As technology improves, fewer people are required to work in offices. I predict people moving back to smaller towns with cheaper towns, while working remotely and achieving a much better quality of life for a given salary.
As an analogy, we live in houses with refrigerators because this is a higher quality of life than farming or foraging for food and huddling under trees to get out of the rain.
We live in concentrated environments because walking down the street is a higher quality of life than needing to travel tens of kilometers to buy necessities. A smaller house is easier to maintain and clean.
In the US, a population density greater than 999/sq mile is urban.
If I was only considering American style urban vs. rural environments, the notion of being able to walk to a grocery store in an urban environment wouldn't be true either (for suburbs).
That has its own disadvantages, but I think the social/communal ties are definitely stronger in small towns.
I see this sentiment often on HN, but so far I have not seen strong evidence to support it other than anecdotes. Have there been studies that show that most people would prefer to live in dense cities if employment wasn't a major deciding factor?
It gives me a lot of hope to hear that there are people who do like that kind of thing, given how many folks I know who live in such situations.
Personally, I don't like it-- at least in Texas it's the worst of all worlds: everything is far enough apart that you still need to drive most places in a car (and public transportation / biking are afterthoughts) but you're still living almost on top of each other.
But if folks like it, good on them. I'm trying to figure out how to get out of it. I like being in places like manhattan where I can get on a subway and access some much amazing things, and I like to be out in the hills where have some space and quite. But that in-between space isn't good for me, and that's not taking into account the various cultural and economic issues that I find in living in "suburbia".
A decent used car is much cheaper than urban real estate in many US cities. Poor retirees often live in mobile home parks. And people who need to save money shop at Walmart, not a pricy convenience store.
Seems like a poor person living in a big city who isn't lucky enough to have a rent-controlled apartment is going to end up homeless?
Observationally, people are moving to bigger cities, I think this is common enough knowledge to not require a citation.
If I walk down the street, the most dangerous things I can expect are deer, or if I'm very unlucky, a bobcat.
When I lived in the nearby urban cities, I could walk down the street and the most dangerous things I have faced in the past were people on crack, with weapons, wanting money. If I had been less fortunate, it would have been a gang that split open a neighbor's skull over a stolen CD.
Nothings perfect, but I'll take the country life any day.
But, I think depending on your role within an organization really dictates whether a remote "office" will work. (and personality, work ethic, etc.)
Anyway, I think that companies, especially large orgs that will need to embrace remote more. Customer support is a great example where mostly remote can work well, could even become a "gig economy" thing (I hate that term). I don't think that many orgs will move to cheaper locations, at least not fully. I do think larger orgs will have remote offices in smaller markets, which many do. I'd like to see large orgs be open to investing in co-working spaces in small towns so that all the rural technology workers that are now commuting hours a day can save time and money.
Exciting time, decentralized workforces seem like a useful thing in many areas.