Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at office attendance, an indicator of how New York City is faring. We’ll also find out what a 45-year-old union contract has to do with school bus delays and driver shortages.
Whatever happened to R.T.O.?
“Return to office” was a frequent topic of conversation among political leaders and business executives as New York City struggled to put the pandemic behind.
Then, over the summer, the phrase seemed to disappear: Its three-letter abbreviation appeared in The New York Times only four times from June 1 to Sept. 30. The words “return to office” appeared only five times in the context of employers, employees and workplaces over those four months.
Estimates of office attendance vary widely. Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, said attendance had stabilized at “probably about 75 percent” of what it was before the pandemic. A survey of foot traffic in 1,000 office buildings across the country put the figure for August in New York even higher, at 84.1 percent.
By contrast, a company that tracks “swipes” — when company-issued cards are used to open turnstiles in office buildings — found that attendance at offices in New York was 52.7 percent during the week of Sept. 18. But another company that keeps tabs on swipes said there had been a surge of more than 18 percent in office attendance since Labor Day, potentially signaling a change in leasing patterns and a hopeful note for commercial real estate.
Whatever the numbers are right now, more office workers could be taking their places at their desks before long. Last month Amazon ordered workers to return to their offices five days a week by Jan. 2. The company had already required its staff to be on hand at least three days a week.
Companies in other sectors have also pushed for a return to pre-Covid norms, with financial powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs leading the parade. “There is a sense the pendulum swung way too far in the opposite direction — this ‘the office is super optional,’” Zach Dunn, co-founder of the workplace management platform Robin, told The New York Times last month.
James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, echoed that idea. “Employers have not thrown in the towel on getting people to come back to the office,” he said.
And because there has been no “meaningful employment growth” in industries like finance, technology and media, there are fewer openings at other companies than there were a couple of years ago, he said. Consequently, workers have fewer options if they go job hunting and are “more susceptible to company requirements or company demands that they return to the office, to a greater extent,” he said.
The city said a year ago that it had recovered the 946,000 private-sector jobs that were lost in the pandemic — more than a year ahead of some predictions. But Parrott noted that many of the jobs in the city’s tally were in lower-paying fields like home health care and social services that do not involve working in offices.
Office attendance typically drops in the summer as people take vacations and rebounds after Labor Day. But officials from VTS, a technology platform that tracks the real estate industry, said that September 2024 was different, with an 18.5 percent increase in attendance at the buildings VTS follows in New York, far more than usual.
Employers “now feel they have the leverage to say, ‘Come back,’” Nick Romito, the chief executive of VTS, said.
That dynamic will help drive demand for office space, he said. VTS predicted that office tenants will sign leases on 30 million square feet of space this year, the first time that leases have involved that much space since before the pandemic. He said roughly 22 million square feet had already been signed, with landlords continuing to offer discounts: He said that the net effective rent was about 8 percent below what it was before the pandemic.
As for R.T.O., Wylde said the conversation had changed, at least among retailers and restaurant owners in Midtown Manhattan.
“For a year, the politicians and many of the brick-and-mortar stores were complaining that people working from home meant that they weren’t patronizing their stores,” she said. “The whole decline-in-foot-traffic argument, I think, just is no longer. The complaints I get now are not lack of foot traffic. They are about the homeless, the drug addicts, the migrants that are hanging out.”
Weather
Expect a partly sunny day with temperatures in the high 60s. For tonight, mostly cloudy with temperatures in the high 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until tomorrow (Rosh Hashana).
The latest New York news
City government
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Accusations from Adams’s defense team: In a court filing, lawyers for Mayor Eric Adams accused federal prosecutors of leaking information about the federal corruption investigation that led to his indictment. The filing comes one day after his lawyers asked the court to dismiss a bribery charge against Mr. Adams.
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Adams goes solo: Adams held his weekly news conference without any aides at his side — and without the usual music announcing his arrival. He said that his administration was “successful” and repeatedly that “I did nothing wrong.”
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A resignation: Timothy Pearson, one of Mayor Eric Adams’s closest aides, resigned on Monday, becoming the fifth senior member of the mayor’s administration to announce his departure in the past three weeks.
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A guilty plea: A former Fire Department chief who was accused of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes to speed the fire-safety approval process has agreed to plead guilty to one count of bribery conspiracy.
Other news
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Online drug rings: Secret “pill mills” across New York manufactured deadly narcotics that were later sold to customers through fake online pharmacies. Prosecutors tied the drug ring to at least nine deaths.
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Deaths at a detention center: Federal prosecutors charged nine inmates at the troubled Metropolitan Detention Center in two killings and several assaults. One guard was charged in a shooting.
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Tony-winning actor dies: Gavin Creel, who had starred in “Hello, Dolly!” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” was 48.
Behind school bus delays, a contract from 1979
Students across New York City are waiting up to an hour for school buses, as a driver shortage and conflict over a contract hamstring the city’s ability to find a solution.
My colleague Claire Fahy writes that the city has 17,500 drivers but needs about 300 more. Officials have coped with the shortfall by lengthening routes, which means that some students spend four hours a day on buses.
Glenn Risbrook, who runs student transportation for the city’s public school system, blames the city’s 45-year-old contract with some of the private school bus companies employed to transport students. He said that a new deal would let the city hire more companies and put more buses and drivers on the streets.
But the city has interpreted a 2011 State Court of Appeals decision to mean that the current contract to bring in new bus companies cannot be modified without scuttling job protections for currently covered drivers. Risbrook, who said that the city did not want to take away those guarantees, said the only solution was a change in state law to allow the contract to be modified without automatically nullifying the job protections.
Carolyn Rinaldi, a spokeswoman for Local 1181, which represents drivers covered by the contract, said the problem was not that simple. But she acknowledged that the driver shortage was getting worse.
“We want to make school bus driving a career again,” she said, “and that’s a challenge.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Bassoon man
Dear Diary:
I was on an uptown 6 train on the first truly cold day of December 2023.
A tall blond-haired man wearing a down jacket with a fur hood and weighed down by a large bassoon case got on at 14th Street. I could hear the bass blasting through his headphones.
He held onto the bar, closed his eyes and swayed as the train made its way uptown.
At 28th Street, he snapped awake and hurried off the sliding door, a pair of gray wool gloves falling out of his pocket as he did.
Three people called out to get his attention to no avail.
The gloves lay on the ground, palms up. “What can you do?” they seemed to be saying.
Just before we got to Grand Central, the woman sitting next to me picked them up and tucked them behind her as though the bassoonist might come back to retrieve them.
— Samuel Sullivan
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Francis Mateo, Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Is R.T.O. Finally a Reality? appeared first on New York Times.
