When PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan was asked last year about his indefinite suspension of 17 players for joining the rival LIV Golf league, Monahan chastised the golfers for choosing money over morality.

Because LIV gets its money from Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy notorious for its human-rights abuses, Monahan implied that players who chose LIV over professional golf’s preeminent league would regret their association with the kingdom. “I would ask any player that has left or any player that would consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?” Monahan said then.

But in one of the most stunningly hypocritical reversals in recent sports history, Monahan is now on Team LIV and, by extension, Team Saudi Arabia.

[Jemele Hill: American values were never the issue]

The PGA Tour and LIV Golf announced yesterday that they will merge their business operations, proving that one of the Wu-Tang Clan’s most famous lyrics remains unerringly true: Cash rules everything.

Monahan struggled to explain his flip-flop. “I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite. Anytime I said anything, I said it with the information that I had at that moment, and I said it based on someone that’s trying to compete for the PGA Tour and our players. I accept those criticisms,” he said during a conference call. “But circumstances do change. I think that in looking at the big picture and looking at it this way, that’s what got us to this point.”

But the circumstances aren’t what changed. The PGA Tour just decided that it wants access to LIV Golf’s enormous financial resources, which come from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. One of the world’s largest sovereign-wealth funds, it has an estimated $600 billion in assets.

The fund is controlled by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—the same man whom the CIA has deemed culpable for the murder of the Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. The prince has admitted that Saudi officials were behind Khashoggi’s death but denied any personal involvement in the journalist’s murder.

[From the April 2022 issue: Inside the palace with Mohammed bin Salman]

The problem with the golf merger isn’t just that the PGA Tour eagerly prostituted itself, or that it didn’t even have the decency to consult its players before making the deal, or that it didn’t care that some players actually had moral objections to LIV Golf, or that the PGA’s sudden shift was unfair to other golfers who, under the assumption that Monahan would stand firm, had previously turned down the opportunity to make millions of dollars by defecting. By selling out, the PGA Tour has also permanently aligned itself with a country that tortures prisoners, executes dissidents and others for vaguely defined offenses, subjects women to second-class treatment, and criminalizes homosexuality. The PGA’s decision horrified the families of 9/11 victims. Osama Bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and the country had long supported the spread of extremist religious ideology around the world. When casting aspersions on LIV last year, Monahan noted that he was close to two families that had lost members in the 2001 attacks.

“PGA Tour leaders should be ashamed of their hypocrisy and greed,” Terry Strada, the chair of 9/11 Families United, said in a statement yesterday. “Our entire 9/11 community has been betrayed by Commissioner Monahan and the PGA as it appears their concern for our loved ones was merely window-dressing in their quest for money—it was never to honor the great game of golf.”

If the PGA thinks that ignoring all the Saudi monarchy’s sins is just the cost of doing business, then the golf league’s reputation and credibility clearly weren’t worth that much to begin with.

If you were searching hard for a reason to give the PGA a pass for joining forces with its former enemy, you could make the argument that this merger helped the established league avoid its own demise. LIV Golf is reportedly paying four of its top players a total of nearly $600 million. The organization once offered Tiger Woods a multiyear contract worth $700 million to $800 million. Other PGA players eventually would have a hard time resisting the amount of money and other perks that LIV’s Saudi backers are offering. LIV golfers were playing for bigger prize money, having to compete in fewer tour events than they did on the PGA Tour, and receiving lucrative bonuses beyond their winnings. For example, the two-time majors champion Dustin Johnson competed in 307 events as a PGA golfer and earned almost $75 million. After playing one season on the LIV tour, Johnson earned more than half of his career PGA earnings.

Another likely factor in the merger was the draining legal battle taking place between both parties. Last August, 11 of the golfers whom Monahan suspended filed an antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour. The plaintiffs argued that by not allowing them to compete in PGA events, the organization was undermining their livelihoods and blocking competition. The PGA countersued, accusing the golfers who joined LIV Golf of violating their commitment to the older tour.

