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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Well yeah, but most people don't have home offices and never will. My girlfriend and I live in a one bedroom apartment that costs $3,800 per month. We're sure as hell not gonna pay the extra thousands per month to get a three bedroom apartment so we can each have a home office. Having extra rooms in your dwelling dedicated for work is a huge luxury. Having companies provide an office space for you to work in (that they pay for) is quite nice.

There is an interesting idea here for companies to subsidize employees' home offices with all the money they're saving on not renting office buildings of their own, but that would make the housing crisis substantially worse and further increase hatred of tech. Imagine how badly rents would be driven up on apartments typically desired by families if you've got lots of single workers using work subsidies to get larger apartments than they actually needed.

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It'd only cause those negative effects if people don't leave the Bay Area, though, with that newfound flexibility. There are plenty of places, even desirable urban centers, that aren't the Bay. (I've worked for SFBA companies and I live in Boston--with its own housing crunch, though not nearly as bad, and TBH I'd live here even if I didn't work in tech, it's just my home.)

I think you underestimate the reasons why people find living in certain cities desirable. There's a lot more to do with it than merely having your job located there. Downtown SF and NYC are always going to be hugely desirable, regardless of whether people are working from home or not.

See, usually it's me saying that (because I'm usually replying to the people upholding rural living as some kind of ideal) but the thing is, people are moving to these cities, from other urban areas, mmmmostly for work. Not because they're great. They are great! But the gravity is because of the jobs more than anything else. Without that gravity, I tend to think people won't keep moving there in the same numbers and more of them will leave.

If you can get 70-80% of the desirability for 50% of the cost (Boston would be like 80-90% and 60-70%, by my reckoning) while retaining 90% of the salary, and you make it perfectly acceptable on all sides to do so, a lot of people are gonna do that.

I think you overestimate how many people want to be there when career isn’t the driver. Everyone I know who moved to the bay did it for the job and gave zero fucks about the shit lined streets of the city.

If it wasn’t for the abundance of tech jobs, there is exactly 0% chance I would choose to live in the Bay Area. To me (everyone is different), the jobs are the upside, the rest is downside.

If you could take the tech jobs with you (without the negative externalities), where is your ideal location?

If I could simply decide to live anywhere, and have some guarantee that my job opportunities and salary would remain the same as if I were in the Bay Area? So many choices!

If I limited myself to the US, any state with zero state income tax, cheap land/housing, and mild winters would work. I lived in Florida for over a decade and would go back in a heartbeat if the job situation matched the Bay Area. A big suburban house near Las Vegas would be fine. Texas doesn’t seem bad either—lots of land!

Without data there's no way to tell, so some folks will shout out about the inscrutable appeal of the popular cities today while others deify the beauty of nature with country living.

Given that SF was not particularly appealing to live in 10 years ago, I think the story is more complicated.

Yes, don't mean to minimise the challenge of having a home office that befits the name. While I am fortunate enough to have the space, my company does provide a stipend for people without it to e.g. rent a desk at a co-working space.

My concern remains that companies who are doing this on the fly, due to an external influence, with employees who never signed up to be remote-first, with new, unfamiliar tools, and without the ingrained culture that a distributed-from-the-start company enjoys, will nonetheless tar us with the same brush when their experience turns out to be disappointing.

I'd rather just work in a normal office provided by my employer than work in a co-working space. The latter seems strictly worse, so long as your company has an office where you live anyway (and mine does).

Also, co-working spaces are no-go because of COVID-19 too, at least for now. So the current situation isn't so much WFH as it is WFQ, and co-working spaces don't meet that need either.

I didnt take it as belittling. Its the one spot that's mine, with my desk, computer and filing cabinet. I live in a 3 bedroom townhouse. Have 3 kids plus the wife. Wife uses one of the bedrooms as her office (she runs a non-profit and needs more room than my occasional wfh) and the lids share the other non-master bedroom.

I'm sorry to hear the GP has to pay 3800 for a studio. I pay around 4400 for a 3 bed/3.5 bath townhouse w/ a 2 car garage in Chicago's suburbs; and I think what I pay is ridiculous.

Yeah, I wish I had those prices. I'm in Manhattan though. At least my transportation costs are very low (about $30 per month); add on the total costs of your cars and that $4,400 figure grows substantially :(

Having extra rooms in your dwelling dedicated for work is a huge luxury. Having companies provide an office space for you to work in (that they pay for) is quite nice

You’re assuming everyone works on the west coast....

