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The problem with your analysis is that it undervalues the benefits of living and working in a major city, especially as a young person. I don't really want to remote -- I want to get out, interact with people, take a coffee break and people watch, grab drinks with coworkers. I want to meet people my age doing interesting things. I want to go out drinking/clubbing/whatever without worrying about driving home after.

Admittedly part of the problem is I, like most of my generation, grew up in the suburbs. Once I turned 18 I couldn't wait to get out.

I could work remote and move back to my hometown or Missouri or Thailand -- but why would I? I'd be sacrificing much of my current life to do so. Of course my opinion would probably change if I had kids, but for now I live in a city for a reason.

And that's great, I wouldn't argue with any of the choices you've made for yourself. For you, the social benefits of urban life are apparently worth the costs, and that's fine. You and your friends probably aren't the ones who are doing most of the complaining.

But if it's that important to someone that they live in that particular city, to the exclusion of all other possibilities available on the planet, then they shouldn't complain when it turns out that real estate and transportation are limited resources that somebody has to pay for. It's the whining about the costs and downsides that bothers me the most about these articles.

People who act like they don't have a choice, when they do have a near-infinite variety of choices compared to most people on Earth, annoy me.

The real problem in the Bay is not SF, it's the lack of commuting infrastructure and quality. Lack of urban life around transportation hubs in the suburbs. The fact that CalTrain is a thing and BART doesn't go all the way around the Bay is a joke.

> they shouldn't complain when it turns out that real estate and transportation are limited resources that somebody has to pay for.

I whole-heartedly disagree. It's much better to try to change things and improve the world instead of throwing your hands up and accepting the status quo as immutable fact. The truth is that real estate in SF is limited largely by anti-growth laws. People have to pay exohorbinantly high prices for it only because of these laws (for the most part). I think we should try to change those laws and make the region a better place for everyone to live. I don't want to give up and let SF become a haven for the rich (plus the handful of affordable housing lottery winners).

Of course, if it turns out that we can't make the Bay Area into the welcoming, inclusive, fun, and livable place I would love to see it be then, yeah, I'll move somewhere else. Life's too short.

Also, I cometely agree with how surprising it is that cities have surged in popularity for well-paid, technically smart workers. And yet, I really like living in a city for all the reasons the grandparent comment mentioned. Maybe VR will change that value proposition though :-)

The truth is that real estate in SF is limited largely by anti-growth laws.

Someone in another thread pointed out that if this were the problem, New York would be the cheapest place in the country.

The local anti-growth political sentiment is a problem but ultimately there's just not that much space in SF to expand into, being a peninsula. Any sustained expansion of housing in SF will have to happen vertically, at which point we're back to the NYC example. The additional housing won't be "affordable" unless the developers are forced to build the 21st-century equivalent of Cabrini Green.

Well, the 90s were probably the peak of suburban living, before people decided the hours of commuting per day and countless gallons of gasoline burned were not really worth it. So people moved to where the jobs are. (considering that most people still cannot fully work remotely).

Also, as you point out, living in urban areas is a luxury good; as wealth increases (for a large enough segment of the population, at least), they're choosing to use that wealth to live somewhere a bit more exciting than a field in Kansas. I agree they shouldn't complain that it costs more than a house in flyover country, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't complain about a city making it unnecessarily difficult to add housing stock. Those who already live there are, of course, more entitled than anyone to complain about their lack of options when they get kicked out of their rent-controlled unit.

Funny anecdote about "north coast of Alaska." My dad visited the oilfields up there a few times as part of his job. In the early 90s I got a phone call from him on a satellite phone as he watched a midnight pickup softball game after the summer solstice. The delay in the phone connection was really entertaining and fascinating for me as a young-ish kid. I shudder to think how expensive that call was at the time, per minute.

20 years later, I rode up there on my motorcycle. I unclipped my iPhone 3GS from my handlebars, had a 5 bar 3G signal, and called my dad, effectively for free. It wasn't even roaming, because I was in the US! I didn't have to know how it worked, and in fact I still don't. It certainly wasn't a laggy satellite connection. Amazing how times change.

Nobody has left suburban living. Young people have just delayed marriage due to financial instability and career preferences, and thus delayed childbirth. Older folks have sensibly sought to downsize when empty nesting.

The hyper dense mega city model is a failure for quality of life. Instead, a dense CBD with trains distributing the population to the suburbs, with medium then low density, with shopping zones on walkable strips built around the train stations, is the way to go. Add in good planning, with buses and cycle infrastructure for last mile. And lots of parks.

Melbourne, where the modern concept of suburban living as we know it originated, executes well on this. Perfect, no. But a good framework.

Failure by who's definition? I live in Tokyo, the largest city on the planet. It's a "Hyper Dense Mega City" and it's an amazing fun city with a high quality of live AFAICT. There are certain things about Japanese work culture that suck for some but that has nothing to do with the city itself and everything to do with traditional culture.