[From the June 1910 issue: The secret of golf]

Many observers speculated that if the lawsuits continued, information would come out that would have painted both sides in an unflattering light.

Whether antitrust regulators in the United States or Europe will try to block the merger isn’t yet clear. Ultimately the PGA decided that making the abrupt switch from concerned global citizens to opportunists was worth all the risk. In wagering its soul for a chance to cash in big, the PGA is hardly an anomaly in professional sports. So far, the conservative politicians who accused the NBA of bending its knee to China have so far been notably silent about the PGA’s alliance with Saudi Arabia. Once the criticism of the merger dissipates, the combination of the PGA’s prestige and Saudi money will create buzz and excitement. But perhaps Monahan should ask himself a version of the question he once posed to defectors: How will you feel when you have to apologize for being the commissioner of the PGA Tour?

The precipitous fall of Chris Licht is just the sort of story that today’s cable-news environment is best at covering: dramatic, messy, lurid, and ultimately lacking in much substance.

Licht was pushed out of CNN today, five days after my colleague Tim Alberta wrote a deeply textured, carefully considered, and entirely damning profile of the CEO. Licht’s clumsiness and tone-deafness in the story—he sniped at his staff, obsessed over his predecessor, and generally seemed feckless—were astonishing for someone in his position, and they’re the immediate context for his firing.

[Read: Inside the meltdown at CNN]

But the real reason Licht failed was not the way he executed his job but the way he conceived it in the first place. He wanted to turn CNN back into the neutral arbiter of truth that it once was (or seemed to be) without understanding that such a role is impossible in today’s fractured, polarized cable-news environment. “He was dealt a bad hand, and then he played it badly,” as one of his friends told the media reporter Brian Stelter.

Licht was not wrong to see serious problems at CNN. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the network unwittingly boosted Donald Trump by providing wall-to-wall coverage. Once Trump was in office, CNN switched gears, becoming fiercely critical of the president. Many of thhe criticisms were correct, though sometimes they were also histrionic and self-absorbed, as I noted in 2017. But with many CNN personalities establishing themselves as adversaries of the president—putting on a jersey, as Licht put it—the network looked less like the fearless news-gathering operation of Gulf War fame and more like a milquetoast replica of the liberal MSNBC.

[Read: Why the media’s defense against Trump has proven so ineffective]

Licht was betting that by neutralizing the most fiercely anti-Trump voices at CNN—firing people such as Stelter and John Harwood, and clamping down on Jim Acosta and Don Lemon—he could return the network to the neutral center. CNN wouldn’t hesitate to call out Trump’s lies, but it wouldn’t pose as the resistance either. This not only would be good for its journalism, he wagered, but would also reclaim the huge, underserved center in the media audience.

But Licht’s analysis misconstrued the cable landscape. No such audience appears to exist—or at least, it doesn’t seem to exist among cable-news viewers, night in and night out.

[David A. Graham: Chris Cuomo must go]

CNN’s viewership still booms whenever there’s a major news event, because viewers maintain a vestigial sense of the network as a place for serious news in a way that Fox News and MSNBC are not. But breaking news simply doesn’t happen that much—even if you slap BREAKING NEWS on a chyron all day, every day. (Cutting back on that practice was one of Licht’s unequivocally correct decisions.) The people who watch cable the rest of the time tend to be news junkies and political junkies. As American politics has become sharply polarized, so have they.

America really does have a substantial centrist middle, which explains why Joe Biden is president today, but it’s composed of normal people. Less than 10 million people watch cable news nightly; 155 million voted in the 2020 election. There simply aren’t enough rabid news consumers who are also staunch centrists to sustain a network. Even Fox News is bleeding viewers who find it insufficiently conservative to networks further to the right, like Newsmax.

