Prepare for cheaper cities

In eerily underpopulated downtown Boston on Oct. 8 at about 11 a.m.

There’s hope that downtown Providence, especially its newer office buildings, can grab business refugees from big cities, especially Boston and New York, to help fill some of its COVID-emptied space. The  pitch would include, among other things, the area’s shorter commuting times and, of course, the compact city’s walkability and visual charms.

Well, maybe a little. But it will be hard to fight a  technology-fueled work-at-home movement that was underway well before COVID-19 arrived and that affects all cities. Yes, having so many employees working from home erodes teamwork, loyalty and esprit de corps. But the savings to employers in office expenses may seem to many enterprises to more than offset those drawbacks.

The savings may soon come to include lower pay (never including senior executives, of course) for many, which employers would justify by pointing to the partial (if workers only come to the office, say,  two or three days a week) or full (if they work entirely at home) disappearance of  employees’ commuting costs, which for most workers total thousands of dollars a year.

We’ll see. But what does seem clear is that there will be fewer, perhaps far fewer, restaurants and hotels in most city centers in the next few years. Maybe more happily, at the same time rents will tend to fall downtown as more apartments go vacant, drawing in more people of modest means to live there even as suburbia becomes more expensive. And many of the remaining restaurants will be less expensive than before COVID. I hope that this means a revival of the old-fashioned diners. “Breakfast all day!”