America's Work-from-Home Capitals Are in a Sorry State

Austin resident here, and remote worker since before the pandemic. Downtown is definitely in a state. But, there are several reasons for this:

1) homeless population makes it less attractive as a workspace, and while the city has started to make progress on this it really ballooned during the early 20's.

2) there is also a lot of empty commercial real estate in Austin, and has been since before the pandemic, and yet they keep building more for some reason which I cannot figure out

3) the downturn in home prices in Austin is real, but the amount of new houses built on the outskirts is a big part of that, and also prices are really just back on trend to where we would have expected them to be based on the rate of price increase during the 20teens

4) hit to city budget is muted by the fact that appraisals cannot go up more than 10% a year, so in most cases never caught up to the market peaks. Recent news suggests that a lot of financial excesses in the city budget came about during the early 20's, as covid money, etc. goosed expectations of lots of $$ in the future

So sad workers have flexibility and improved working conditions at the detriment of office real estate investors and cities who might have to adjust their budgets /s

If your tax base was driven by taxes on corporations via office space usage, find another mechanism to tax them instead of forcing people back into the office just to get your rake.