Mene Ukueberuwa joins Brian C. Anderson to discuss cities’ efforts to convert unused office space into residential apartments.

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Mene Ukueberuwa. He’s an editorial board member at the Wall Street Journal, a former associate editor of City Journal. He writes about politics, economics, education, and lots more. He’s been on the show before, and we’ve published a number of his pieces in City Journal. His work has also been featured in National Review, New Republic, New Criterion, and other prominent publications. Today, we’re going to discuss his recent writing for the Wall Street Journal on cities’ efforts to convert unused office space into apartments, residential apartments.

So Mene, always great to talk with you. Thanks for coming on.

Mene Ukueberuwa: It’s great to be back, Brian.

Brian Anderson: Yeah, this is a looming problem post-pandemic for cities, urban business districts, really, nationwide have yet to regain pre-pandemic activity. I saw one study that was looking at foot traffic and tracking cell phone use, and I think the best cities were doing were two-thirds returned to pre pre-pandemic highs. New York and Chicago’s office buildings are estimated to be around 20 percent empty. And San Francisco’s in a bigger crisis. Their vacancy rate, I think, is over 30 percent, and that was noticeable when I was out in San Francisco recently.

So, as you detailed in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, many cities are looking to adjust to this new reality to transform all of this empty office space into residential apartments. Some mayors are offering incentive tax breaks to encourage these conversions. So, what is the state of play there? Which cities are pushing this via tax breaks, and are there different approaches to try to carry out these conversions?

Mene Ukueberuwa: Yeah, I think it’s been interesting to follow the action over the past few months because people have been talking about the prospect of converting unused office space into apartments in a very big way since the beginning of the pandemic. We saw, of course, the rise of work from home. And people predicted that now that we had demonstrated the concept, even after the pandemic eased up, you’re going to see a lot of office workers continue to work from home, and that has continued to be the case. And so we’re no longer in a place where people can expect that we’re going to return to pre-pandemic levels of office occupancy. And that means there are a lot more empty spaces in these offices. And this isn’t only a problem for developers, of course, because office workers are important for cities because of the foot traffic that they generate, as you mentioned. There are downstream effects for restaurants, stores of all kinds, and all sorts of urban amenities take a hit when there aren’t as many people in the office.

And so for many months, people were wondering whether developers would begin the process of saying, “Let’s take this unused office space and convert it into apartments because there is still very high residential demand in some of these cities.” And so, it converts an unneeded office asset into a highly needed residential asset. But now, what we’ve seen just in the past few months is that a lot of cities are rolling out policies to aid this process, not just waiting for developers to take the lead. They’re saying, “We need to change the policies and make it a more favorable ground for these conversions to happen.”

And so you asked what cities are deploying in this vein, and I think it’s very interesting that just in the past two months, you have two very different approaches being taken by a pair of major cities. One is Boston, which in July, rolled out a policy to give developers up to a 75 percent tax break if developers choose to convert offices into apartments. And that tax break can last for about 29 years. So that covers not only the period of converting the office, which often takes a few years, but many years after that. And so the idea is to encourage as many of these companies to make these conversions as possible by vastly reducing the cost of doing so and making it very likely that they’ll get a good return on their apartment buildings.

In New York, in August, you had Mayor Eric Adams roll out a plan that is going to rezone parts of the city to allow more people to convert office buildings into apartments. Particularly, they’re targeting Midtown where you have a lot of older office space and where these conversions generally haven’t taken place. And this policy is not incorporating a tax break. Basically, the idea is that they’re going to give relief in the zoning code in ways that encourage developers to make the change by reducing the amount of compliance that they have to jump through and making it available for buildings in every neighborhood in New York as opposed to just Lower Manhattan, where it was already permitted.

And so you can call it a tale of two cities between Boston and New York. One has a financial incentive, one is merely relying on zoning changes, and that will be a great experiment to see which approach is more effective and whether there’s a major difference in the results in the number of offices being converted in the coming years.

Brian Anderson: It’s very interesting. Now, many of the cities with office occupancy rates that are low right now also have, and this might seem paradoxical, some of the highest apartment rents. New York, I think, is just off the charts now. San Francisco is still pretty bad. Are office-to-residential conversions, as you’re describing, an effective way to increase the supply of affordable housing? And why is there such demand for housing in some of these cities which are struggling in other respects?

Mene Ukueberuwa: Well, that’s a great question. I think one of the first things to point out is that office-to-residential conversions can only be part of a plan to increase the supply of affordable housing. There’s certainly not a silver bullet even in some of these cities that have very high office vacancy rates. For example, mayor Eric Adams’s plan in New York is to create, at most, about 20,000 new apartments in Manhattan over the course of the coming decade through office conversions. Whereas Manhattan is a city that has at least 850,000 apartments. And so, you’re really only going to increase the supply, at most, by a small percentage of the total residential population of the city. It’s not something that’s going to create a massive decrease in rents or a massive increase in availabilities for apartment buildings. But of course, in these cities that are very dense and where there is very high apartment demand, any little bit helps. And so that’s the best way for mayors to look at this as part of a mix of policies.

But I do think that to your broader question of why you see the correspondence of low office occupancy and high residential demand, it’s really because work is something that people have discovered that they can do just as well from anywhere. And if they’re people who were already living in the suburbs during the pandemic or they were people who were living in the cities and decided to maybe move a little bit further out, they don’t want to take the time out of their day or bear the additional cost of commuting anymore and are just as productive working at home. And so they feel as if the office is something that they can easily part with.

But a lot of people, and particularly younger people, find that they really can’t do without the amenities that cities offer. They want to be able to walk around and not have to drive everywhere. They want to be able to go to bars and restaurants and have an endless variety of opportunities, especially in the off-work hours. And so residential demand did dip briefly during the pandemic, but it really surged back and is now above pre-pandemic levels in a lot of these pricey coastal cities like New York, Boston, Washington, San Francisco. And so that’s why you have that mismatch between under-demanded offices, but over-demanded apartments, and that’s what makes office conversions a particularly attractive policy solution.

Brian Anderson: Now, the office-to-residential conversions, you can’t just snap your fingers and make this happen, unfortunately. They’re expensive. They’re often complicated, just doing it. So they require plumbing and electrical lines to be rerouted. Elevators often need to be replaced or changed in terms of their location. Air conditioning systems need to be rebuilt. And because most jurisdictions require rooms in residential apartments to have windows, office buildings, which generally have deep floor space, aren’t always easy to reconfigure for residential use in the sense. And in some cases, it may be just an impossible obstacle. So, to what degree are these kinds of conversions really practical?

Mene Ukueberuwa: Right. Well, I think you hit on a lot of the major barriers that have prevented developers from going ahead and converting office spaces into apartments at scale in the past. Office buildings are very different from residential buildings in the layout of the floor plan, in the amenities that they offer. Of course, in an apartment building, you have to run individual piping gas, et cetera, to much more spread-out area of units that have to have hookups for every single room as opposed to the centralized setup that you’d see in large office buildings.

And I think that, really, a lot of the difficulties correlate with the age of the building. So you find that in older buildings, particularly in dense cities like New York, Boston, again, you find that there are a lot of buildings that are easily convertible to apartments because they have smaller floor plates, as you mentioned, the total area of the building is much smaller, which means that there’s much more of it, which is closer to the exterior of the building, which means that it’s easier to have apartment units that you’re adding have windows. And also, generally, they have a frame in the way that they’re constructed that allows for the spacing of apartment units much more naturally than you would see in some of these very large glass corporate towers that dominate buildings that have been built since the 1980s.

And so, when these mayors are rolling out policies to encourage conversions of offices into apartments, generally they’re looking at neighborhoods that have a lot of these older and smaller buildings, because that’s where it’s going to be much easier to do. But the built-in costs of doing these conversions are one of the reasons why mayors believe that the conversions will only be successful if they offer tax incentives to make it more worth developers’ while. And so in the cities that are merely rezoning, you’re going to see developers take a look at a lot of buildings and decide that they would be not feasible to convert over into apartments, but when they do have the availability of tax incentives, then that’s going to put more potential buildings in play for this kind of treatment.

Brian Anderson: We can look back at New York City, which is one of these two cities that are trying to do this, now that you mentioned, and there was some success in these conversions in the past. During the 1990s and 2000s, 13 million square feet of empty commercial space in New York City was transformed into residential use. Policymakers pushed through a plan to encourage property owners in Lower Manhattan, which was, at the time, the epicenter of the vacancy crisis, to convert office space into apartments. And more than 12,000 apartment units were created as a result of this initiative. And now Lower Manhattan is one of the liveliest and most sought-after residential areas in all of New York City. So, I wonder if there are lessons we can learn from this earlier conversion story to apply to today.

Mene Ukueberuwa: Yeah, absolutely. I think that that tax program in the late ‘90s into the early 2000s is the great proof of concept that both developers and mayors look to know that this is something that can actually be successful to create not just a drop in the bucket, but completely change the face of a neighborhood. Lower Manhattan had seen the flight of a lot of the financial firms that used to populate it, leaving a lot of vacant office space. By the 1990s, you had a huge share of vacancies down there. And that once-bustling part of the city had become very dreary, and you had a lot of the owners taking a massive hit on these assets. New York stepped in to rezone the neighborhood to allow the conversions, and also allow a tax abatement on conversions into apartments. And that really did encourage quite a lot of redevelopment. So this was part of Rudy Giuliani’s broader redevelopment plan for Manhattan, which was very successful in some ways.

I do think that it’s important to not overdraw too many lessons from that change because, in addition to the tax abatement that developers had access to, you generally had residential demand for apartments surging during that period. You had seen crime be cleaned up by quite a lot since the early ‘90s with the deployment of more police and the beefing up of NYPD. You had a surging growth in the markets and New York’s financial sector was booming again after some stagnant periods in the 1970s and ‘80s. And so you had a lot of people wanting to move into Manhattan, and you had particularly a lot of wealthy people who were willing and able to pay high prices for new luxury apartments. And so the conversions were very successful because demand was high.

But if you see that mayors who are seeking to replicate that success are creating huge tax breaks today, like Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, right now, as we have mentioned, you do see very high residential demand. And so it seems quite likely that developers might still be able to get a good return on some of these conversions and that the city would do well offering these tax breaks. But you never know that that demand is going to stay as high for as long as it did in New York in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. And so, if a recession were to come within the next five years, and all of a sudden you don’t have as many people willing to pay a top dollar for these apartments, then Boston ends up taking a massive hit in terms of the tax revenue that’s being generated because of the carve-outs being given to developers for these conversions. So it’s a risky strategy that isn’t necessarily going to replicate itself.

Brian Anderson: You’ve mentioned a few times the zoning question. It is indeed a well-known culprit in thwarting new construction of any kind in cities. It certainly also limits remodeling or redesigning buildings. So many local zoning codes include very specific recommendations for residential buildings such as stairwell width, elevator placement. All of this is going to, as you suggested, add a lot of complexity to renovations.

I wonder what role zoning reform is going to play in facilitating conversions, and maybe just say a bit more about some of the zoning obstacles.

Mene Ukueberuwa: Absolutely. Well, there are two types of urban codes that can inhibit conversions. One is building code. So requirements for residential buildings, they’re often very stringent in certain cities. The stairwells have to be a certain width. The windows have to be operable. There are all kinds of provisions that are attached to the construction of a new apartment that developers have to adhere to to fall within the law.

And so conversions, because you’re starting with a building that already exists and was built for a different purpose, often those types of restrictions on the building interior and the specifications of its amenities can be restrictive. And so it’s very helpful to give them some flexibility. Maybe office buildings tend to have broader stairwells, but the residential buildings are required to have more narrow ones. If a city steps in and says, “We’re going to give you an exception. You can keep the stairwell the same width that it is,” that’s something that sounds very simple, but can actually reduce the cost of converting the office building by quite a lot. And so you’ve seen cities like San Francisco start to reform some of the very strict specifications on what residential buildings are required to have in a way that’s going to facilitate more conversions.

The other type of zoning is what type of building can be built in what neighborhood. And so this is something that New York is addressing. You have certain areas of Midtown and other neighborhoods where apartments are simply not permitted to be built. And Eric Adams and his reform plan is trying to allow apartments to be built in a broader array of locations so that if you have some of this older office space, you have the right as a developer to go ahead and convert it into an apartment building.

So zoning is something that has been talked about a lot, quite a bit with the creation of new apartment buildings, but it also is something that is going to have a big role to play in the conversion of existing offices into apartments.

Brian Anderson: It’s an enormous challenge for the post-pandemic city, so this is a really important topic. I want to thank you very much, Mene, as usual, for coming on and illuminating us.

Our guest has been Mene Ukueberuwa from the Wall Street Journal. He has written a number of times for City Journal as well. So you can check out his work on the City Journal website. That’s at www.city-journal.org. We’ll link to his author page there in the description. You can also find City Journal on Twitter, @cityjournal, and on Instagram, @cityjournal_mi. And if you like what you’ve heard on today’s podcast, please give us a five-star rating on iTunes.

Mene, great to talk with you as always, and look forward to seeing you soon.

Mene Ukueberuwa: Thanks a lot, Brian. I appreciate it.

Photo: Mordolff/iStock

The post From Office to Residence: 10 Blocks podcast appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

CHICAGO — For Marcus Medsker, the pace of life in Quincy, Illinois, is slow. And he likes it that way.

Medsker, a senior client sales manager at Echo Global Logistics, was living in a two-bedroom condo in the River North neighborhood of Chicago just over a year ago. But when his wife became pregnant with their second child, they decided to move to his hometown.

The 37-year-old grew up in Quincy and said his return in December 2020 was somewhat unexpected. But the low cost of living and small-town feel has made life with young kids a lot simpler, and he said his proximity to family has been one of the most special parts of being back.

Before the pandemic, moving to a different city wasn’t really an option for Medsker, who is now the father of three.

“Me working remotely was never really on the table, so until that became fully available, that’s when we kind of decided to look at Quincy,” he said.

Medsker is one of the millions of Americans who has been working from home during the pandemic. As the average number of COVID-19 cases continues to decline across the United States, many employers are cautiously optimistic about returning to the office. But for some, the remote workplace changes are permanent.

According to a January Pew Research Center survey, about 59% of US workers who say their jobs can mainly be done remotely are working from home all or most of the time. Since 2020, the share who say they have relocated away from the area where they work has increased from 9% to 17%.

Many small towns in the Midwest, including Quincy, are trying to attract remote workers by using their sense of community to their advantage. The city advertises on a website called MakeMyMove, where people can browse through a range of incentive packages offered in cities and towns across the United States. If they decide they want to move, they can submit an application to the destination of their choice.

Evan Hock, co-founder and head of product at MakeMyMove, which was launched in December 2020, said he thinks remote work has given people the freedom to tailor their lifestyles to their personal preferences, not the locations of their employers. As a result, he said many remote workers are choosing to relocate to small towns because of affordability and opportunities to connect with the local community.

“It just so happens that a lot of these smaller towns and rural towns offer a lot of what folks that are leaving big cities are looking for,” Hock said.

In fact, Nicholas Epley, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said the sense of community people find in small towns can sometimes replace some of the social connections that are lost in remote working environments.

Epley said social connection happens more when actual, in-person conversations take place. Though most people understand the value of connections with close family and friends, he said they often underestimate the importance of weaker, more distant connections.

“The acquaintances, the more distant colleagues, even conversations with strangers are also important for our well-being,” he said. “What you’re going to lose when you’re not going into the office routinely is a broader social network that comes from connecting formally and informally with the colleagues that you work with.”

Even though these more distant connections can be lost by working remotely, Epley said it is certainly possible to find them elsewhere, like within a small town. Ultimately, he said where people find meaningful connections depends a lot on the individual and what they do for a living.

‘Just a nice little town’

Quincy resident Ricci Dula has had no shortage of social connection since moving to the area with his family from Redlands, California, in 2019.

As he sipped his iced black salt caramel mocha — the same drink he orders each time he visits Electric Fountain Brewing — he said hello to the only other two patrons in the coffee shop, both of whom knew Dula by name. The father of two said he has grown accustomed to seeing familiar faces in grocery stores and restaurants, which rarely happened when he lived in California.

Quincy, home to about 40,000 residents, has four National Register of Historic Places districts packed with more than 3,500 impressive, architecturally distinct buildings. Ornate stone and brick homes tower over the city’s residential streets, and quaint storefronts are clustered merely blocks away from the banks of the Mississippi River.

Dula joked that his days of road rage are long behind him, as it takes less than 15 minutes to get from one side of the city to the other.

“The sense of community is greater in a smaller town,” said Dula, who moved to Quincy for his career, where he served as the scout executive for the Mississippi Valley Council of the Boy Scouts of America. “From a safety standpoint, from the activities for youth, for growing a family or establishing yourself as an employee, I would say that Quincy’s worth it.”

Residents of other small towns also feel proud of where they live; some have even come up with their own creative incentives to attract new families.

In Greensburg, Indiana, the relocation package includes $5,000, gift cards to the seasonal farmers market, and, among other things, a “Grandparents on Demand” service, in which longtime resident Tami Wenning and her husband offer free baby-sitting for those who move to the area.

Located in Decatur County, halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, Greensburg is home to 13,000 residents.

Wenning has lived in Decatur County her whole life, and she said she came up with Grandparents on Demand when she was asked to help brainstorm ideas for MakeMyMove. She wanted to showcase how welcoming the community is, and since she has kids and grandkids of her own, she said she knows there are times when parents need to trust someone to watch their children.

As a result, whether new families are in need of a date night or someone to fill in for Grandparents’ Day at school, Wenning said she and her husband are happy to volunteer.

“It’s second nature around here; you want to step in and help somebody out with their kids,” she said. “It’s the coolest thing on Earth being a grandparent.”

Remote workers Kasey and Doug Waltz moved to Greensburg from Mason, Ohio, in November, and they said they have already come to appreciate the safety, community and convenience of a small town. As the parents of two children under the age of 2, they said the incentives really resonated with their needs.

“The area’s phenomenal; anything that we ever want is right around us,” Doug Waltz said. “It’s just a nice little town.”

‘What they value in life’

In Quincy, “Help Wanted” signs hang in the windows of many businesses along the city’s main streets. Mayor Mike Troup said there are more than 700 full-time positions open even though unemployment in the area is below 3%.

To address Quincy’s aging and stagnant population, the Great River Economic Development Foundation, the city and county’s lead economic development organization, launched a campaign called “Quincy’s Calling” in September .

Quincy’s Calling works in tandem with another city initiative that provides a financial incentive for individuals and families to move. Participants may apply for a $5,000 rebate on property taxes or a $3,500 rebate on rent or lease payments if they take a job in Adams County and reside within Quincy’s city limits for a designated period of time.

In the past five months, more than 55 families have moved to Quincy through the Quincy’s Calling campaign — including a number of remote workers.

Kyle Moore, the foundation president, said he thinks the accessibility of remote work has influenced the success of the campaign.

“I definitely think that the pandemic has caused people to pause and look at what they value in life and the quality of life they want to lead,” Moore said.

For barbershop owners Elizabeth and Matthew Thomas, the cost of their 10,000-square-foot Victorian stone mansion was too good to pass up. The couple moved from the San Francisco Bay Area a year and a half ago and opened Gold Line Barbershop just a week arriving after.

Matthew Thomas is particularly interested in Quincy’s history. The walls of the barbershop are covered with newspaper clippings that detail the city’s criminal past during the Prohibition era; a story Thomas said he finds “fascinating.” He is passionate about protecting the old homes in the area, so he said he thinks the city’s effort to attract new residents is a great idea.

“A lot of these giant, beautiful architecturally significant Victorian mansions on the north end and the south side of town were kind of left behind, and they’re just waiting to be saved,” he said. “Every time I drive around down there, it’s like, I want to buy more.”

Moore, the foundation president, said the early success of the Quincy’s Calling campaign has been encouraging, and he hopes the positive momentum will continue to grow.

“I think if you would have asked us when it started, that we would have had, you know, 25 folks in a year, we would have been happy,” he said. “We hope every year that we can snowball this.”

Despite the ever-evolving nature of the pandemic, remote work is here to stay. According to data scientists at Ladders, a jobs site for positions that pay more than $100,000, 25% of all the jobs in North America will be fully remote by the end of the year.

The doors to the office are still shuttered for Quincy resident Medsker, and even if they reopen, he said he will only have to make the trip to Chicago occasionally.

Medsker said having his kids changed everything, and relocating to a small town gave him the simple life he could not find in Chicago.

“We never really considered Quincy as an option, and then, you know, as we dug more into it, things became more clear,” he said. “We wouldn’t take the decision back for anything.”

———

©2022 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The post Extra distant staff are transferring to small cities as pandemic reshapes the office | AP appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Autodesk is downscaling its physical presence in San Francisco and Marin County, another sign of how some large Bay Area employers are reconfiguring their plans for the workplace in the pandemic.

Autodesk recently decided to consolidate some of the office space it occupies around its San Rafael headquarters and in San Francisco, according to a spokesperson. The software developer is exiting two locations — 3900 Civic Center Drive in north San Rafael and at 300 Mission St. in San Francisco — and consolidating employees into surrounding buildings.

“Rather than a departure, these two closures represent a reallocation of Autodesk’s investment in the San Francisco market,” wrote Stacy Doyle in an email. “We remain committed to our presence in the Bay Area.”

Company hiring during the pandemic has increased because of company growth and turnover, said to be below industry average, Doyle wrote. But the company has accelerated its “flexible workplace” program in recent months, working from quarterly input from workers.

“Based on insight gained via direct employee surveying, there is a growing preference to carry out individual work remotely, and conduct team meetings or collaboration-based work in offices,” Doyle wrote. That preference have been over half on some of those polls.

Autodesk announced the opening of the 117,000-square-foot office at 300 Mission last year, and the lease for the nearly 47,000-square-foot 3900 Civic Center building commenced at the beginning of 2020, according to San Francisco Business Times and North Bay Business Journal reporting.

According to its latest annual report, the company’s San Rafael facilities included about 162,000 square feet under leases with expiration dates ranging from December 2021 to December 2024, and its San Francisco facilities consisted of around 284,000 square feet of leases with expiring December 2022 to June 2026 Corporate real estate totaled 2.1 million square feet in 100 US and global locations.

In its fiscal third-quarter report, released in early December, the company said it expected to take a roughly $180 million impairment charge for the adjustments to its real estate because of the pandemic.

While larger employers in the Bay Area and Marin generally are being more cautious about their plans to reoccupy their offices, a number of smaller firms have been getting back together in their corporate spaces, according to Whitney Strotz, who overseas commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield’s San Rafael location.

“This recent spike in omicron seems to be putting things on hold in the short term, as we go through a relatively steep spike in cases,” Strotz said about large companies’ plans to expand their local real estate. But rather than nixing those goals, those employers tend to be slow-rolling their site searches, he said.

One trend in those site searches that has been gaining momentum in the pandemic is the shift from central offices in urban areas to a hub-and-spoke model, with a smaller central office there plus even smaller satellite locations in surrounding suburbs closer to the employees ‘ homes, according to Strotz.

He’s currently working with a handful of San Francisco firms that are looking for multiple locations of about 4,000-5,000 square feet in Bay Area suburbs.

“Sales organizations have seen success with this model for a long time,” Strotz said. That arrangement typically includes a regional office staffed with a management, human resources and operational support, then small offices in surrounding markets. “What’s different now is we are seeing other kings of organizations looking for similar space.”

Haden Ongaro, who leads Newmark’s North Bay commercial real estate brokerage team from San Rafael, said the rebound of rents and occupancy rates in higher-class office space in Silicon Valley, San Francisco “viewspace” (with window views above surrounding buildings) and southern Marin prime complexes are signs of the market for such space is recovering.

“We are seeing a flight to quality in the Bay Area,” Ongaro said. “Buildings in southern Marin have done well and maintained high lease rates and low vacancy — in some cases below 5% available (to lease).”

One company that gave up sizable Marin County office space earlier in the pandemic was jobs online marketplace Glassdoor, which moved its headquarters to a San Francisco high-rise as part of a Bay Area consolidation. But the company’s 40,000-square-foot former head office at 160 Shoreline Parkway in Mill Valley is in late-stage negotiations with three undisclosed companies in various industries to occupy the space, according to Ongaro, who is part of the team brokering the deals. And one of those companies also is interested in adding another 15,000 square feet in an adjoining building.

Yet the 3900 Civic Center space Autodesk is moving out of may have a tougher time on the market, according to Strotz.

“Larger blocks of space have not seen as much action since COVID,” Strotz said. “That’s a soft spot in the market. Medium- and smaller-(sized) suites have seen the most action in the last 24 months. I’m hopeful that as we move from the pandemic to the endemic stage soon, we will see larger blocks get more interest again.”

Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Before the Business Journal, he wrote for Bay City News Service in San Francisco. He has a degree from Walla Walla University. Reach him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.

The post Autodesk scales again its Marin County, San Francisco workplaces as staff choose hybrid office appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

DUBLIN – (BUSINESS WIRE) – Horizon Therapeutics plc (Nasdaq: HZNP) announced today that it has been selected as a Top Workplace for 2021 by the Chicago Tribune and ranks 5th out of 75 other midsize companies in the Chicago area. This is Horizon’s seventh time on the list.

“We are always honored to be included on the Chicago Tribune’s Top Jobs list,” said Tim Walbert, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Horizon. “Because giving back to the communities we live and work in is fundamental to our business, we proudly contribute to the Chicago area ecosystem, home to our US headquarters, innovators and our diverse future Actively support STEM managers. We also pride ourselves on providing state-of-the-art facilities for our employees in the greater Chicago area, where solutions for patients are brought to life. ”

The Chicago Tribune’s list of top jobs is based solely on employee feedback collected through an external survey conducted by research partner Energage, LLC. The anonymous survey takes into account workplace culture, including alignment, execution and connection, among other things.

