Nothing really surprising here, but JP Morgan Chase researchers draw on a lot of sales data to show how the pandemic shift to work-from-home has changed where retail locations choose to operate. The near-term for formerly expensive downtowns looks grim.
Downtown Downturn: The Covid Shock to Brick-and-Mortar Retail
Nearly three years after its onset, work-from-home (WFH) technologies and their effects are one of the most important and enduring economic legacies of the COVID-19 pandemic (Barrero, et al., 2021). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 27.6 million Americans reported primarily working from home in 2021, triple the size of that population in 2019.1 In response to this revolution in work and commuting patterns, high-income residents in primarily business services industries have moved from downtown to suburban neighborhoods and out of large, expensive cities(Ferreira & Wong, 2022; Ding & Hwang, 2022; Athloff, et al., 2022; Li & Su, 2022; Brueckner, et al., forthcoming; Ramani & Bloom, 2021). To date, most of the literature on the responding change in firm locations has focused on those whose workers have made the WFH transition. They find that these firms are also leaving downtown locations and substantially reducing the size of their commercial office...
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