Urban Living Might Just Survive Coronavirus

Still here 24 years later. Not everyone leaves but yes you do see waves. A lot of people come for their 20s and then bail to go back where they came from to settle down. Then ten years later another wave leaves for the suburbs when their lifestyles no longer match up with urban living. And then there are lifers like me who love it here and hope to be here forever.

Agreed. If you're willing to put up with crazy expensive real estate, higher crime and every other problem SF has, you obviously value living here a lot!

Cities have a special kind of "city culture". It's not better or worse than the country side, but it rather depends on your tastes. Some cities have tons of artists, those have better cultures. But many cities don't.

As for the services, in smaller or midsize towns they are usually much cheaper at the same quality because they don't have to pay 10s of thousands of USD in rent each month. If you have high standards and only want the high quality services, then the air gets admittedly thin quite quickly.

As for educational institutions, it depends on your country. In my home country of Germany, they are pretty comparable between countryside and cities, but I've heard bad stories about the US. In fact, the city states Bremen and Berlin are renown for having low educational standards compared to the remainder of the country.

As for opportunities, I agree that this has been the main pull factor for many people. You simply couldn't get a good job in small to mid size towns. But that might change as we transition into the post-Covid world.

The core issue is that many middle class people (including non-FAANG-level earning tech folks) simply can't afford life in cities, or the life they can afford includes having roommates while they could easily buy a house with a garden in the countryside with a couple years worth of rent.

This is a very egocentric viewpoint. Just because you think something is clearly better doesn’t mean everyone agrees with you. Example: I’m in the middle of a move right now for work. I’m selling a 2,500 square foot house on a corner lot in suburbia with a nice porch and three car garage. I’m moving to an 850 square foot apartment in a big city and paying the same rent as my mortgage. I get one parking space so I have to sell two of my cars. I’m trading a ton of privacy and living space to get the benefits of a big city. A lot of people don’t think the trade is worth it, especially people with families.

I cringed when I read this comment. This is exactly why half of the United States looks at the other half and calls them "out of touch elites." Saying city culture is better than rural culture is such a haughty statement.

Pandemics are temporary, while the attraction of city life persists over millennia. If there any truth to such predictions, cities would have permanently dwindled after previous pandemics. Most of which were deadlier than Covid.

I've heard from a few people that they aren't leaving permanently. Their attitude is if my company is work from home for the foreseeable future, why not work remote until they make me come back to the office?

While I don't think cities are dead, I think COVID has changed the balance of how centralized society will be. It's added a cost that didn't exist previously, and higher cost means lower demand.

As for the exodus, it is already happening to a degree in the Bay Area. People may come along and fill the gap eventually, but given the new cost I don't think demand will ever be what it used to be. Additionally, the Bay Areas growth in the last decade was driven almost entirely by an industry who's job are very easy to make remote, so there's an extra point against things bouncing back to before, at least here in SV. I know New York has benefitted from tech growth in the last decade as well, but it's still much more diversified than SV and will likely get off a little easier.