The average square footage of a home in the US is 2600 square feet. (https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/real_estate/american-home-s...) I would assume since most developers in most of the United States make more than the average for their market, they would be able to afford the average home. In my market (a major metropolitan city), any developer with 5-7 years of experience could easily afford a place with an extra room for an office.

We were renting a three bedroom, 2 bath apartment with an office four years ago in the most exclusive part of the city with the best school system for $1700/month. It’s still about the same price. We bought a brand new build 3200 square foot house (5 bedroom/3.5 bath house with a large separate office) and are paying $2150/month all in with 5% down and still live in a great school system.

> most people don't have home offices and never will.

[citation needed]

Just because your use case, and likely that of most of your friends, doesn't lend itself to having a home office, doesn't mean that other people, with different costs of living (esp in land price), will live the same way. If $3,800 got you 5 bedrooms instead of 1 and everything else stayed the same, it's possible you'd voluntarily choose to downsize, but it also seems possible you'd keep it, and have 1 bedroom, a home office each, a conference room, and a (shared) workshop. Or however else you wish you divide up the space. (Hint: children take up a lot of it.)

Rents would go down as most would flee to bigger homes in nicer places. No reason to pay 3800 for a shoe box if you stay at home to work.

Cities have attractions that are uniquely their own. You overestimate how many people would flee to the boonies.

In fact, if you don't have to commute during rush hour, living in remote suburbs is the best of both worlds: you're far enough that the prices are low/rent is cheap, but the city is close enough to casually drive there off peak. Sure, if you had to endure 1 hour commutes one way every day, that would be terrible, but since you don't drive at the same time as everyone else, you won't have to experience that.

Assuming someone can or wants to drive, and owns a car, is a massive assumption in today's world.

Many people who live in urban areas neither own a car nor want to drive.

Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses. Taking a walk for more than an hour is impossible because there is nowhere to go to the bathroom, unless you want to do your business in someone's bush. There are no drinking fountains, and if you get hungry on your long walk, you're screwed. It can get (seriously) depressing, compared to cities, where most of the stuff you pass by on the street is generally open to walk into and explore, and food/water/restrooms are readily available.

> Many people who live in urban areas neither own a car nor want to drive.

By "many", I understand you mean "few". I live in Seattle, which has one of the better transit networks in the country, certainly better than average. Yet, 85% of households own cars. In the suburbs, that percentage is even higher.

> Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses.

That hasn't been my experience. There's lots of things to do in suburbs, you just need to drive there. The rest of your comment is about some difficulties of doing walks in suburbs, which are quite foreign to me -- for one thing, I'm quite sure that almost everywhere in Seattle metro area, you're not more than 1 hour walk from a convenience store. Given how millions of people love going hiking in places even further from convenience stores, gas stations and water fountains, I don't see this as such a huge problem. The rest of your complaints are simply matter of your preferences: I for one thing couldn't care less about presence of places to walk into and explore. I'm not a tourist in my own town, I need to get places and get things done, and idly walking around the business districts is not one of my hobbies.

> By "many", I understand you mean "few". I live in Seattle, which has one of the better transit networks in the country, certainly better than average. Yet, 85% of households own cars. In the suburbs, that percentage is even higher.

This may be a US thing. I've lived in about 10 countries now (but not the US), and I hardly knew anyone who owned a car in any of them.

The US has order of 5 registered vehicles [edit: previously said “cars”] for every 4 adults.

That can be hard for Europeans to wrap their head around. (I live here and am a car enthusiast and it’s hard for me to wrap my head around.)

I googled it up and 209M adults vs 183M passenger vehicles.

In the USA registration wildly varies by state and the actual stat is a quarter billion "vehicles" but in my state every non-rowboat boat is a registered vehicle (although essentially unenforced for small sailboats and inflatables) and every boat trailer is yet another vehicle and every RV is a registered license plated vehicle and every trailer and etc. My parents never owned more than one car although they had five "registered vehicles" at one point. Also any commercial vehicle that drives on public roads, in my state this includes SOME farm tractors and other farm equipment. Needless to say every motorcycle and moped is a registered vehicle, and in my municipality, resident bicycles are technically required to be registered although never enforced.

Nationwide there's about 70M "things that move and pay registration tax and are not cars" that are registered as vehicles. Very near one per adult.

As a check on the figures, note there's only 105M "housing units" in the USA, so when you see strange figures reported about 300M to 400M vehicles its obvious that the average house does not have four cars parked in front of it, and that figure includes scrapped cars in junkyards and railroad cars and minecarts and things like that.

