Well, yes. Cities must change. How? This article is way over-thinking it though.
Every single one of these office towers has an owner that wants to make a profit. They’ll do it if they can. Class A office buildings will take tenants from Class B towers, who in turn will take tenants from Class C towers. And if the zoning allows it, the Class C buildings will convert to residential. Because people really do like living downtown (even if you or me don’t want to). This is actually what the NYC mayor was talking about as an option but the article either didn’t realize it or decided not to engage with that idea.
It must also be tough for younger executives who are stuck with the idea that someone 40, 50, 60 or 70 is "old", near extinction, and so on.
These are the individuals who are dinosaurs. and they are dinosaurs for being incapable of realizing that employment ages are getting extended due to longer, healthy and vital lifetimes.
This is one of the crises of our time. That is the wholesale reevaluation of what work and careers are, how long they last, the effect on traditional workplaces, and so on. These companies are discriminating out of ignorance and because there is a ground-swell of pressure from younger generations to "move out" older workers so there's room for them to move up.
Shorter work weeks and flatter organizational structures can play a role in remediating some of these issues. But 21st century "life" reality seminars are critical - more so than the dross of diversity trainings.
Be careful not to confuse technical debt with technical entropy.
Technical debt may be nothing more than a prioritization strategy that is either intentionally or unintentionally blindsided by a technical asymmetry of attention to a rate of system degradation.
Smart organizations will throttle the degree to which development performs like an ever insatiable desire to maximize efficiency at the cost of mortgaging away the responsibility for system refreshment.
Just as "fitness functions" are desirable sensors for expiring licensing and contractual renewals so should an enterprise think about and implement ecosystem fitness functions that compare existing system state against the latest industry trajectories. Identifying, recognizing, and rectifying business ecosystem weaknesses will go a long way in preventative maintenance and reduced technical entropy and debt.
Executive summary: Cities must change. Sherlock.