpose,” he said. “And I think for many people, they’ve discovered that contentment and purpose for them may lie outside of work.”That was the case for Matt Gisin, 24, who gave notice at his job as a graphic designer at a health and wellness company this month. During the pandemic, he was able to work remotely, and without a commute, he had more time for hobbies like CrossFit and video game streaming.“I got very adjusted to all of this time and all of this freedom,” he said.But slowly, his company began requiring employees to come back into the office, first for two days a week, then three, then four. With so many people commuting to work in their cars, his trip from his home in Mamaroneck, N.Y., to the middle of Long Island could stretch to two hours each way, leaving him little time for his pastimes.“I wasn’t happy anymore,” he said. “I was finding happiness in a lot of outside activities so I took this kind of leap to leave.” He now hopes to find a job in the video game industry.Economists expect the elevated level of quitting to continue for some time, as the pandemic eases and the economy rebalances.“I would be surprised if this ended before the summer ended,” said Andrew Chamberlain, the chief economist for the hiring site Glassdoor. But he also said there was an “expiration date”: A high number of workers quitting will contribute to a labor shortage, eventually forcing employers to raise wages and provide other incentives, which will help lure workers back and re-establish economic equilibrium.In the meantime, he said, workers — especially those with low wages — will continue to gain leverage over employers.“The longer these shortages persist, the more bargaining power you put into the hands of very low-skilled workers,” he said. “There is some evidence that employers are moving in response, and that’s unusual.” More

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    New York Rents Appear Close to Bottom

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    After a year of record price declines, lease signings are up and landlords are pulling back on rent concessions.After months of record price cuts and concessions, New York City’s rental market appears to be turning the corner, but it could be at least a year before prices return to their pre-Covid peak, according to two new reports.In May, the median rent in Manhattan, including concessions, was $3,037 a month, up 8.8 percent from the previous month — the biggest monthly increase in nearly a decade, according to the brokerage Douglas Elliman. Even with the sharp increase, the price was still 11.1 percent below the median rent a year earlier, and 14 percent below the recent peak, when median rent reached $3,540 in April 2020.While the warmer months tend to see increased activity, the rise suggests more than a seasonal upswing, said Jonathan J. Miller, a real estate appraiser and the author of the report. There were 9,491 leases signed in May, breaking the record set just one month prior for the most signings since 2008.“The market, with all this new leasing activity, is beginning to stabilize,” Mr. Miller said. “It’s finding a bottom.”The same is true in Brooklyn and Queens, where the median asking rent has begun to rise after several months of decline or stagnation, according to a report by the listing site StreetEasy. In May, the median rent in Brooklyn, not including concessions, was $2,499, up from $2,400 in April; in Queens, it rose to $2,100 from $2,050.But renters haven’t necessarily missed their opportunity at discounted apartments, said Nancy Wu, an economist with StreetEasy.“Just because more and more people are getting vaccinated and are coming back doesn’t mean these incentives will disappear with the snap of a finger,” she said. Concessions, including one or more months of free rent, remain higher than pre-Covid levels, as do other sweeteners.While New York State recently upheld agents’ ability to charge broker fees, many landlords are still covering those fees to entice renters, Ms. Wu said. On StreetEasy, 81 percent of listings from January through May advertised that tenants would not have to pay broker fees, which can add up to 15 percent of an annual lease — the highest share of no-broker-fee listings on the site since 2015.It’s a sign that the recovery will be slow. In Manhattan, there were 19,025 apartments for rent in May, Mr. Miller said, down 26.5 percent from a peak of 25,883 in January, when many affluent renters had decamped to nearby suburbs and workers in hard-hit industries struggled to pay the rent at all. But the current inventory remains more than 50 percent above long-term norms. The unemployment rate in New York City — which has an outsize effect on renters and curtails new leases — was still 11.4 percent in April, compared to 3.8 percent in March 2020, the last month before the pandemic took its tollAnd there are thousands of New Yorkers at risk of losing their homes later this summer, when a statewide eviction moratorium is expected to end. The pandemic drastically deepened debt for low-income renters who were already at risk of eviction. While a roughly $2.4 billion state program for emergency rental assistance opened to applicants on June 1, some tenant groups have questioned whether the funding and outreach will be sufficient.New York’s price reset is part of a nationwide trend spurred by tenants seeking lower rents and more space, said Brian Carberry, a senior managing editor with Apartment Guide, a listing aggregation site.In April, among 100 U.S. markets, Las Vegas had the biggest average rent increase for one-bedroom apartments at $1,653, or 44 percent higher than the same month in 2020, according to the site. It was followed by Virginia Beach, Va., where rents for a one-bedroom rose 32 percent to $1,603, and Mesa, Ariz., where they rose 25 percent to $1,268.Among the cities with the biggest average price declines for one-bedroom apartments from the same month last year were San Francisco, down 19 percent to $3,137, Washington, D.C., down 17 percent to $2,181, and New York, down 15 percent to $3,684.“If you always wanted to live somewhere expensive, now is the time to go there,” Mr. Carberry said.But while deals persist, some landlords are starting to draw back on those sweeteners.“The prices are coming up, and the concessions are coming off,” said Beatriz Moitinho, an agent with Keller Williams NYC, noting that some buildings that once offered four or five months free on a 16-month lease in the winter are now down to one or two months free.There has been especially strong activity downtown, in neighborhoods like the East Village, Ms. Moitinho said, where inbound college students — or their parents, more likely — are once again bidding on apartments sight unseen. Areas like the Upper East Side have been slower to rebound, but there, too, prices are rising.“We’re seeing things change daily downtown, and weekly everywhere else,” she said.Renters are sensing the shift. In an analysis of the last two and a half years of lease terms, tenants signed the shortest leases in January 2021, an average of 13.2 months, an indication that they believed prices could dip further by the time they renewed, Mr. Miller said. In May, the average lease jumped to 15.6 months, the longest during that period, suggesting that renters want to lock in their current prices.“Renters are seeing the window close on declining rents,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean an immediate rebound to pre-Covid levels.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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    For Many Workers, Change in Mask Policy Is a Nightmare

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    After a shift by the C.D.C., employers withdrew mask policies that workers felt were protecting them from unvaccinated customers.The Kroger supermarket in Yorktown, Va., is in a county where mask wearing can be casual at best. Yet for months, the store urged patrons to cover their noses and mouths, and almost everyone complied. More