Where the Fight Over a Return to the Office Is Over and the Office Won

Gabe Tucker, 26, is a lawyer with Fortif Legislation Companions in Birmingham, the place the share of job listings that let distant work is roughly half that of New York’s. Every morning, Mr. Tucker places on a button-down shirt, drives for quarter-hour and arrives on the workplace round 8 a.m. His routine, in different phrases, stays an identical to the one he had earlier than the pandemic started (apart from not having to put on a tie). Within the evenings, he and his colleagues generally make a toast to have fun the closing of a deal. They’ve been again within the workplace since June 2020, with masks and different Covid precautions.

“It’s work like regular, just about,” Mr. Tucker mentioned. “We discovered it tough to be working remotely. All of us take pleasure in being round one another.”

San Francisco’s workplace occupancy is at 39 p.c of its prepandemic degree, and New York’s is at 41 p.c, in keeping with knowledge from the constructing safety agency Kastle. Austin, Texas, in the meantime, is at practically 60 p.c. Then there’s the Huntington Middle, a 37-story workplace tower in downtown Columbus, which now has about 85 p.c of its prepandemic occupants on website in some unspecified time in the future through the week, in keeping with Hines, the corporate that manages the constructing.

Traci Martinez, the workplace managing accomplice at Squire Patton Boggs, a legislation agency with workplaces on the twentieth ground of the Huntington Middle, mentioned anyone coming from San Francisco may stroll into her workplace and marvel on the buzz.

“They’d come into our constructing and be like, ‘Wow, that is simply regular,’” mentioned Ms. Martinez, 45.

She has a front-row view of the disparities in workplace returns nationwide. She coordinates with managers within the agency’s quite a few workplaces, and has discovered that its Ohio places have stuffed up quicker than many others, notably its Washington, D.C., location.