Labor Day is supposed to honor the American worker. So I drove FM 1960 from Cutten to Northchase and filmed what our labor-market abstractions look like when they finally become physical. The numbers are staggering. In Q2 2026, 38% of the office space in the FM 1960/249 submarket was vacant. Class A vacancy was 49.3%. Keep driving east toward Greenspoint/North Belt and overall office vacancy reaches 48.4%. (57.1% for Class A) West/Northwest Houston had more than 4 million square feet of directly vacant retail space in Q2 and lost 432,242 square feet of occupied space year-to-date. Blight doesn’t always look like a burned-out building. Sometimes it has mirrored glass, security lights and a fountain that still comes on every morning. Sometimes collapse even has landscaping. For decades we’ve been told that where work is performed doesn’t matter; that moving labor across borders, outsourcing departments and chasing the lowest possible cost makes everyone richer in the aggregate. But the aggregate doesn’t drive down 1960 after five o’clock. This is “Nobody Works Here Anymore.” For the Americans who trained their replacements, watched their jobs disappear and were then told the economy had simply become more “efficient.” Happy Labor Day.