I don't understand why everyone here talks like the only options are cities or featureless suburbs.

Don't you have towns and villages in the US?

> Don't you have towns and villages in the US?

Are you European by chance? We have these things but they tend to be very spread out due to our wealth of land, especially so as you move further west. Further a lot of them have basically slowly turned into boring suburban sprawl.

Active urban space, sleepy suburbs, and country-living are pretty much your options in most of the US.

Have you ever been to somewhere like Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco? That's a town isn't it? I know it's a 'city' (everything seems to be a 'city' in the US) but it's town-sized. You could walk to everything there. It seems to have a bustling main street. I see lots of these little towns in the US. Carmel? Morro Bay? These are just the ones I can remember being in myself and thinking these are perfect little walkable towns.

Why drive when you can live where the action is?

Outside of a very small number of admittedly very large coastal cities, the action is in the burbs, not the city.

Metro areas that are under, perhaps, 10M people, generally have nothing to do in the legacy cities. Everything fun has been built in the burbs for half a century. NYC is fun to visit, but only 8M people live there compared to 319M not living there. 98% of the population will never participate in "new urbanism" and so forth.

You're flat-out describing an alternate reality than the one that actually exists. Go down the list of largest American cities and tell me the first one you can find that you think has more fun things to do in the suburbs than in the city proper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Well, yeah, I think we're aggressively agreeing with each other that life is quite a bit different for 5% of the population in megacities vs 95% of the population outside those cities.

Take for example the location of the 2020 democratic national convention, Milwaukee. I know for a fact there's literally nothing to do in the city other than drive to the burbs.

Generally fun follows the people who pay for it, and anywhere there's no geographic constraint or travel time constraint, people always do the burb thing, and the fun follows them. I visit family in that area, and there's just nothing to do in the city, all the action is in the burbs.

You can have a burb 20 minute drive from Milwaukee so all the fun moves to the burbs to follow the money. You can't have a burb 20 minute drive from downtown NYC, so without the people moving to the burbs there's no fun in the burbs.

I work from home and choose to live in the inside the ring in Berlin because it's got everything I want from the place I live. What's outside my frontdoor is way more important than how big my apartment is.

You don't both need a private office, there is no reason you can't have one office room with 2 desks. Companies should probably pay extra with the savings from not having to rent an office. Combined with the savings from not having to transport yourself to an office, it should be affordable.

> Combined with the savings from not having to transport yourself to an office, it should be affordable.

Until it isn't. That's the magic of the invisible hand at work. And when you can barely afford rent on a WFH-friendly apartment with work subsidies, think of all the regular families with non-tech salaries that can no longer dream of it.

The benefit of WFH is your actual location doesn't matter too much. If the inner city apartment is too expensive then find one further out. Anyone with a full time job should be able to find something with 2 bedrooms somewhere in the country/state of their job.

> You don't both need a private office, there is no reason you can't have one office room with 2 desks.

My girlfriend and I both have a good number of meetings, which is incompatible with being in the same room as another person also yapping to their computer. When we both have meetings we need to be in a different room.

> Combined with the savings from not having to transport yourself to an office, it should be affordable.

I pay roughly $30 per month in total transportation costs, so this is negligible. My $3,800 rent at least gets me an apartment within walking distance (and easy biking distance) of work.

I have days with seven hours of meetings. Having another person in the room isn’t an option.

That sounds like a nightmare, to be honest. What do you do?

I'm a middle manager of a moderately sized team. 7hr meeting days are the exception (maybe 1 such day every two months). Usually its 3hrs-4hrs per day or so.

$3800/month? if you can work remotely, you could go to a place like Medellin and get a penthouse suite with 5 bedrooms, a 360 view of the city AND cleaning staff and personal chef for less than that!!

Why the fuck would I want to live in Medellin?? I don't even speak the language, and all my friends and family are on a different continent entirely.

Most people aren't digital nomads.

There are plenty of English speakers in poblado. The women are beautiful. The meat and produce is super fresh and the people are super friendly. I was there for 6 months and absolutely loved it. it was way better than living in SF. If I wasn't working on my startup in Europe, I'd go back there in a heartbeat.

And still have money left over. If you work in tech there is a strong developer community and you can get away with not speaking the language as 5-bedroom penthouse suites are located in neighborhoods where almost everyone is bilingual, from waiters to C-level execs.

I've got the same: 1 bedroom flat, however if I were to work 100% remote, what I spend on commuting each month would almost cover higher rent for 2 bedroom flat.

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