Remote work’s toll on cities

Cities exist to serve people's needs. The 2 existing models are a relic of a low technology past: suburbia with long car commutes to downtown, and dense cities built around facilitating mass daily movement to the office through subway/public transportation. Instead, we need self-sufficient neighborhoods catering to different lifestyles and needs (some higher density and walkable, others still car-centric but encouraging shorter car rides) with limited need for long car rides or large investments in mass public transportation.

These conversations are kind of like the airplane on the treadmill problem, where there are (approximately) two orthogonal sets of assumptions&#x2F;preferences that lead to obvious but incompatible conclusions, and people end up yelling at each other over the conclusions without realizing the difference is just the underlying assumptions.<p>Personally - I don&#x27;t want to live in a city, or a town, or even a neighborhood. I don&#x27;t mind seeing my neighbors but I don&#x27;t want to hear them and I don&#x27;t really want to interact with them. I&#x27;m perfectly happy driving 30 minutes or 45 minutes into town to run errands. I don&#x27;t think that living out in the suburbs (or further) is &quot;boring&quot; because I don&#x27;t like crowds and I&#x27;m not going to do anything that people in cities do for &quot;fun&quot; anyway.<p>I&#x27;m living in a suburb now because I need to be close to work - and for my career involving hardware, that&#x27;s unlikely to ever change. But if I could truly work 100% remote and I knew this would last me 10 years - I&#x27;d move somewhere further away in a heartbeat.<p>If you think the world is made up mostly of people like me - you think remote work is going to devastate cities because who in their right mind would want to live there if not for work? If you think the world is made up mostly of people who want to live in cities in the first place - you think remote work will make cities better because a lot of disadvantages of city living are due to the need to accommodate a daily commute.

Remote work has the potential to make neighborhoods more dynamic. With more people at home, there&#x27;s more demand for nearby coffee shops, entertainment, food options. I prefer the decentralized neighborhood approach to the hub and spoke model where you commute to a big city from the boring suburbs.

Boo hoo.<p>US cities are abysmal. Chronic underfunding of public transit and bad zoning policies that make it illegal to build dense means that we have some of the most unlivable and exclusive cities in the developed world.<p>People are speaking with their actions. No one wants to deal with commuting downtown anymore. The expense, the time, the stress, just to further line the pockets of a small number of already incredibly rich rent seekers.<p>Forget it, I am done and 100 more submarine articles will not get me back.

It wouldn&#x27;t devastate them if people could live above or around (walkable distance even in bad weather) where they work. It would revitalize them.<p>The automobile society notion of residential far from workplace is just bad.

&gt; cities must let developers convert office buildings into housing<p>This is an Activist piece - not an Analysis piece. You cannot trust facts reported in an article that&#x27;s advocating change.<p>It cherry picks a number of facts in order to further the arguments.

Remote work will change, not devastate, American cities. It&#x27;s pretty silly to live a split life anyway. Homes empty half the day and offices empty half the day; not an efficient way to use space.

There was a lot of worry about this with London during the pandemic, to the extent that the politicians seemed to be putting the interests of Pret a Manger (a sandwich chain) ahead of health measures.<p>In the end it seemed likely that commercial landlords were a driver behind the politicians - if people no longer come to the city, who will rent my extremely expensive office space?<p>British workers were made to feel like they were letting the country down, not coming in to the city, not spending money in city-centre shops, personally responsible for bankrupting business owners.<p>Meanwhile my <i>local</i> sandwich bar and my <i>local</i> coffee shop were getting a bunch more trade. As were my <i>local</i> tradespeople, as I used what I saved on train travel to pay for work on the house.<p>The effort to drag people back to workplaces was massively short-sighted in a country where politics and earnings are massively london-centric, where public transport is often straining to meet demand for commuters, and commuting by car jams roads and pumps out tons of unnecessary CO2.<p>The hollowing out of big city centres should be considered a victory. Spread the wealth, cut unnecessary travel. And give commuting time back to families.