After seeing how a number of Japanese acquaintances live, I've concluded the lack of personal space is a kind of paucity that makes them very poor. Barely room for a couple with one child to keep the tiniest amount of personal belongings. A pet, a small garden, bicycles for the family, any number of personal possessions I consider normal are out of the question. People living in other capital cities experience similar, although not as extreme, paucity of personal space. I don't understand how so many people feel this is a high quality of life.

You're not wrong. Any developer for example that can find remote work can benefit from the plummeting real estate costs to be found in any of the areas that have seen an outflow of people in search of work in urban areas.

There are countless communities across the US that are aging, as the youth have moved to the metropolis to work. Anyone that can extract money from the internet can benefit from this trend.

Couple that with low interest rates, good credit and a duplex and you can live without paying a cent for housing. This works well in towns with some sort of natural beauty, but few jobs. Grab those tourist dollars via airbnb rentals and take it easy.

What cities or towns would you put at the top of this list?

Southeastern CT is cheap, and well located, in my opinion.

You can buy a house in walking distance to the decent downtown of Westerly, RI for 120,000 and hop on an Amtrak train and be in Manhattan in 3 hours.

And if you like sailing, there are some great harbors here, like Mystic.

There are plenty of places to adventure to, Block Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vinyard, Cape Cod.

>finally going to liberate us from crowded, noisy, polluted urban prisons

What are you, a suburban developer from the 50's?

Urban areas often provide a higher quality of life than The Geography of Nowhere. Do some introductory research into urban design. Read some Jane Jacobs. You thought the human desire for community and activity was just going to leave?

They only do so for a specific type of person, who is happy externalizing and surrendering ownership. It is too expensive to own a workshop, so you go to a makerspace. You do not have land to have your own garden, so you go to a communal one. If you feel the desire to see nature, public park. To entertain, bars in stead of your own dwelling. You cannot transport yourself beyond walking distance, you rely on communal transport. In Japan, even bathing, quiet studying and reading, and practice for activities must be externalized.

To be uncharitable, urban areas are perfect for housing worker drones bereft of ownership rights.

>urban areas are perfect for housing worker drones

That's what I'd call the suburbs: Nothing to do, no competition, and labor is kept cheap. http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/stuck-in-1950s-subu...

If one cares about resources and climate change it's a non starter: Unless you are productive with the land, sprawl is a horrible waste of resource. (About half of a suburban family's energy use is transportation.)

I love articles like that, because they're so good at packing the maximum number of leftist dog whistles possible into the available physical space and rhetorical spectrum. Just to pull a typical quote:

   Meanwhile, as the labor movement gained steam, corporate 
   leaders were struggling to prevent employees from 
   unionizing. “In the early 20th century, there was a 
   limited but influential set of companies engaging in 
   what is commonly referred to as ‘welfare capitalism,’” 
   Mozingo explains. “The idea was to prevent turnover 
   and control workers better by making factory sites that 
   were tidy, safe, and well-ventilated with good lighting 
   and all those things.

The entire premise of the article, as far as I can tell, is that the corporate pigs should be condemned because they kept their workers from unionizing by actually treating them like human beings. So, if the "welfare capitalists" hadn't tried to create "tidy, safe, and well-ventilated" factory sites, could we expect Ms. Mozingo's judgment, handed down on all history's behalf, to be more sympathetic? I'm guessing not.

For what it's worth, I actually agree with a lot of the criticism directed toward campuses like Apple's. It's hard to describe the renderings we've seen in any terms other than dystopian. A building designed to keep everyone looking inward is better suited to a religious cult than to a creative organization.

>The entire premise of the article, as far as I can tell

The premise of the article is that choice is good for workers, and urbanity fosters choice. Corporations creating isolated campuses removes choice and reduces quality of life.

>A building designed to keep everyone looking inward is better suited to a religious cult than to a creative organization.

That's not the intent of the design and the view is pretty much identical for both sides: trees. The point of the shape is to connect as much as possible while creating a secure courtyard. The closest path from one side of the building to another is outside.

The premise of the article is that choice is good for workers, and urbanity fosters choice. Corporations creating isolated campuses removes choice and reduces quality of life.

Regardless, it's very clear that there's no way to win with these people. No matter what decisions the managers and architects arrive at, there will always be some ankle-biting from noncontributing journalists and academics with political axes to grind.

The point of the shape is to connect as much as possible while creating a secure courtyard. The closest path from one side of the building to another is outside.

Interesting, I didn't know that. My understanding was that the courtyard area would be easily accessible to everyone working there.

But ugh. Suburbs and driving.

If there was a light rail to an urban center and I could get my daily/weekly errands done via walking or cycling, sure.

But the car centric culture of, well, just about everywhere is IMHO grosser than an "urban prison"

"techies/hippies/yuppies/homeless people/Republicans"?

Let me guess you write poems for a living?

Because I'm suggesting that overly-entitled whining is an equal-opportunity avocation?