Office buildings remain nearly empty amid Delta surge: Occupancy rates stall at around 20% in New York and San Francisco
While more and more U.S. workers return to the office after last year's COVID shutdowns, New York City and San Francisco have fallen behind other populous metro areas, a new report found.
On average, office buildings in 10 of the most populous cities in the U.S. were about 33.1% occupied by the end of August, according to Kastle Systems, an access-control company that tracks how many people swipe into buildings.
Yet New York and San Francisco are keeping the average down as they reported only 22.3% and 19.7%, respectively.
New York and San Francisco are trailing behind the national average of the 10 most populous metro areas in the country for office occupancy rates
The One Vanderbilt office tower in Manhattan stood mostly empty last year. New York City employees hope to see about 41% of workers return to the office by 2022
Some workers returned to New York's financial district on June 22, 2020, as reopening began
'We're obviously disappointed,' Douglas Durst, chairman of the New York real estate developer the Durst Organization, told the Wall Street Journal.
An end of August survey by the Partnership for New York City found that employers wanted 41% of employees to return by the end of September, Business Insider reported, but the goal seems unlikely given Kastle Systems findings.
'I've spoken to a number of other companies - BlackRock, a major asset management firm; Accenture, a huge global consulting firm - all of their plans are being deferred,' Kathyrn Wylde, president and CEO of Partnership for NYC, told NPR. 'And they're going back to masking policies for vaccinated people, which is, again, a real downer in terms of getting people back to the office. '
The stall in occupancy rates come as the Delta variant continues to plague the country.
The streets in front of the New York Stock Exchange, one the world's most populated business hubs, was practically empty on May 19, 2020
The MetLife Tower was also void of most of its employees last fall
New cases had reached a seasonal peak on September 1, with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reporting 182,425 new cases that day. While daily cases are still higher than they were at the start of the summer. They dropped to 47,728 on September 6.
The CDC also reported 242 new deaths on September 6.
New York City reported no new cases on September 6 and San Francisco reported less than 50 in the previous week.
Houston, Dallas, and Austin sport the highest percentage of office building occupancy, all at around 40% while Texas grapples with a nearly all-time high number of new cases at the end of August at 28,245, with a recent respite of about 3,828 reported on September 6.
While more than 40 major companies that operate in the U.S. have imposed vaccine mandates for their workers with deadlines set for this month and October, other major employers have said they will keep waiting before calling employees back to the office.
Apple employees were set to return in early September, but CEO Tim Cook pushed the date back to January 2022, a move Amazon mimicked, Forbes reported.
The move comes out of step with other tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, who have also pushed for all U.S. employees return to their offices.
Many healthcare companies and other employers - like Hawaiian Airlines, Hess, TJX, Chevron and Tyson Foods - have set deadlines for November.
About 75 percent of eligible adults have at least taken one jab of the vaccine, according to the CDC.
No comments: