Those of you who have ventured into downtown Boston have described the experience as a trip into emptiness; one of my partners remarked that you could hear crickets on the streets. Many people reading this post are working entirely or mostly remotely, and everyone says (vaguely) that this is a permanent thing. But what does that mean?

Enter a current study by Harvard Business School, which tries to put a metric to the generalization. Short answer is they estimate that 16% of the US workforce will work remotely at least two days a week once the “new normal” arrives.

Predictably, the higher the sophistication of the job and thus of the worker, the more likely this result. At present, that cohort is able to work remotely and has found reasonable levels of efficiency– no startling news here. Somehow, I find the Harvard projection very modest, as I would expect a much greater shift away from central offices, but that perception may be colored by personal experience and the currency of the pandemic threat.

Impact on real estate markets is not difficult to guess. Combined with new emphasis on space efficiency in office design (fewer square feet per employee) and reduced need for file storage (going electronic), remote working will mean empty city offices. Theoretically. No doubt there will be industry variables; hard to imagine life sciences being remote without labs for a simple example.

Personal reports from New York, again anecdotal, suggest a major permanent shift. Will executive functions be driven to the home or at least to the suburban areas and out of the urban core due to future concerns about COVID 19 and similar fears? I know of several people moving out of NYC to the “Island” on a permanent basis. I have a client presently looking for office space in Manhattan and per the broker the choice in size, location and price point is staggeringly large. Today, someone told me they bought a house in Maine as a permanent non-Boston work locale.

Lastly, query the impact on a trend for executive employment becoming materially remote on economic disparity. Many lower end jobs support working in the city cores, which are also generally accessible to lower income employees. You can make your own intuitive assumptions about maintenance and cleaning workers, building receptionists and parking garage attendants, waiters and cooks in restaurants, other city-based support trades (think about dry cleaners, hair salons, shoe repairs, eye glass stores to name a few such trades practiced in close proximity to my downtown office). Not so easy to relocate the folks who staff these functions to the Westons and Shaker Heights and Hamptons, even if the base need for these functions remains to some degree.