Earlier this week, Horizon was also named an elite winner on the list of the best and best places to work in the San Francisco Bay Area and named a top company in the Best of the Best Small Business category. The Elite Award is presented by the National Association for Business Resources and recognizes companies that focus on employee needs while serving as leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is the second year the company has been listed and the first year as an elite winner since opening its South San Francisco office in November 2019.

“We are proud to be recognized as an elite winner in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Best and Brightest Companies to Work For,” said Srini Ramanathan, Ph.D., senior vice president, Research and Development Sciences and Site Manager South San Francisco, Horizon. “This honor is important because it underscores our strong commitment to our employee experience and our continuous growth in the region.”

The “Best and Brightest Companies to Work For®” competition identifies and honors companies that are committed to excellence in terms of their human resources work and the enrichment of their employees. Companies are rated based on categories such as communication, work-life balance, employee education, diversity, recognition, loyalty, and more. The San Francisco Bay Area Elite winners are those who set the highest standards for all San Francisco Bay Area businesses. The winners will be selected based on the overall high scores and then designated as elite winners in their respective category.

About Energage, LLC

Energage offers a fully unified SaaS platform, support and professional services to help companies recruit and retain the right talent. As a founding member of B-Corporation, Energage is committed to making the world a better place to work together. Based on 14 years of cultural research, the engine of 51 top workplaces programs across the country, and data gathered from over 20 million employees in 60,000 companies, Energage has isolated the 15 drivers of engaged cultures that are critical to the success of any business . and developed the tools and expertise to help companies measure, shape and showcase their unique culture in order to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. More information is available at www.energage.com.

About the best and brightest programs

The “Best and Brightest Companies to Work For®” competition identifies and honors companies that are committed to excellence in operations and the enrichment of employees that lead to greater productivity and financial performance. This competition identifies potential winners based on regional business performance data and a set standard across the country. This program recognizes the companies who are doing better business, creating richer lives, and building a stronger community as a whole. There are numerous regional celebrations across the country including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Houston, Milwaukee, San Diego, San Francisco, Miami, New York, Charlotte, Denver, Seattle, Nashville, Portland, and Nationally.

Over the horizon

Horizon is focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of drugs that meet the critical needs of people affected by rare, autoimmune and severe inflammatory diseases. Our pipeline is targeted: we use scientific expertise and courage to offer patients clinically meaningful therapies. We believe science and compassion must work together to change lives. For more information on how we are doing incredible things to influence lives, please visit www.horizontherapeutics.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

The post Horizon Therapeutics plc Receives High Office Awards in Chicago and San Francisco appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif .– (BUSINESS WIRE) – Nov. August 2021–

Veracyte, Inc. (Nasdaq: VCYT), a global diagnostics company, announced today that it has been named a Top Workplace by the Bay Area News Group for the eighth consecutive year.

The annual award is based solely on employee feedback collected through an anonymous third-party survey conducted by Energage, LLC, a leading provider of technology-based engagement tools. The survey measures 15 culture drivers that are critical to business success, including alignment, execution, and engagement.

The employees of Veracyte, who took part in the survey about the top jobs in 2021, rated the company as the best for the efficient and good completion of tasks, for the fact that executives who understand the processes in the company hold meetings that the Make good use of employees’ time, have strong cross-departmental coordination, step in the right direction and act according to strong values.

“The results of this survey suggest that Veracyte employees at all levels believe in the quality of our work, our leadership and our processes and believe in our strategy,” said Marc Stapley, Chief Executive Officer of Veracyte. “As we continue to expand globally, we are committed to ensuring that Veracyte remains a top job for each of our employees around the world. This has been a core Veracyte value since the company was founded in 2008 and will be critical to achieving our vision of improving outcomes for patients around the world every step of their journey. “

The Bay Area News Group released the full list of the winners of the Top Workplaces 2021 on Sunday, August 22nd. The list is available on the Bay Area News Group website.

