One surprise emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, at least according to the plethora of news reports and articles on the subject, is how effectively professionals and white-collar workers have adapted to—indeed, embraced—the notion of working remotely. When the crisis hit, many workers were, of course, forced to report for work every day, just as they did before lockdowns were imposed around the country. Health care providers, manufacturing employees, sanitation workers, bus drivers, police officers and many others could only do their jobs in situ. But millions of others, confronted with executive orders deeming them "non-essential" or with hastily adopted corporate policies prohibiting their presence in their offices, were forced to work from home.

At first, alarm and consternation prevailed. How can this possibly work, employers wondered. How can these employees be left to their own devices? Who will manage them? But as data was collected over the ensuing weeks and months, despair turned to hope, and then to optimism, and then outright giddiness. Armed with their laptops and iPhones and linked together by what became the ubiquitous and highly awkward and annoying Zoom meeting, employees appeared to be working from home with minimal negative consequences. Little or no empirical data existed to support this, but that was the perception.

In fact, pundits wondered whether this temporary arrangement was getting enough traction to become a permanent model for a large segment of our workforce. And if that happened, decreased demand for office space would necessarily follow. Real estate developers with large office building holdings became queasy.