Licht’s attempts to market CNN to this imaginary audience just dragged the network down further, most vividly demonstrated by the disastrous May town hall with Trump, where the former president bullied CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and pumped out nonsense. Licht’s attempts to win over conservatives didn’t work; they were still watching Fox (or Newsmax), but they took the overtures as a sign of weakness and a way to tug CNN further right. Meanwhile, the liberal and centrist viewers whom CNN had retained were appalled by the spectacle and lost allegiance. He made other errors, too, like elevating Lemon, only to fire him when a new morning show flopped and Lemon’s sexist remarks alienated his co-hosts.

[David A. Graham: The double bind of Trump’s outrageous statements]

Licht fell victim to the same fallacy as many other media figures did, from moguls to reporters to critics: They overestimate the power of the press, believing it to be the dominant force shaping American society. TV, magazines, and online outlets all convey the national discourse, but too often arrogantly assume they’re creating it out of thin air. One simple example suffices: The great mass of the press detested Trump, and and if the media had the kingmaking (or -breaking) power that it presumes, he would never have become president.

Licht’s catastrophic tenure is a shame, not only because CNN is one of the largest and most important reporting organizations in the country, but also because the role it used to play in the American media was valuable. Having a network that is widely viewed as reliable and basically trustworthy by a broad swath of the public is positive, and the partisan lean—sometimes open, sometimes less so—of much of the press today helps explain declining trust in the media. But Licht could no more rebuild the old CNN in today’s environment than he could turn back the clock to 1993. That time has expired, and now, so has Licht’s.

These are not your average reservoirs.

The plastic-lined cavities span, on average, 20 acres—more than 15 American football fields. Nicknamed “mega-basins,” they resemble enormous swimming pools scooped into farmland; about 100 basin projects are in the works across France. In wetter winter months, the basins are pumped full of groundwater; during punishing droughts and heat waves, those waters are meant to provide “life insurance” for farmers, who are among the region’s heaviest water users.

In 2022, France faced its worst drought on record; 2023 stands to be worse still. In 2020, anticipating future dry spells, federal environmental and agricultural agencies proposed prioritizing and subsidizing basins as “the most satisfactory way of securing water resources.”

But critics say that this so-called climate-change adaptation is, in reality, a maladaptation—a lesson in how not to prepare for water scarcity. Already, almost two-thirds of the world’s population experiences a water shortage for at least one month each year, and “basins are absolutely not the solution,” Christian Amblard, a hydrobiologist and an honorary director at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, told me.

Humans have, for millennia, smoothed out seasonal water availability by damming rivers or lakes to create artificial reservoirs. Jordan’s Jawa Dam, the world’s oldest, is 5,000 years old. But the first mega-basins in France were built only a few decades ago and, unlike traditional dams, draw some of their reserves from underground. Once on the surface, this water becomes vulnerable to evaporation (even more so as the planet warms) and to pathogens including bacteria and toxic algae.

France is not the only country collecting groundwater to combat major droughts. Others have done the same, with devastating effects on local people and ecosystems. In Petorca, Chile, about 30 groundwater-rights bearers control 60 percent of the region’s total streamflow; most residents depend on a few daily hours of access to water-tank trucks for their needs. In India, groundwater is a primary source for drinking water; overexploitation has led to declining groundwater levels across the country and could slash some winter agricultural yields by up to two-thirds, experts warn. Iran has increased its groundwater withdrawal by 200,000 percent over the past 50-plus years and now faces a potential state of “water bankruptcy.”

[Read: Suddenly, California has too much water]

Climate change will leave many regions alternating between harsh multiyear droughts and sudden, extreme flooding—all as the water frozen in Earth’s poles, glaciers, and permafrost melts away. Groundwater might seem to be a limitless resource of moisture in the unpredictable and imbalanced future. But it’s not, and scientists say that the freshwater lying beneath our feet should be managed  like any other nonrenewable resource.

“They’re thinking very short-term,” Amblard said of mega-basin proponents. “Water needs to stay in the ground.”

Surface water is all the water we can observe: ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. It coats almost three-quarters of the planet. When we imagine water, we usually envision surface water.

