And I'd bet the cost of Baltimore housing would no longer be cheap when commuting options are expanded.
(I moved from Brooklyn to Baltimore, in part because of the >30% difference in housing prices.)
My point is mainly that we'd start thinking about commuting distance differently if we had a system like the hyperloop (assuming the cost isn't prohibitively high). We could conceivably even build other dense cities somewhere in the radius of 225 miles outside of places like NYC, LA, or SF to offload people if commute times are around 30 min.
It can take me an hour to go see friends in Harlem or The Bronx, so you'd even open up the possibility of going to see friends or family for the evening 200 miles away for the same door to door travel time.
Of course this is all futurist speculation, who knows what the numbers would actually add up to until a pilot program happens.
Not to mention the difference in housing cost would have to support the cost of travel. Who knows what a single Hyperloop ticket will cost but a 3-digit figure wouldn't surprise me, especially during rush hour. You could be looking at $3-$4k/month for a daily commute (which granted, is not too far from the difference in housing costs between parts of NYC and parts of Baltimore).
Living 5min from Baltimore hyperloop station would give you 15mim on the other side for a 40min overall commute each way.
If you are saving 2k/month on rent you could pay up to 50$ each way and break even. Though, I don't know what tickets would actually cost, that not ridiculous.
I have friends that have moved upstate from NYC and spend 80 minutes door to door commuting via Metro North, while only being about 60 miles away. Baltimore is about three times the distance and in this future would take 1/2 the time. The metrics just change with something like the hyperloop.
The other way of dealing with it is to gentrify an area so the inner-city housing prices are so absurd that the poorer people can't afford to live there any more.
In a nutshell, the American way to is establish a lot of space between poorer people and everyone else. Honestly, I'm not sure what else can be done; all kinds of social programs have been tried.
SF Bay area is a leader in this work-from-home/remote revolution, but what external factors will tip the masses to be able to migrate?
That's not actually easier to solve. Only theoretically and only if your theory involves only robots and is specific to a dozen cities.
Study after study keeps proving most people like working physically with other people. The majority would prefer to not telecommute. It also keeps getting proven that most people perform their jobs much better on location rather than telecommuting. Amazing things happen from physical human interaction that do not happen telecommuting. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC would never happen via telecommuting. These things are not true for everyone, they're simply true for most.
Beyond that, it's a small minority in the US that has a housing cost problem. Overwhelmingly the US is the land of inexpensive housing compared to other nations with comparable median incomes.
I'll bet Bell Labs and Xerox PARC didn't have modern open-plan office spaces.
When the choices are telecommuting or open-plan offices, telecommuting is clearly the better option.
But I wonder about the longer term. In 30 or 40 years we will have virtual reality systems that can almost perfectly fool our senses into believing a remote colleague is in fact sitting in the same room. Will most people still commute to work?