Veracyte (Nasdaq: VCYT) is a global diagnostics company that improves patient care by providing answers to clinical questions and providing diagnostic and treatment decisions throughout the patient journey for cancer and other diseases. The company’s growing range of genome tests leverages advances in genomic science and technology so that patients can avoid risky and costly diagnostic procedures and reduce the time to appropriate treatment. The company’s tests for lung cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, thyroid cancer, bladder cancer, colon cancer and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis are available to patients, and its kidney cancer and lymphoma subtyping tests are under development, the latter as companion diagnostics. With Veracyte’s exclusive global license for a world-class diagnostic instrument platform, the company is able to deliver its tests to patients worldwide. Veracyte is based in South San Francisco, California. For more information, please visit www.veracyte.com and follow the company on Twitter (@veracyte).

Veracyte, the Veracyte logo, HalioDx, Decipher, Decipher GRID, Afirma, Percepta, Envisia, Prosigna, Lymphmark, “Know by Design” and “More about You” are registered and selected trademarks of Veracyte, Inc. and its affiliates in the USA countries. nCounter is the registered trademark of NanoString Technologies, Inc. in the United States and select countries and is used by Veracyte under license.

Vice President for Corporate Communications

KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA CALIFORNIA

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: SCIENCE OTHER SCIENCES BIOTECHNOLOGY HUMAN RESOURCES ONCOLOGY HEALTH PROFESSIONAL SERVICES GENETICS

Copyright Business Wire 2021.

PUB: 8/23/2021 10:33 a.m. / DISC: 8/23/2021 10:33 a.m.

Copyright Business Wire 2021.

The post Veracyte Named a San Francisco Bay Space “Prime Office” for Eighth Consecutive 12 months | Enterprise appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

PLEASANTON, CALIFORNIA, June 30, 2016 / PRNewswire / – Service Champions Heating & Air Conditioning, a contractor for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and home comfort services, was named to the Bay Area News Group’s 2016 Top Workplaces list. This is the first time an HVAC contractor has received this prestigious list, based solely on an annual survey of the company’s employees in the Bay Area.

Photo – http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160630/385273

The list of top jobs is determined based on the results of an employee feedback survey conducted by WorkplaceDynamics, LLC, a research firm specializing in organizational health and workplace improvement. The survey measures various aspects of work culture, including alignment, execution, and connection, and organizations must meet strict organizational health standards to be selected as a “Top Workplace”.
The full list of Top Workplaces 2016 was announced on Sunday June 26thand will be published online at http://www.topworkplaces.com/frontend.php/regional-list/list/bayarea.

Service Champions has been consistently recognized for the past 13 years. The company has been named a Diamond Certified® company for the 13th consecutive year and is meeting ongoing research and rating requirements to qualify for the prestigious Service Award. In addition, Service Champions proudly has an “A +” rating from the Better Business Bureau, a 5-star rating on Yelp.com, and an “A” rating on the home improvement and review website, Angie’s List.

Hiring of service technicians and business people

Service Champions provides service technicians and business professionals for functions across East Bay, South Bay and Sacramento Areas. For more information on full-time positions, please visit www.servicechampions.com/careers. “As a value-driven organization, we focus on the personal growth of our team members and on how this directly affects the entire company,” he says And Michie, Vice president of the people.

To inquire about career opportunities at Service Champions, contact And Michie at the [email protected] or (925) 271-0977.

About Service Champions Heating & Air Conditioning
Founded by Kevin Comerford In 2003, Service Champions offered its customers in the East Bay and South Bay regions heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems as well as services for living comfort.

Driven by his dream of starting a business that not only delivers a great customer experience, but also serves and supports the local community, Comerford, a Pleasanton The native American developed a corporate culture that reflects his passion for helping others by providing opportunities for success for his 185+ team members.

About WorkplaceDynamics, LLC, headquartered in Exton, PAWorkplaceDynamics specializes in employee feedback surveys and workplace improvements. This year alone, more than two million employees in over 6,000 organizations will take part in the Top Workplaces campaign – a program carried out in collaboration with more than 40 renowned media partners The United States. Workplace Dynamics also offers advisory services to improve employee engagement and organizational health. WorkplaceDynamics is a founding member of B Corporation, a coalition of organizations leading a global movement to redefine business success by offering a positive vision of how to do business better.

This content was posted through the news release distribution service on Newswire.com. For more information, please visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE Service Champions Heating & Air Conditioning

similar links

http://www.servicechampions.net

The post Service Champions Heating & Air Conditioning Named a San Francisco Bay Space 2016 “High Office” appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.