Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin urged city employers to bring their workers back downtown as the neighborhood’s office towers continue to sit underutilized.

Bronin was speaking at the MetroHartford Alliance’s “Pulse of the Region Connect” event at the Hartford Yard Goats’ Dunkin Park yesterday morning.

According to the Hartford Courant, Bronin called companies’ decisions to keep letting their workers do jobs remotely “one of the biggest threats that we face.”

“I’m convinced that we lose something very real when we shift a little too much toward remote work,” he said.

The Hartford-area area office vacancy rate hit 25.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022, Cushman & Wakefield reported, an improvement over the second quarter but following about 1 million square feet of negative absorption between January and October. Downtown Hartford had 1.74 million square feet of vacant space at the end of last year, plus another 410,502 square feet of space available on the sublease market.

Bronin also touted the success of residential developers either converting downtown towers to housing or building new, ground-up apartment buildings in the neighborhood.