Lonely Last Days in the Suburban Office Park

In their prime, suburban office parks offered a modern alternative to cramped office towers, and easy car access when mass transit was faltering. They promised, in the place of seemingly noisy, congested, unpredictable downtowns, a quiet space to sit in a cubicle and concentrate.

That tranquil ideal, however, might be described differently today.

“You’re in the middle of nowhere here,” said David DeConde, the real estate development lead with Point View Wayne Properties, which purchased the Toys “R” Us campus in 2019 amid the company’s bankruptcy. You couldn’t walk to happy hour after work, or bump into someone from another company on your coffee break (you might, however, meet a fox on the way to the parking lot).

But the property is so large that it could be redeveloped to include all kinds of other uses. “If I had everything at my fingertips,” Mr. DeConde suggested, “I could reside at my home, roll into work, go down to the ice cream shop, get a sandwich, get a bagel, go out to dinner, go to the gym — and it’s all walkable.”

In other suburban office parks around the country, it will make financial sense to renovate outdated offices into modern ones, with at least some of those amenities. Other sites will have to become something fundamentally different: schools, senior living centers, apartment complexes, public parks, warehouses.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/upshot/future-suburban-office-park.html