For years, the prevailing narrative in commercial real estate has been simple: America is overbuilt. Too many offices. Too many strip malls. Too much supply chasing too little demand.
But that diagnosis misses the real problem. America isn’t overbuilt. It’s misbuilt.
We don’t have too much real estate. We have the wrong kinds of real estate in the wrong places, designed for a version of American life that is quickly disappearing. And until we admit that, we’ll keep trying to solve the wrong problem with the wrong tools.
The real estate market is not collapsing.
The post-pandemic economy didn’t destroy demand for real estate. People are still spending, traveling, working and gathering. But what they want from physical space has changed dramatically.
Today, the average consumer is not searching for square footage. Instead, they want walkability, convenience and community (consider that America is the loneliest it’s ever been).
They also want value, because affordability is now the defining economic issue for much of the country. Ninety-two percent of Americans cut back spending in 2025, and the middle class is shrinking.
The problem is that much of the built environment is optimized for a different era, in which commuting was a given, office attendance was required and retail was about products and not experiences.
The office crisis is not a ‘work-from-home’ problem.
It’s tempting to frame the office downturn as a remote work story. But that’s only part of it.
The deeper issue is that America spent decades building the most expendable kind of office space: low-to-mid-quality suburban inventory, built for scale rather than place. The suburban office vacancy rate ended 2025 at a record high of 32.9% (paywall).
Now, in a world where employees have options, companies are learning a hard truth: If you want people to come in, the office has to be worth coming in for.
The buildings holding value today are near housing, restaurants, transit, culture and daily life. They are high-tech with lots of conveniences, and they are not in office parks.
Americans don’t want more space—they want better space.
The most misunderstood aspect of today’s real estate environment is that demand hasn’t disappeared. It has become more selective.
People want to be part of communities. They want third places—cafes, gyms, public spaces and local retail—where they can interact with others. In retail, when you can buy almost anything online, experiences at physical stores have become more important than the products themselves for some people.
Real estate that delivers both can sometimes be scarce.
We built for cars and commuting.
If you consider the default development model of the last 40 years, we built housing far from jobs. We built jobs far from housing. We built retail as isolated boxes. We built office campuses surrounded by parking.
This model produced enormous square footage, but not necessarily better places. It produced assets that were financially efficient to build, but didn’t have staying power. And now we’re seeing the consequences: properties that are physically sound but functionally obsolete.
It’s time to reinvent real estate.
The good news is that misbuilt real estate is not a dead end.
Across the country, underperforming retail, office parks and aging suburban corridors represent an opportunity for redevelopment and repurposing.
For example:
• Converting surplus offices into housing
• Rebuilding dead retail into mixed-use areas
• Converting empty real estate into healthcare, child care, education and recreation
The goal isn’t to rescue every asset, but to reallocate land and capital toward the kinds of places people actually want.
The future is more human.
The overbuilt narrative is comforting because it suggests the solution is time: Wait long enough and the market will absorb the excess.
But actually, change is required: redevelopment, rezoning, repositioning. The next era of real estate will not be defined by who has the most square footage but by the kinds of places people actually want to live in. The winners will be the ones who stop chasing scale and start designing for community.
Source: “America Isn’t Overbuilt—It’s Misbuilt: Rethinking Commercial Real Estate“
