The future of the office remains hazy, but it’s clear that many inner suburban markets are doing fine. But it’s not due to any much-ballyhooed shifts by tenants to “hub and spoke” occupancy models. 

As Steve Adams describes in this week’s issue, most of Boston’s office buildings are still empty of workers on any given weekday. Employers are being whipsawed by COVID-19 variants and related safety concerns, and employees’ own desires. The habits those workers have built up over two years of pandemic work-from-home aren’t helping matters, either.  

The end result: Many large firms still haven’t set a date for when they’ll return to the office, or in what capacity. But doubtless many will be reimagining what they use physical offices for when they do come back, likely requiring significant physical changes to these spaces. 

The region’s most troubled markets heading into the pandemic could prove to be canaries in the coal mine, as Scott Van Voorhis describes in his column on page 3. Office parks along Interstate 495 are hemorrhaging tenants, with 600,000 square feet hitting the market over the course of the last year.  

This is despite the surge of new arrivals in the belt’s exurbs, which might have been expected to draw firms to exchange a big downtown operation for a small executive office in the urban core and satellite facilities on the fringes to reduce employees’ commute times. There’s still time left on the clock before a fork can be stuck in this prediction from the pandemic’s early days, but so far, the signs aren’t good. 

The only suburban commercial markets coming out ahead in Pandemic Year Two are those on the western and northwestern parts of the Route 128 arc. A jet of biotech firms in need of bigger footprints is shooting out of Kendall Square like steam from a pressure cooker, letting landlords fill up vacant space. Thanks to the speed with which the life science industry has expanded and the comparatively plodding pace of any building project more robust than a tent, this area is now performing like downtown Boston by some measures. 

Amid this chaos, one thing is certain: It will be some time before we know how this will all play out. 

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