Bloomberg New Economy: The Pandemic Can’t Stop the Rise of Cities

If New York City is “dead forever,” as the despairing author and comedy club owner James Altucher recently declared, why has Facebook just agreed to lease a 730,000 square-foot space in Midtown Manhattan? And why is Amazon expanding its offices in New York and five other U.S. cities, adding thousands of corporate jobs?

After all, in a post-Covid world, no two companies are better placed to abandon cities altogether and keep their people working from home, given their virtually unlimited computing power, bandwidth, storage capacity and general technical wizardry. Amazon owns almost half of the worldwide public cloud services market. Yet there they are, signing up for some of the priciest real estate on the entire planet.