My long-term prediction: Rural areas and exurbs will up-class, housing the higher-paid remote workers. The remaining non-farming rural poor will be priced out of these properties and will have to live in cities, in ever smaller apartments and eventually pods. The nice services that often are only available in cities currently will distribute more evenly geographically, negating a lot of the benefits of city life.<p>This will have some positive effects, like having the countryside and its adjoining natural environments better curated, along with the large underclass masses living more resource-efficiently. The main downside will be that cities will be even more of a concentration of crime and other social ills, combined with worse public infrastructure due to reduced city tax revenue.

Some cities, perhaps. I live in a large (for the Midwest) city in the heartland and previously, being a software engineer around here topped out at ~150k if you had 25 years of experience. (This was literally quoted to me by our most “illustrious” local company, which is just a big government&#x2F;bigco contracting place).<p>I got very lucky in finding a highly unusual job paying &gt;&gt;&gt; median wage (but still very light compared to if I moved to the Bay Area). Then the pandemic happened and now in my most recent job search (just completed, I got laid off in November alongside all the other people) pretty much every place offered remote without even asking and I had my pick of pretty much any company I wanted despite my house being literally in a (feed)corn field.<p>So pretty pumped about some of these very profitable companies finally directing some (prodigious) payroll into my locale. Both selfishly and because I hope it helps inject outside cash locally where it otherwise wouldn’t ever go.

Submission to the automobile has already devastated America&#x27;s Cities...

Good, American cities aren&#x27;t designed for human beings to actually <i>live</i> in. Hopefully this will cause major zoning reform &amp; allow us to have dense, healthy, mixed-use cities.

Then cities need to become places where people live again. That&#x27;ll be easier to do with fewer silly restrictions on what qualifies as valid as a residential area, but also can&#x27;t be used as an excuse for developers to create tiny box apartments.

I was stuck in the Portland airport during the snowstorm. I had several illuminating conversations with people in the five hours I waited to reschedule my flight there at the airport.<p>For context, my family recently relocated to a medium sized Florida town (~100k) from a Portland suburb.<p>It was really interesting to hear the 20 and 30 somethings in line with me talk about Portland. They seemed to prefer it to Florida (where one grew up) and Portland, Maine (where the other grew up). They loved access to snowboarding (1.5 hours away from downtown Portland) and the restaurant and music scene. I half assumed they would be intending to flee Portland, but their mindset was not the same as mine is (saturated with bad news from Twitter and shitty local news stations).<p>My news feed is all about the crime in Portland. These two people clearly weren&#x27;t bothered by this to the extent I was (with small kids, etc). I think for many young people, living around other young people is still very, very important. I miss that part of my old life. It seems very stale in central Florida, to be honest.<p>It&#x27;s a small sample, but if cities could convert their downtowns into affordable homes (option to buy, not rent) I bet there would be a resurgence of young people establishing long term ties. If you don&#x27;t have kids, you can avoid the homeless people (Portland recently voted to evict them from downtown anyway) on your way to multiple dates and drinking establishments.<p>It (revitalized downtown) happened in Detroit, right, when they were at the bottom. Why not in all the other cities? Crime is, even now, no where near the levels it was in the 80s when I grew up in Portland never felt uncomfortable at all. Social media is amplifying a point of view for certain people, IMHO.

On youtube, Notjustbikes states that mixed commercial&#x2F;residential areas solve most transportation problems. Living in such an area, I absolutely concur.