Our stores of groundwater, on the other hand, are invisible and vast.  Most of this water is stored in the gaps between rocks, sediment, and sand—think of it like the moisture in a sopping wet sponge. Some groundwater is relatively young, but some represents the remains of rain that fell thousands of years ago. Overall, groundwater accounts for 98 percent of Earth’s unfrozen freshwater. It provides one-third of global drinking water and nearly half of the planet’s agricultural irrigation.

Water is constantly cycling between below-ground stores and the world above. When rain falls or snow melts, some replenishes surface waters, some evaporates, and some filters down into underground aquifers. Inversely, aquifers recharge surface waters like lakes and wetlands, and pop up to form mountain springs or oases in arid lands.

Despite our utter dependence on groundwater, we know relatively little about it. Even within the hydrological community and at global water summits, “groundwater is kind of sidelined,” Karen Villholth, a groundwater expert and the director of Water Cycle Innovation, in South Africa, told me. It’s technically more difficult to measure than visible water, more complex in its fluid dynamics, and historically under- or unregulated. It “is often poorly understood, and consequently undervalued, mismanaged and even abused,” UNESCO declared in 2022. “It’s not so easy to grapple with,” Villholth said. “It’s simply easier to avoid.”

Take a crucial U.S. groundwater case, 1861’s Frazier v. Brown. The dispute involved two feuding neighbors and “a certain hole, wickedly and maliciously dug, for the purpose of destroying” a water spring that had, “from time immemorial, ran and oozed, out of the ground.” Frazier v. Brown questioned the rights of a landowner to subterranean water on the property. Ohio’s Supreme Court ultimately argued against any such right, on the premise that groundwater was too mysterious to regulate, “so secret, occult and concealed” were its origins and movement. (The case has since been overturned.)

Today, groundwater is still a mystery, says Elisabeth Lictevout, a hydrogeologist and the director of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre in the Netherlands. Scientists and state officials often don’t have a complete grasp of groundwater’s location, geology, depth, volume, and quality. They’re rarely certain of how quickly it can be replenished, or exactly how much is being pumped away in legal and illegal operations. “Today we are clearly not capable of doing a worldwide groundwater survey,” Lictevout told me. Without more precise data, we lack useful models that could better guide its responsible management. “It’s a big problem,” she said. “It’s revolting, even.”

[Read: 2050 is closer than 1990]

Water experts are certain, however, that humans are relying on groundwater more than ever. UNESCO reports that groundwater use is at an all-time high, with a global sixfold increase over the past 70 years. Across the planet, groundwater in arid and semi-arid regions—including in the U.S. High Plains and Central Valley aquifers, the North China Plain, Australia’s Canning Basin, the Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, South America’s Guarani Aquifer, and several aquifers beneath northwestern India and the Middle East—is experiencing rapid depletion. In 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey found that the country had tripled the previous century’s groundwater-withdrawal rate by 2008. Many aquifers—which, because they are subterranean, cannot easily be cleaned—are also being contaminated by toxic chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers, industrial discharge, waste disposal, and pumping-related pollutants.

Because these waters are hidden and can seem “infinite,” Lictevout said, few people “see the consequences of our actions.” She and other hydrology experts often turn to a fiscal analogy: All of the planet’s freshwater represents a bank account. Rainfall and snowmelt are the income. Evaporation and water pumping are the expenditures. Rivers, lakes, and reservoirs are the checking account. Groundwater is the savings or retirement fund—which we are tapping into.

“We have to be careful about dipping into our savings,” says Jay Famiglietti, an Arizona State University hydrologist and the executive director emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security.

As they face down hotter and drier growing seasons, some French farmers say the water backup of basins is crucial to food security. (Agriculture, according to the federal government, accounts for two-thirds of France’s total water consumption.)

“If we don’t continue with this project, there are farms that won’t survive,” Francois Petorin, an administrator of the 200-plus-farm Water Co-op 79, in Western France, has said. "We have no other choice."

