'There's been a sea change'
Downtown life in most American cities has been organized around office commuting for decades, but as Covid ebbs, it’s an open question of how many people who worked remotely during the pandemic will return to the office, and with what frequency.
I considered the case of Hartford for an article last week in The Wall Street Journal. Connecticut’s capital city has about 120,000 residents, and in 2019 had about 100,000 daily commuters. They work at hospitals and universities, and in some of the insurance companies that are still headquartered in this traditional industry center. One of the biggest groups is the 13,000 state workers who did their jobs from Hartford.
But unlike governmental employers in places like New York and Pennsylvania, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration is embracing remote work. About 2/3 of all state employees will work from home up to four days a week, according to Josh Geballe, the state’s former chief operating officer.
The state has been “restacking” employees to a smaller number of large office buildings, and is now planning to develop a “hoteling” system where employees do not have assigned desks for the time when they are in an office, he said. Geballe said it plans to sell some of its real estate.
That poses a challenge for Hartford. Downtown retail businesses say they’re reliant on office workers, and retailers cut hours and reduced staff when they went away. Chris Rosa, owner of Professional Barbershop on Pratt Street, said business hasn’t exceeded 50% of pre-pandemic levels.
“Hartford is a disaster right now,” Rosa told me. “We’re the capital of Connecticut, and New Haven has so much more going on than us. Even Stamford.”
The city’s plan is to make up for the lost foot traffic from commuters by developing more downtown housing. Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, a 42-year-old Democrat, said the city has added 2,700 housing units in the last 10 years and that he was confident properties doffed by the state would be converted into apartments.
“We would love to see all employers bring every employee back five days a week, but I think we all recognize that there’s been a sea change in the way a lot of employers think about the nature of work,” Bronin said. “I think we’ll probably stay in a period of transition for some time to come.”
To be sure, different cities and firms are all grappling with the same thing. Hartford was interesting to me because it’s a smaller city, and a small-ish number of employers (like the state) account for most of the white-collar workforce. A decision by one to keep its workers in home offices can have major effects that get diluted in a larger place like, say, New York.
My colleague Peter Grant wrote recently about what things are like in Texas, where more than half of workers have returned to their offices — a larger percentage than the older East Coast cities. Officials in Houston say they feel like they’re approaching a ceiling.
“It’s hard to imagine, when you look at office workers who can do their jobs remotely, that those numbers are going to get above 60% to 65% nationwide,” Brian Kropp, chief of human-resources research for advisory and research firm Gartner, told Peter. “This is just the remote hybrid future. We have kind of arrived.”
In Albany, things have been getting busier — fueled by state employees whose permission to telework has mostly expired. State lawmakers are holding more meetings in person, and lobbyists are back in the Capitol (where I’ve worked since 2008).
It’s a welcome change for the hulking stone building with its oak doors, 20-foot ceilings and sandstone walls adorned with the faces of New Yorkers once prominent and long dead. “It was like wandering around Hogwarts at night,” State Sen. Mike Gianaris, a Democrat from Queens, told New York Times reporter Luis Ferré-Sadurní. “In a word, surreal.”
COMING UP: I’ll be on vacation this week, so don’t break anything until I get back!
THE QUESTION: Who founded the city of Hartford?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Northwell Health is the largest private hospital system in New York state.