Working From Home
I was way ahead of the curve when it came to working from home. I was doing it from the mid-1990s.
Like most people, for years I either drove or took public transit to an office. Then when we purchased a home that had to be completely renovated. I took the money and time to construct a portion of the house into an office intended only for work. There were no distractions. It was not a spare bedroom but truly an office.
As electronics and the use of the internet expanded, I could not only work from home but my office could be anywhere. When I first started working from my Connecticut home, I was managing ironically more than 500,000 square feet of Manhattan office space with additional residential units. I would commute into New York City twice a week and then reduced the frequency to once a week and, finally, every two weeks.
When I moved to Florida, my work didn’t change but technology was advancing faster and faster. Documents no longer had to have original signatures by all the parties for instance. Meetings became easy to have from anywhere. My properties had extensive cameras installed throughout making it easy to see what was going on in the different properties online.
Originally, I would fly to New York and spend 10 days a month. I had an apartment with a dedicated office space. After a while, I discovered that I was not spending time in the field but in my apartment office. After a decade I sold my apartment and would come up for the day once or twice a month, flying in as early in the morning as possible and leaving the same evening back to Florida.
COVID ended even that schedule. I retired just as millions began working from home. With offices closed in places like New York, office workers discovered they didn’t need to be tied to a desk from 9am to 5pm which, with New York commutes, could stretch their workdays by two hours on both ends.
But there is something alienating about staying in a cocoon all day that I found out. Working from home allows you no place for interaction with co-workers, talking in person to your boss, or eating lunch with a subordinate. It becomes hard to mentor or be mentored.
Midtown Manhattan today is a ghost town during the day. But come evening, many restaurants fill up. People meet for drinks. It is a modern-day Transylvania.
Rental pressures and home price escalation are closely tied to the vagaries of the COVID epidemic. Working from home made millions of office people responsible for their own office space. The company may provide the tools, but employees had to provide the space where they would be used.
Many people decided they could perform their jobs from their country homes. Many gave up the big city life and headed for places like Florida. Many traded tight apartments on the 30th floor of a Chicago high rose for a home overlooking the mountains in Colorado.
All of this made home prices skyrocket throughout the U.S. It wasn’t only for housing but furniture, home improvements, even the need for a car where once the subway or cabs sufficed. Since prices rise when you have higher demand for products, this was a large contributor to inflation.
We don’t move every month, nor buy new computers or cars. These are long-term actions taken that, once purchased, are not repeated for years. COVID accelerated the trend of working from home that I may have been on the cutting edge of more than a quarter of a century ago. Yet most of the office work changes are now over and inflation has begun to lessen because of it.
The world’s economies were fundamentally changed by the epidemic. For the most part, we are coming out the other side of the inflation spiral. We have stabilized. However, we may enter another destabilizing period if the debt ceiling is not raised by Congress and the U.S. markets really fall.
