this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
391 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
59347 readers
5349 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
One of the more honest arguments I have seen about RTO:
The company has rented an important building for operations.
That building is prime real-estate, which is now loosing value, because no one is using it and no one wants to buy it.
Since that can get very expensive, forcing use of the building to keep the investment stable makes sense on paper.
Result: Workers are forced back into office, to everyones detremend. Just because some guys asset is loosing value and now everyone else has to suffer because of it.
Why would a company care about a rented property losing value?
Has less to do with companies who rent and more to do with ones whom finance the construction of the building in the first place. It was a lot more common back in the day for companies like sears to build sky scrapers as a vanity project that they could park money into. Trump wasn't the only person in the real estate market advantageously overvaluing his properties.
Pretty much every sky scraper devoted to office space is a huge waste of money, and are rarely ever utilized anywhere near their capacity. It why so many NYC government agencies were located in the world trade center. The local government was basically helping achieve some of the capacity they approved for the project, helping make the wtc look more utilized that what it was.
There used to be a pseudo economic model that was surprisingly consistent. That anytime the newest tallest building in the world was announced, there would be some sort of recession within a couple years. It was seen as a sign that corporations were running out of productive places to stick their earnings.