Under a deal with local water authorities, farmers can access set volumes from the basins in exchange for reducing pesticide use, planting fields with hedges, and increasing biodiversity. Proponents of the mega-basins also argue that they would be careful to pump only when groundwater levels are above certain thresholds and would draw from shallow aquifers that could be quickly recharged by precipitation.

[Read: One nation under water]

Experts don’t disagree that groundwater must be a part of adapting to climate change. But many argue that overdependence on and overexploitation of a shrinking natural resource cannot be the solution to a problem created by the overdependence on and overexploitation of nonrenewable natural resources.

Instead, experts told me that regulated groundwater tapping could be paired with other adaptations—many of which involve reducing water use and consumption. Farmers could swap out water-intensive crops such as corn (which is grown on 60 percent of France’s irrigated lands, much of it for livestock) in favor of drought-resistant species adapted to local climates. They could employ  more efficient irrigation technologies and plow less, which would make for healthier, more permeable soil, which could retain more water and filter it down more effectively to aquifers. Reducing meat consumption and cutting down on food waste would also shrink water use. Instead of drawing groundwater up for dry seasons, we could inject and help infuse water into depleted aquifers for storage.

“It is a common resource, at the end of the day,” Villholth said. “It’s an issue of equity. It’s almost a democratic question.”

That’s certainly how France’s mega-basin opponents see it. They have staged numerous protests and acts of civil disobedience, including planting hedges on land earmarked for basins and excavating crucial pumps and pipes. In March, thousands of activists (30,000 according to organizers, 6,000 according to state officials) faced off against 3,000 militarized police over the construction of a new mega-basin in Sainte-Soline, in western France, that would supply 12 farms. Organizers say 200-plus people were injured by tear-gas grenades and rubber-ball launchers. A few weeks later, a French court approved the construction of 16 heavily subsidized mega-reservoirs in western France, including the one at Sainte-Soline.

This is one advantage of mega-basins: They make the invisible hyper-visible. “It puts the matter in front of everybody,” Villholth said. Pulled to the surface, groundwater becomes more measurable, as does its use—as do debates over the ethics of its use. But that won’t tell us how much is left. If we’re not careful, we’ll discover that only once it’s all tapped out.  

“I’m about to cancel all my Zoom meetings.” It was May 2021, and Jamie Dimon had had enough. The JPMorgan Chase CEO expected that “sometime in September, October,” the company’s office would “look just like it did before.” Two years later, his company is slashing its Manhattan footprint by a fifth.

Post-pandemic, kids are back in school, retirees are back on cruise ships, and physical stores are doing better than expected. But offices are struggling perhaps more than most casual observers realize, and the consequences for landlords, banks, municipal governments, and even individual portfolios will be far-reaching. In some cases, they will be catastrophic. But this crisis, like all crises, also represents an opportunity to reconsider many of our assumptions about work and cities.

During the first three months of 2023, U.S. office vacancy topped 20 percent for the first time in decades. In San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston, vacancy rates are as high as 25 percent. These figures understate the severity of the crisis because they only cover spaces that are no longer leased. Most office leases were signed before the pandemic and have yet to come up for renewal. Actual office use points to a further decrease in demand. Attendance in the 10 largest business districts is still below 50 percent of its pre-COVID level, as white-collar employees spend an estimated 28 percent of their workdays at home.

[Derek Thompson: The biggest problem with remote work]

With a third of all office leases expiring by 2026, we can expect higher vacancies, significantly lower rents, or both. And while we wrestle with the effects of distributed work, artificial intelligence could drive office demand even lower. Some pundits point out that the most expensive offices are still doing okay and that others could be saved by introducing new amenities and services. But landlords can’t very well lease all empty retail stores to Louis Vuitton and Apple. There’s simply not enough demand for such space, and new features make buildings even more expensive to build and operate.

