Is Downtown Austin Back in the Office?

This is what we look like in the office, more or less. Image: Shutterstock

Hey, is anybody working in downtown Austin? This sounds like the setup to a joke, but we’re actually curious — with high office vacancy rates and an increasing preference for hybrid or fully remote work after the start of the pandemic three years ago, the current state of working downtown is kinda up in the air.

One Lady Bird Lake Office Tower Project Redesigned for Residential Use

This cultural shift has all sorts of downstream effects on the built environment of the downtown area, from big stuff like new office projects getting retooled before groundbreaking to small stuff like restaurants and food trucks catering to the office lunch demographic having a tougher time staying in business. Of course there’s a lot of personal effects as well, with some employees reporting that the mass implementation of remote or hybrid work has a positive impact on their mental health and work/life balance. Other people get bored! There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the “office question,” but we’re curious to hear from Austinites who worked downtown prior to the pandemic about their current situation. This calls for a casual survey!

Use the embedded survey above or click this link to tell us about your current work environment. We’ll be sharing the most interesting responses in a future post, but really we’re just curious to see if our downtown-loving readers still work downtown these days. It should only take a few minutes, so have fun, and don’t work too hard!