I personally wouldn&#x27;t have a problem living in a city like SF if crime and homeless were less common<p>But since this is a literal nightmare in SF, being less &quot;car dependent&quot; or appeasing these whining activists is the least of my concern.<p>I could give a shit less about &quot;car dependency&quot; if I have to worry about my own personal safety on a regular basis. Expecting people to put their own personal safety on the line to reduce &quot;car dependency&quot; is asinine. If city advocates want people to move to their cities, they should get their shit in check first before even bothering to ask

Another headline: Remote work to invigorate America’s smaller communities

&quot;Remote work exposes bankruptcy of current unlivable cities&quot;

Mh, allow me a question; let&#x27;s say almost all offices would be abandoned and converted to residential buildings: who will reside there?<p>Modern cities have economy of scale as main reason to exists. Most western word is evolved toward tertiary sector, most cities have experienced such trend more than the rest of the country. Cities still have some social purposes of course, being many means meet more people to select as friends, partner, have some services that are unlikely in the countryside etc but the main raison d&#x27;être was economy of scale.<p>Without offices who need much of restaurants, health-related services, shopping malls etc? Here (EU) it&#x27;s a not-that-recent trend that large malls, supermarket etc disappear or suffer and get split in more smaller instances spread in the territory BUT even if we do so WHO will reside in cities?<p>Who want to live in an apartment instead of a home to WFH anyway, also counting the fact that many services will closed in cities due to lack of office workers?

poor-man&#x27;s market research:<p>Would <i>you</i> (not your belief about others) be interested in co-working &#x2F; co-living locales, in different countries (think Costa Rica, Tenerife, Zanzibar) with excellent maintained QoS connectivity, and (higher tier offering) where your right to work (local work visa) for your home-country employer &#x2F; clients was looked after by the company hosting the network of sites? Goal: to liberate you to maintain your employ but hopping from locale to locale on a monthly or even weekly basis, with diverse life experiences to go with it.<p>(cue HNers posting links of offerings that already exist but I promise from experience don&#x27;t really offer at any ubiquity or scale)<p>Important caveat: assume your home country&#x27;s tax regulations have no contest with your working physically from outside its borders.

The first time I heard this prediction was in 1994 when the city of Atlanta told workers to stay at home and work remotely over the internet to relieve congestion during the Olympics. Still waiting.

Many people want to live in cities, including remote workers. They like being in a lively place. If anything, they leave big cities because rents are incredibly high.

Companies did RTO wrong imo, the correct incentive was bonus pay for in person. If people are going to be ruthless about money, then go for it. Prices for how much that is worth might stabilize and save companies from themselves. US cities are built around commuter models that don&#x27;t work well when people don&#x27;t have to come in.<p>Cities are very upset tax receipts are lower and are increasing taxes to shore up budgets. Not a good sign.

Cities take a huge toll on the environment. in Los Angeles the week we had basically total lockdown we had the best air quality ever here.

It&#x27;s good to note the changes that can happen but I don&#x27;t care if downtown caves in because I&#x27;m not there and work remote in a nice quite small home an hour outside of it.

So, zoning laws and greed have negative consequences and someone is writing an article pretending remote work is something bad.<p>Got it, the writers have an agenda.

Nah. It will become living spaces rather than office spaces. Especially for people who love the density of city living.

Yes, more city housing is the answer.

Remote work will devastate the cities but safe the planet.

Toll? That&#x27;s a wild title

I don&#x27;t see how that&#x27;s a bad thing for cities where housing prices were sky high already.

Maybe I&#x27;m biased, but I think cheering on the toll of remote work on cities is being sanguine. Cities have existed for a long time for reasons beyond proximity to work. Their decline will represent a decline in wider society. We centralize people and resources to give everyone better access to resources and economize on infrastructure. This pattern is as old as civilization itself. Bully for you if you can make off with the loot to the hills. As cliche as it sounds, we live in a society. Of course there will be winners and losers. But to me, the picture of wealthy, isolated, and spread out exurbs hoarding the wealth while cities languish in poverty is an incredibly bleak picture of the future. My hot take is that remote work is unnatural and has only taken off because of how laborious commuting and unaffordable housing have become in this country. Like others have said, many remote workers will still choose cities because of what they offer, and they could be much better places to live if we re-invested in them as such.