This too, the suburban office park, shall pass.
This, the suburban office park, too, shall pass. Hank Shiffman/shutterstock.com

Because white middle-class Americans were socialized to blame the problems of the city not on economic factors and pressures but on the character of groups of people (usually minorities, usually black), they fled to the suburbs in large numbers during the socially turbulent 1960s.

As Steven Conn points out in Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century, a book that in my reading experience is only second in depth, insights, and style to Kenneth T. Jackson's masterful Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, the expressways that were built to reduce congestion in major cities facilitated the flight of whites to the suburbs. They also took with them their jobs. The office park was the result of this massive relocation. (My Kindle notes and highlights for Americans Against the City are open to the public.)

But with the rise of the Jane Jacobsian ideas in the new urbanist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, and the growing awareness of the serious health consequences of car dependence, as exemplified by the impact Urban Sprawl and Public Health had on the language and thinking of urban planners, more and more ordinary Americans want walkability to be a part of their lives. They want to revive the old-time luxury of strolling to nearby shopping centers and parks and other amenities. This means, they want the kind of suburbs that existed in the age of the streetcar. Seattle's Columbia City was once such a suburb.

This pronounced shift in preferences has apparently had an impact on the office park market. This is the conclusion made in a paper (PDF) by Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, a multinational real estate services corporation based in New York City. The key passage in their report:

[T]he expansiveness, serenity, and security of the 1980s suburban office campus once made that environment appealing for many professional and business services firms. Now, however, walkability and activated environments are at the top of many tenants’ lists of must-haves. Suburban office buildings that have become obsolete due to car-centric and removed locations – and which do not
have some factor that will remedy these traits in the future (such as a planned transit station or new highway exits) – are unlikely to achieve market-average rents as leases roll. In extreme cases, properties that are incurably obsolete—primarily those at undesirable locations or with building sizes or floor plates that tenants now find either too large or too small – may never lease again.

Of course, this is just a trend. People are still buying cars, and still need parking spaces. The office park is far from extinct. But it is no longer the leading idea. It is losing its charm and dependable access to profits.