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Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

For 15+ years I have noticed a certain set of people trying to make a claim that people are leaving or desire to leave "the cities" for the suburbs or rural areas in America. NYC growth has slowed since 2017, and certainly there will be a rush for cheaper housing as a result of COVID, but the physics that have driven people to urban centers hasn't changed at all.

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I've noticed the same thing and especially in tech. I have a few friends who are engineers and have this idea that if everyone went completely remote, cities would clear out as everyone rushed to buy acres of land in the country. I always find it a bit funny that these friends are also the ones who seem to have the most city oriented lives. They are going out to bars and restaurants all the time. They get their coffee from local artisanal coffee roasters and their beer from the many local microbreweries. They don't seem to recognize that the cities they think people want to flee offer more than just career opportunities.

They are most likely also childless. When you have young children, your demand for fancy restaurants, artisanal coffee roasters and visiting local microbreweries diminishes, as there are now more things that occupy your time and attention, and are not very conducive for above-mentioned entertainment venues. The trend of delayed or foregone childbearing is also contributing to increase in interest in urban life.

With very few exceptions, most of my cohort who went to NYC after graduation to work in finance moved to a suburban bedroom community around the time they had kids--or at least by the time the kids were going to need school. The alternative as they saw it was to upgrade their expensive Manhattan apartment or condo and to enroll their kid in an expensive private school.

I think I know one couple who stayed in the city and they were very well off.

>>The alternative as they saw it was to upgrade their expensive Manhattan apartment or condo and to enroll their kid in an expensive private school.

Those that might have been thinking of enrolling their children in private schools can do so more affordably outside of NYC. As an example, most top tier private school base tuition in the city is around $55K/year/child (not including "suggested donations") while most great private schools outside of the city are sub-$30K/year/child.

>>I think I know one couple who stayed in the city and they were very well off.

Public school is an option too, as long as one can navigate the byzantine DOE processes. From a housing/apartment perspective, if more people flee the city then there is a delicate balance where prices may come down for families to once again find them more affordable.

>When you have young children, your demand for... visiting local microbreweries diminishes, as there are now more things that occupy your time and attention

I totally agree and I'm sure the data supports it but before covid every brewery in Austin was packed with families. I actually stopped visiting many during the weekends because there would be dozens of loud kids with tired and defeated parents drinking nearby. It was annoying.

Austin is the kind of city that families move to after having kids. A microbrewery in Austin most likely has minivan parking and stacks of kids' high chairs.

If kids really annoy you that much, you might be the perfect candidate for moving to a city where having kids is actually difficult or expensive.

While I share the sentiment that tech workers would likely leave tech hubs that doesn't mean they'd do it for homes in the country. There are plenty of other cities to choose from whose values may resonate stronger with them than SF/NYC/etc.

I can definitely see that happening more often. If you're not required to be in a certain office location, that opens up a lot of options for other cities.

I was disagreeing more with the extreme opinion that some have that remote work would cause these cities to become desolate. Would some tech workers leave? Definitely! Would they all leave? I doubt it.

That's a great point, however, bars, restaurants, and artisanal coffee shops are the exact types of city amenities that are being devastated by the pandemic!

The current exodus is people realizing that they don't need to pay city prices if they're not able to benefit from city living.

If the virus ends up being an issue that can be resolved in months (Which I highly doubt), I could see a comeback relatively soon. But every month this drags on, more and more businesses that make city living great will go bankrupt, making city living less desirable, and it'll create a negative feedback loop that will take years to recover from.

Most tech companies are allowing company-wide WFH for the rest of the year and in come cases permanently. That's tens of thousands of people who can be elsewhere for at least 6 months and possibly forever. That seems like a change in the "physics" of the magnetism that has drawn people to SF and the bay area for decades. A lot of people who had to stay in the area due to work but who have been considering a move are taking the opportunity to relocate to places with lower cost of living.

Add that to the thousands of layoffs at startups over the last few months (and a presumed hiring slowdown), as well as thousands of H1B holders who are reassessing life choices. There could be a serious shift in housing supply and demand in the bay area. Oh let's also not forget the huge impact the pandemic is having on the service and hospitality industries.

I think we could see a long-term reversal of the trend of 15% annual rent increase in SF.

I work for a small tech company and we've decided that we're going to be WFH permanently now. I can't imagine we're the only ones.

I work for a company with 400 devs that says we’ll be back on site in October. This is in the hinterlands though.

> but the physics that have driven people to urban centers hasn't changed at all.

I'd actually argue that one thing that has changed is that companies are much more amenable to at least part-time work from home. I agree the economic forces that have concentrated wealth and opportunity in cities hasn't and isn't changing, but I do think it will be much more viable for people to work at jobs where they only go in to the office, say, twice a week. In that situation I think a lot of people would be much more willing to live further out because traffic (a punishing factor in most cities) then becomes much less of an issue.

Agree. I bought a house an hour (one way) from the city and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t know I could work 50-100% from home even if I switch jobs. That is - not all jobs allow that but enough of them do that I don’t need to worry about it.

If I work just every other day in the office then my commute time per day is 30 minutes one way effectively. In that sense, my suburb is moving closer to the city.

I also think there is a wider periodic trend of moving from cities and closer to nature and vice versa, which has (at least in Europe) been in the from-the-city phase for several years now.

I live near a commuter rail line but going into a city office still ends up being almost 90 minutes door to door. (Driving at rush hour is just as bad.)

I did it maybe half the time for about a year and a half but it really wasn't sustainable long term. I don't work out of an office today but I really wouldn't mind going into our downtown office once a week or so.

The physics, specifically, are high paying remote jobs. That's the thing that is specifically changing with Covid. As to the points being made about artisanal coffee shops not in rural areas? That's the exact thing that changes when you have urbanites moving to small towns. They start restaurants, bars and coffee shops.

except that has not materialized... like at all... yet

It takes more than just 4 months in a pandemic to start a trend of new businesses in a new town.

For ~60 years the "physics" that drive people into large urban centers has been changing, with the changes getting much faster at the last ~20 years.

I really don't think there's enough evidence to say the change is on the direction of people abandoning cities (but the largest ones already slowed down their growth to a minimum). But it's unreasonable to expect the COVID changes to be undone. Things change slowly because people resist changes; but once they change, people will resist reverting them.

The Millenial generation is the largest birth cohort in the USA at this point. Their shifting preferences due to age may be very impactful on real estate generally, since many people are generally going through the same phases of life at the same time. This is likely one of the things that made urban real estate so desirable over the past decade too.

> but the physics that have driven people to urban centers hasn't changed at all.

Other than being unable to do anything social and a large portion of restaurants/cultural opportunities are ceasing to exist?

I'm not paying $4000/month to get lukewarm food delivered at 20% markup.

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