New York City’s post-pandemic recovery has slowed as just a small fraction of Manhattan’s office workers have returned to work in-person, according to a survey published Monday.
The findings — compiled by the Partnership for New York City, which represents the Big Apple’s largest employers — estimated 62% of Manhattan’s office employees worked remotely during a typical weekday in late April. And just 8% — or one in 12 — showed up to work in-person five days per week, the report shows.
“The longer people worked remotely, the longer they wanted to continue to work remotely,” said Kathy Wylde, the CEO of the Partnership for New York City. “It’s called inertia. The longer people are doing one thing, the harder it is to get them to change.”
It’s a far more sluggish return to in-person work than the organization projected before the omicron variant of COVID-19 first swept through the city. A survey conducted in late October found nearly half of Manhattan’s office workers expected to be in the office by the end of January.
Predictions of a return to normalcy have proved inaccurate for more than a year. A March 2021 survey found employers expected about half of the borough’s office workers to be back in-person by last September.
About 78% of the city’s major employers expect a combination of remote and in-person work is here to stay, the survey found.
The survey also found many New Yorkers continue to cite crime and harassment as a reason to avoid the office. Nearly two-thirds of the companies surveyed said improving public safety and addressing the city’s homelessness crisis would help bring workers back.
“What we found about this survey is people are concerned about crime and homelessness and mental health issues, but they’re also waiting for their colleagues to come back. They’re waiting for Manhattan to come back to what it was in 2019,” said Wylde. “People are seeing a much stronger police presence in the subway and I think that’s providing relief and restoring a sense of security, but at the same time they’re seeing a lot of mentally ill homeless people on the streets. People are shooting up drugs in Midtown.”
“It’s a bit of a Catch-22,” Wylde added. “The fewer commuters, the fewer people on the streets going to do their business, the more problems are going to arise.”
Wylde said she was confident people would come back to work in Manhattan over the next two years — but the slow return threatens to hammer the city’s economy until then.
New York City’s unemployment rate was 6.5% in March, nearly double the national average of 3.6%.
The dim outlook is also bad news for the MTA, which has reeled financially since the onset of the pandemic and faces a deficit of $500 million come 2025 if more people do not return to trains and buses. Mass transit ridership is down about 40% from 2019 — and the figure hasn’t budged up by more than a few points in months.
MTA chairman Janno Lieber last month said the agency would publish new ridership projections in July that would give New Yorkers a clearer idea of when — or if — more commuters are expected to return.
