Remote Workers Should Move to College Towns | Hacker News Reader

Remote Workers Should Move to College Towns

blog.zachwf.com

28 pointsrealbarack18 comments

I don't want to live near college kids -_-

The me of today doesn't want to live anywhere near the me from college.

The restaurants per capita are so much better in a town like, say, Bloomington Indiana than an equivalent community in population without a large university.

You aren't moving there for the students, you're moving there for the professors and grad students and associated intellectual staff.

> American office-workers now work completely from home; this policy will last until the end of 2020 for many and will likely shift millions of office jobs to fully-remote workers.

Justifying the word "likely" is key here, surely?

Fair criticism. I don't have a confident estimate for the number of new remote employees, but here's a hand-wavy one: one third of the 130M US jobs can be done remotely [0]. 20% of CFOs expect about 20% of their workforce to be remote in the future [1]. Assuming a uniform distribution across company sizes and no other remote jobs outside of those 20%, we'd expect 1/3 * 130M * 1/5 * 1/5 = 1.75M new remote jobs.

The assumptions here are obviously strong and wrong but it does seem like "low millions" is probably the right order of magnitude.

Moreover we can expect highly-regarded companies like Facebook and Twitter to be bellwethers for the rest of industry. If their remote work experiments succeed, I suspect expansion will follow rapidly (I expect the reverse if they fail).

[0] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/much-us-staying-home-how-man... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ezequielminaya/2020/04/03/cfos-...

Thanks for the response. I wonder how many of the 1/3 in the first article can be done fully remote, i.e. without needing to come in once or twice a week, which might make moving out of the city less attractive. The uniform distribution seems strong too... at $50m revenue it feels like you're looking at big businesses which have a lot more leeway for offering remote positions. How many of the 130m jobs belong to such big businesses? It all seems pretty hard to predict.

> Justifying the word "likely" is key here, surely?

The word “surely” should be justified here, most likely.

Nope. A good rule of thumb: where people go to retire + good internet. There are other factors but this one gets you far.

Nice idea. Too bad the retirees didn't figure it out twenty years ago when they started bidding up the price of real estate in these little shangri las. The best parts of Hanover NH (Dartmouth) rival Palo Alto in price. And gosh, Palo Alto IS a college town first. The same for Cambridge, MA.

Why? To drive up the COL for students more?

And drive up the rent in the area such that college kids can't afford to rent anything?

Isn't off-campus rent already generally higher in college towns because of the high demand and high rate of turnover, preventing any rent control?

If rent increase beyond what is sustainable for college students, it will force the college to invest in more affordable on-campus housing options (Or college-owned, rentable apartments).

What do you mean "preventing any rent control," precisely? If it's in California, I guess, but rent control need not be implemented the way California does.

"college kids" have more disposable income than just about any other segment of society outside the top couple of %.

I'm not sure I like this take, a lot of "college kids" are working through college whilst taking on high interest predatory loans for the opportunity to be there, many making state minimum wage with work/study jobs if they're not lucky enough to get seasonal/freelance work.

Source? Top percent cutoff is about ~700k/yr, top 5% cutoff is ~300k/yr, and top 10% is ~100k/yr. This is for the entire US. (https://www.epi.org/blog/top-1-0-percent-reaches-highest-wag...)

TBH I can see an argument for a college student living at home with low expenses, a job, and/or plenty of loans having more disposable income than 90% of the population. But I’d hesitate to call that the average student experience. The average student income seems to be around $25k/yr as best as I can find on a quick search.

I don’t see how the math works out for your average student to have more disposable income than someone making 300k/yr. How does that work?

I think the claim, as it's typically presented, is that college students don't pay their own rent, so they are not sensitive to the expense. Affluent parents driving the demand for dilapidated student housing leads to local inflation.

Taken to extremes, this is an absurd claim. Lots of college students pay for their own expenses and are obviously very sensitive to cost. But you generally do see higher rents and worse housing in college towns.

It's an aggregate of parents, scholarships and loans, not just any one of those things. Plenty of students spend an unwise chunk of their loan money on consumer goods and housing, since they want those experiences now. At the same time there are also thrifty students and homeless students who are just barely getting by. A lot of different types of people go through large universities, and I think the appeal and the cost is much like big cities in that respect.

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