Caregiving, Building For A Longevity Society, And The Future Of Work With Marisa Toldo — RFP 89

The office vacancy conversation has been stuck on the same set of explanations for four years. Remote work. Hybrid schedules. Interest rates. Oversupply. These are real forces, and they have genuinely reshaped demand. But there is a deeper structural problem that almost nobody in commercial real estate is talking about directly, and architect and researcher Marisa Toldo names it with unusual clarity.

 

The office was designed for a person who does not exist.

In episode 89 of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Marisa Toldo to unpack what she calls the “carefree employee” myth: the assumption baked into decades of workplace design that the ideal worker arrives fully available, unencumbered by family obligations, health challenges, or caregiving responsibilities, and leaves all of that at the door. That assumption shaped floor plans, lease structures, amenity programs, and HR policy for generations. And the gap between that assumption and the reality of the modern workforce is now showing up in retention numbers, absenteeism data, productivity losses, and, increasingly, in how space is actually being used.

Caregiving Is a Workforce Issue, Not a Personal One

One of the most important reframes in this conversation is Marisa’s insistence that caregiving, whether for children, aging parents, or other dependents, is not a personal issue that employees bring into the workplace. It is a systemic workforce issue that employers, designers, and real estate owners have structurally failed to account for.

The data supports this. The U.S. is in the middle of a demographic transition that is reshaping the labor market from the inside out. The population is aging. Multi-generational workforces are becoming the norm rather than the exception. And the sandwich generation, workers simultaneously managing childcare and eldercare responsibilities, is growing in size and economic significance. Many of these workers are not leaving the workforce. They are staying in it while quietly managing obligations that their employers have no visibility into, because the culture of most workplaces still treats caregiving as something to hide.

This matters for real estate in a very specific way. If a significant portion of your tenant’s workforce is managing hidden caregiving stress, that stress shows up as reduced productivity, higher turnover, and lower engagement. It also shows up in how space gets used. Employees who need flexibility in their schedule or their location are not going to commute to a traditional office environment that offers no accommodation for the realities of their lives. This is part of what Marisa means when she argues that office vacancy is not only a demand problem. It is also a design failure.

The Longevity Society and What It Means for Space

Marisa’s work sits at the intersection of workplace design and what demographers call the longevity society, a world in which people are living and working longer, age cohorts are more distributed across the workforce, and the physical and social infrastructure built around a 20th-century age distribution is increasingly misaligned with reality.

For commercial real estate, this has several direct implications.

The first is intergenerational design. Buildings and campuses that co-locate childcare, eldercare, and workspace are not a fringe concept. They are a logical response to a workforce that increasingly needs both. Some of the most forward-thinking corporate campuses in Europe and Latin America, markets where Marisa has worked extensively, have already begun prototyping these models. The question for owners and developers in markets like Chicagoland is how quickly that design logic crosses the Atlantic and starts influencing tenant requirements here.

The second is the physical adaptability question. A workforce with a wider age distribution has wider physical needs: accessibility standards, lighting conditions, acoustic environments, and ergonomic configurations that serve a 28-year-old and a 62-year-old with equal functionality. As we have written about extensively in our analysis of designing offices for 2030, buildings that will remain competitive are not those optimized for a single user profile. They are those designed as adaptable platforms that can absorb changing tenant demographics without requiring complete reinvestment.

Biophilic Design: What It Actually Is

One of the more useful clarifications in this conversation is Marisa’s treatment of biophilic design, a term that has been diluted almost beyond usefulness by overuse in commercial real estate marketing.

Biophilic design is not a plant wall in the lobby. It is not a moss installation in the elevator bank. It is a design philosophy grounded in the human body’s evolved need for connection with natural systems: light cycles, airflow, material texture, views of nature, and spatial variety that mirrors the non-uniform environments humans adapted in over millennia. The research connecting genuine biophilic design elements to measurable improvements in cognitive performance, stress reduction, and absenteeism is substantive. What gets marketed as biophilic design in most commercial leasing brochures is decorative, not functional.

