The city doesn’t give a damn about mom and pop restaurants catering to a bunch of suits and skirts on lunch break. Office buildings generate a huge chunk of tax revenue from property tax assessments and take comparatively little for the city to maintain (see: prioritization of the Seaport development) New construction brings in tons of money in the form of tradespeople being employed which means those people will vote for development-friendly governments and the building contractors and unions will contribute funds to the elected officials’ campaigns to keep the gravy train rolling.

If the values of those offices tank because leases aren’t renewed and the buildings end up 50+% vacant, the city is staring down the barrel of a huge funding problem. Then, demand for new square footage vanishes, construction companies have no work, people get laid off, and demand can fall more.

This is not an easy problem to solve and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The only saving grace is that commercial leases are 5+ year terms in most cases with renewal options, so there’s still some time to fix this problem. Not much, but some.