Why Your Office Space Continues to Shrink
Despite more than a billion square feet of empty office space in the US, a return to roomier layouts and private offices does not seem to be in the cards.
More than a billion square feet of office space stands empty in the US.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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 workers faster than they could find space for them.
Fast-forward to 2023. More than a billion square feet of office space stands empty in the US, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s estimates, for a national vacancy rate of 19.4% (up from 13% just before the pandemic). Yet after an upward spike in square feet per worker in 2020, the densification appears to be accelerating.