The downtown of any major city is stacked with huge office towers employing vast multitudes of employees along with vast towers of condo buildings for people who have chosen to live near their workplace
As the pandemic swept through cities, many businesses were told to close, and offices told most employees to work from home. The result has been a rather major emptying of the downtown spaces. Fewer people, fewer cars, fewer delivery trucks and so on.
Businesses that remained open but which depend on office workers and downtown shoppers find they’re suffering from lack of clientele and closing as income dries up, which in turn means fewer workers, and fewer options for those who want to go downtown and so becomes another disincentive. This becomes somewhat of a feedback loop.
In Toronto, Canada’s biggest city, even the theoretically surefire business of the coffee shop is suffering as evidenced by the closing of some Starbucks locations.

While downtowns in Canada are not the empty places they were earlier in the pandemic, but still nowhere near the busy places they were before COVID-19. Here a single pedestrian on the normally very busy Bank Str. in Ottawa in Dec. (Andrew Lee- CBC)
This all has meant a huge increase in empty stores, empty office space, and questions about the future of downtown office. Even Toronto’s city administration is planning to reduce its need for office space cutting its current 55 various office locations down to 15 for a reduction of 33 per cent of floor space.
Toronto is now reporting that office space available for lease has increased quadrupled this year compared to pre-COVID levels. In the greater Toronto area (GTA) available office space is now reported to be over 5 million square feet. (over 464,000 sq/m)
Another major city, Calgary Alberta, reports an office vacancy rate of over 28 per cent in the third quarter of this year. Several huge office towers in the city are now totally empty.
In Montreal, one brokerage estimated the downtown commercial vacancy rate as having increased by over 11 per cent since the start of the year. Several new projects are also set to draw people away from downtown. This includes a new light rail line to the west island and redevelopment projects there, along with more development in Laval to the north, and a huge shopping and development complex known as 10-30 on the south shore.
Other than Vancouver which has not seen the quite the same trend for various reasons, major cities across the country have seen office space availability downtown increase dramatically.
The question in many minds is, how will this affect the future? Some companies have decided to move out of expensive big city downtowns to locations in smaller centres, while others realize that with telecommuting of staff they no longer will need such large amounts of office space. Surveys have also shown many workers would prefer to continue working from home, if not full time, at least part of the week as opposed to commuting to an office.
As with many issues resulting from the effects of COVID-19, the future of office work, how downtowns will evolve, and many other questions cannot be accurately predicted.
Additional information-sources
- Globe and Mail: K Kerr: Dec 1/20: Commercial real estate: Trends to watch in 2021
- Globe and Mail; Dec 8/20: Transit, mall development to spur growth of Montreal’s West Island
- BlogTO: B Robinson: Dec 10/20: Available office space in Toronto has quadrupled in 2020 as trend to work from home continues
- CBC: Oct 16/20: There’s an additional 311.000 square feet of empty office space in downtown Calgary
For reasons beyond our control, and for an undetermined period of time, our comment section is now closed. However, our social networks remain open to your contributions.