With such grim prospects, some landlords are threatening to “give the keys back to the bank.” Over the past few months, the property giants RXR, Columbia Property Trust, Brookfield Asset Management, and others have collectively defaulted on billions in commercial-property loans. Such defaults are partly an indication of real struggles and partly a game of chicken. Most commercial loans were issued before the pandemic, when offices were full and interest rates were low.

The current landscape is drastically different: high vacancy rates, doubled interest rates, and nearly $1.5 trillion in loans due for repayment by 2025. By defaulting now, landlords leverage their remaining influence to advocate for loan extensions or a bailout. As John Maynard Keynes observed, when you owe your banker $1,000, you are at his mercy, but when you owe him $1 million, “the position is reversed.”

Banks have many reasons to worry. Rising interest rates have devalued other assets on their balance sheets, especially government bonds, leaving them vulnerable to bank runs. In recent months, Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature all collapsed. Regional institutions like these account for nearly 70 percent of all commercial-property bank loans. Pushing down the valuation of office buildings or taking possession of foreclosed properties would further weaken their balance sheets.

Municipal governments have even more to worry about. Property taxes underpin city budgets. In New York City, such taxes generate approximately 40 percent of revenue. Commercial property—mostly offices—contributes about 40 percent of these taxes, or 16 percent of the city’s total tax revenue. In San Francisco, property taxes contribute a lower share, but offices and retail appear to be in an even worse state.

Empty offices also contribute to lower retail sales and public-transport usage. In New York City, weekday subway trips are 65 percent of their 2019 level—though they’re trending up—and public-transport revenue has declined by $2.4 billion. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 retail-sector jobs lost since 2019 have yet to return. A recent study by an NYU professor named Arpit Gupta and others estimate a 6.5 percent “fiscal hole” in the city’s budget due to declining office and retail valuations. Such a hole “would need to be plugged by raising tax rates or cutting government spending.”

Many cities face a difficult choice. If they cut certain services, they could become less attractive and trigger a possible “urban doom loop” that pushes even more people away, hurts revenue, and perpetuates a cycle of decline. If they raise taxes, they could alienate wealthy residents, who are now more mobile than ever. Residents making $200,000 or more contributed 71 percent of New York State’s income taxes in 2019. Losing wealthy residents to low-tax states such as Florida and Texas is already taking a toll on New York and California. The income-tax base of both states has shrunk by tens of billions since the pandemic began.

Finally, turmoil in office markets threatens retirement systems and the portfolios of individual people. Public and private pension funds have traditionally kept their assets in stocks, bonds, and cash. However, in recent decades, they have shifted toward so-called alternative investments, including commercial real estate and private equity. These investments now comprise a third of their portfolios, with real estate comprising more than half of these assets for many pension funds.

[Tracy Hadden Loh: Downtown needs to change to survive]

Pre-COVID, this trend included significant investment in office space, particularly in major markets such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston—which are now struggling. Pensions saw this type of investment as a stable source of income, mainly through rent, and a hedge against inflation. With public pensions already underfunded by an estimated $1 trillion, a decline in the value of commercial real estate could make this bad situation significantly worse.

You get the idea. Office buildings pose a threat to a variety of financial institutions. As more leases and loans come due, the bulk of the pain is still ahead of us. Over the next two years, many downtowns will find that dozens of buildings are no longer fit for purpose. Municipal services will likely deteriorate, and more people might leave. The worst-case scenario is a return to the 1970s, with bankrupt municipal governments, rising crime, and the flight of (primarily white) upper-middle-class residents. Landlords like to point out that “New York always comes back.” But some cities—like Detroit or Pittsburgh—never recovered from the previous waves of technological change. And even in New York, a comeback may take decades.

In the ’90s, the internet helped cities come back. As the economy became more dependent on innovation and creativity, many of the largest and densest downtowns boomed. In 2007, the world’s preeminent urban economist, Ed Glaeser, called it a “central paradox of our time” that cities remain “remarkably vital despite ever easier movement of goods and knowledge across space.” Economists have been busy explaining this paradox up until the current crisis. As the theory goes, companies require the rapid exchange of ideas and specialized division of labor that large cities provide. In addition, companies want access to the largest possible talent pool, and top talent likes to live in large cities because of lifestyle considerations.

