Those Sprawling Office Parks You Drive By On Your Way Into The City Are Now Being Abandoned

You know all those office parks or towers you pass in certain cities on the way in from the suburbs?

There is a pretty good chance they are now completely abandoned.

In a recent feature called "Suburban Corporate Wasteland," NPR's Connecticut affiliate discusses how the state is now dotted with massive white elephants, the shells of a multi-decade boom in mega office parks.

Pfizer's sprawling, 160-acre research park in Groton, for instance, is now in the process of being torn down. The town of Ridgefield had to purchase the former 40-acre Schlumberger-Doll research center after it sat vacant for five years; it's now being sold off piece by piece. And officials in Simsbury are now debating what to do about a 173-acre site formerly owned by The Hartford.

Connecticut is not the only site of this phenomenon. Nationwide, the suburban office vacancy rate is 16.6%, compared with the downtown rate of 12.4%, according to CBRE. Elk Grove Village outside Chicago must now grapple with a 60-acre site formerly owned by United Airlines after the company moved its offices to Chicago. AT&T and Motorola have likewise left nearby suburbs with similar dilemmas after they moved into city limits, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Aaron Renn at the Urbanophile identifies several reasons behind this phenomenon:

• The massive post-war migration waves from the inner city to the suburbs have stopped, and in many cases are now reversing. You can also see this in lack of new growth in vehicle miles traveled.
• Relatedly, it's now actually cool - and safe - to be downtown again. Much of the new crop of tech dynamos are actually in San Francisco instead of the surrounding valley, Amazon has a huge new campus in Seattle, and the aforementioned Chicagoland firms are retreating from the Interstate back into city limits.
• M&A and corporate restructuring and downsizing have wiped out mid-sized firms.
• People don't work like they used to. Firms have realized that "people who don't get out and engage with the world around them end up cut off from information flows, leaving them a step behind." Suburban office parks are also quite expensive.

"Put it all together and it's clear office space demand is weaker than it used to be," Renn writes. "Joel Kotkin recently surveyed the same trends and suggests that the US may have hit 'peak office'."

It wasn't even fun while it lasted.