This distinction matters for owners and occupiers evaluating office space investments and renovation decisions. The highest-value biophilic interventions, consistent access to daylight across the floor plate, operable windows where mechanical systems allow, outdoor spaces that employees can genuinely use, and material choices that engage tactile and visual senses rather than just checking an aesthetic box, are design decisions made early in a project. They cannot be retrofitted with a plant delivery.

Measuring Space Usage: The Gap Between Assumption and Reality

Marisa raises a methodological point that deserves attention from anyone making real estate decisions based on utilization data: how you measure space usage determines what you find.

Sensor-based occupancy tracking tells you where bodies are in a building and when. It does not tell you whether those people are productive, whether the space configuration is serving the work being done, or whether the employees using a collaboration room are doing so because it is the right tool for the task or because it is the only available option. Employee survey data captures perception and preference but is subject to social desirability bias, people tell you what they think you want to hear, or what they think is safe to say. Observational research is slower and more expensive but produces a more textured picture of how space is actually functioning.

The practical implication for tenants evaluating office space strategy and for landlords repositioning assets is that single-metric utilization data is an incomplete basis for decision-making. As we explored in a prior post on why office space efficiency is broken, most offices are underutilized by 50 to 70 percent even among organizations that consider themselves fully back. But the reasons for that underutilization are varied and cannot be addressed by a single intervention, whether that is a return-to-office mandate, a headcount reduction, or a redesign.

Office Vacancy, Adaptive Reuse, and the Mixed-Use Argument

The conversation turns in its final section to the persistent office vacancy problem and what Marisa frames as a circular thinking opportunity: rather than treating vacant office space as a real estate failure, treating it as raw material for a different kind of urban and suburban environment.

The office-to-residential conversion thesis has been well-covered. What Marisa adds is a more expansive vision of mixed-use repurposing that incorporates the caregiving and longevity lens. Buildings with persistent vacancy that cannot be repositioned as pure office could become hybrid environments: workspace alongside childcare facilities, eldercare day programs, health and wellness services, and community infrastructure that serves the surrounding neighborhood rather than just the building’s tenants.

This is not a simple or inexpensive path. The zoning, regulatory, financing, and design challenges involved in mixed-use adaptive reuse are substantial, and as we have noted in our coverage of downtown Chicago office transactions, the capital required to reposition distressed office assets is significant even before programming complexity is added. But the logic is sound: buildings that serve more human needs, in more integrated ways, for a broader slice of the community around them, are more resilient assets than those built around a single tenant profile that the market may no longer reliably produce.

What This Means for Owners and Occupiers in Chicagoland

The forces Marisa describes are not hypothetical or distant. They are already reshaping how tenants think about space in the North Shore and Northwest suburban office markets we focus on.

Tenants making multi-year lease commitments are increasingly asking questions that would not have appeared on a traditional needs assessment five years ago: Can we accommodate a caregiver support program in this space? How does this building serve employees at different life stages? What is the outdoor amenity situation? How is the lighting on the interior floors? These questions reflect a broader shift in how sophisticated employers think about the relationship between physical space and workforce performance, retention, and recruitment.

For owners, the message is consistent with what Spencer Levine outlined in RFP 53: the office market is not recovering to a prior equilibrium. It is evolving into something different. Buildings that are designed as rigid, single-purpose environments built around a workforce profile that no longer accurately describes the people inside them will continue to underperform. Buildings that treat adaptability, human need, and the full complexity of the modern employee as design inputs rather than afterthoughts will be the ones that lease well, retain tenants, and hold value across cycles.

If you are evaluating office space in Northern Illinois or Southern Wisconsin, whether as a tenant, owner, or investor, Van Vlissingen & Co.’s Chicago commercial real estate brokerage team has the market expertise and long-term perspective to help you make decisions that hold up.