The consensus among economists was that as technology and media expanded, economic activity would consolidate within a select few superstar cities. But even before COVID, the theory started to crack as some of the top-performing cities saw population decreases, tech giants started distributing their offices across smaller cities, and the office market was propped up by WeWork’s irrational, venture-capital-funded expansion.

The pre-COVID consensus wasn’t wrong, but the leading thinkers did not consider the full implications of their own theories. Once the quality of online collaboration crossed a crucial threshold, the internet itself became the largest talent pool and the premier facilitator of human interaction. And once highly educated individuals could earn a nice living from anywhere, lifestyle preferences became more diverse. This does not mean that superstar cities are doomed, but it does mean that their previously captive audience now has more options.

Cities will have to survive and adapt. In a world of consumer choice, locations must think like consumer products. One way to win is to double down on what only the biggest cities can offer—walkable streets, car-free transportation, and cultural and intellectual diversity. But smaller cities can emphasize shorter commutes, ample parking, proximity to nature, better schools, and lower taxes.

And then there’s the nitty-gritty. Most offices will chug along, under new ownership or in the hands of investors who will have to wait longer to recoup their investment. Many old buildings will have to be converted to other uses or demolished. Steve Paynter, a principal at the design firm Gensler, has been evaluating hundreds of office buildings across North America and estimates that as many as 30 percent of them could be fit for residential conversion. Other buildings could accommodate new uses, including health care, education, light logistics, and even data centers. To facilitate such conversions, cities must loosen existing zoning laws, streamline planning procedures, and provide tax abatements and other incentives. In the 1990s and early 2000s, New York City relied on this policy mix to convert 59 office buildings in lower Manhattan to more than 12,000 apartments.

[Derek Thompson: The pandemic will change American retail forever]

Cities can also lean into public-private partnerships. Such partnerships bring public and private resources together to finance, build, and maintain public facilities and spaces. In the late 20th century, such partnerships in New York City helped rejuvenate Times Square, revive Bryant Park, build the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park, and fund the New York Public Library. When executed properly, public-private partnerships can inject billions into urban development without sacrificing the broader public interest.

Realistically, though, whatever resources cities can muster won’t be enough. The federal government will have to provide significant, ongoing assistance. In the ’70s, Vice President Hubert Humphrey called for a “Marshall Plan for the Cities,” drawing on an earlier suggestion from the civil-rights activist Whitney Young. In 1975, President Gerald Ford apocryphally told New York City to “Drop Dead” after the local government declared bankruptcy, but ultimately authorized billions of dollars in loans to bail out the city.

State governments will have to chip in as well. Many states depend on their large cities and have their own struggles. But local and state governments could coordinate to make better use of resources, speed up the approval of new projects, and pressure the federal government to provide more funding. This crisis is also an opportunity to renegotiate the fiscal boundaries among states, cities, and suburban counties. As the economist Richard McGahey pointed out, cities receive too little of the revenue they generate because many urban workers live—and pay taxes—in separate counties. This dynamic will be exacerbated now that hybrid workers can live even farther away.

Beyond matters of taxation and construction lies the biggest opportunity of all. As the Canadian writer Margaret Visser pointed out, “The extent to which we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives.” She was talking about forks and chairs, but her observation applies to our offices. These boxes of glass and steel determine the shape of our cities and the rhythm of our transportation systems. They dictate when we wake up, what we do, how far we live from our relatives, how much time we spend with our children—and whether we have any children at all. They permeate our culture and underpin our economy. Even before individuals are old enough to work, classrooms prepare us for life at the office. And once we retire, we rely on commercial property to provide stable income and protect the value of our savings. The office crisis is an opportunity for us to rethink these patterns.

TikTok faces growing pressure in the U.S. following reports that the company has stored personal information of American users on servers in China.