Why Your Office Space Is Continuing to Shrink: Justin Fox

In the decade before the pandemic, the amount of office space per worker in the US shrank steadily — a trend given the charming name “densification.” Saving money was one driver, as was a belief among some employers that denser layouts encouraged interaction and innovation. But the best predictor of densification was “market-level job growth and the availability of space (or lack thereof),” commercial real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield concluded in a 2018 analysis of the phenomenon. That is, in large office markets such as Manhattan and San Francisco and up-and-coming ones such as Miami and Nashville, companies were simply hiring ...