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Comment by papito | Hacker News Reader

People will still need to get out of the house. I hate working from home. I need my commute to wake me up, but not TOO much of it.

I think the future might be shared work spaces (WeWork) but in suburbia - so people can come to work, but not necessarily having to spend 4 hours a day on a commuter train.

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> People will still need to get out of the house.

I'm not sure if you're in a California city mindset, but it's easy if you move to a suburb of a city like Atlanta. You can have over an acre of wooded land and be less than an hour's commute to the city. It's super affordable too. 300k gets you 3000sqft and sometimes more.

If you're willing to pay double, you can have the same within thirty minutes of the city. And there are still spacious priorities within the city limits.

If you don't need a decent school zone, can confirm.

38 minutes from downtown. 3 acre wooded lot. 1900 sq ft house (currently refinishing full basement). $135 when I bought, probably $200 now. In the process of selling a much more expensive intown house, because there's no point.

The biggest things suburbs need to do these days is revolutionize malls. Tear up all the parking and retrofit empty store space into community-centric things people actually want.

Big box -> co-working space, as new anchor tenant.

Interestingly, if you go north of Atlanta, you can find examples of the new "downtown" areas that have been built in the last few years to replace malls. Avalon: https://www.experienceavalon.com/ Halcyon: https://www.visithalcyon.com/ Alpharetta City Center: http://www.citycenteralpharetta.com/ All 3 within 5 miles of each other

Used to live down the road from Avalon. I'd say it's better than a mall, but still too profit-first to be when I'd hope we're pivoting towards.

As context for others, Avalon is a mixed-use development, with restaurants and shops on the first floor (of ~3). Definitely still anchor-tenant focused (movie theater, larger clothing retailers) & restaurant weighted.

IMHO, the type of place you visit to do things, then leave. Not the type of place you live.

But then, my opinion is that Atlantic Station should be nuked from orbit for the sin of isolating itself from the transit grid, so I'm probably on the get-off-my-lawn side of the planner/developer split.

>IMHO, the type of place you visit to do things, then leave. Not the type of place you live.

But then people pay very high rents to live. $1600 or so for a studio.

Atlantic Station replaced a hulking eyesore of a shuttered steel mill. Not gonna find that much property in midtown Atlanta on top of a rail station. Not a big fan of Atlantic Station, it does not feel authentic to me, built on top of a parking garage

In a world of remote k-12 schooling, hopefully real estate values tied to school zones will be history.

Right on, I too believe a big chunk of the future office will look a lot more like a Starbucks, or the main lobby of a WeWork. A place to hang out with your coworkers, and a quit room for occasional meeting, an office that you visit once or twice a week, or maybe a month. It still makes a lot of sense to meet at a place that's not a public coffee shop, but has all the atmosphere and amenities.

I’d like to see communities support non profit coworking spaces to attract talent.

Like a library, with wifi, printers, a coffee bar, and a few EV charging parking spots. My coworking space has these amenities, I happily provide financial support.

The days of communities catering to businesses to move to them is over. Cater to remote workers (Tulsa, OK has a great campaign for this). They’re the ones bringing dollars.

There's a lot of reasons to get out of one's house. Work is merely one of them. With the small (but measurable) exodus from Silicon Valley, people are choosing areas that offer more than work as the only reason to leave the house (though, there are many scenic things to do in the Bay Area). However, there are scenic things to do elsewhere too at a fraction of the cost.

After this, fly into the Bay Area when you need to. Things like performance reviews, and strategic planning ought to be in person. But the world is speculating day-to-day software development tasks may not need physical proximity. At least, we'll find out the benefits/consequences of that decision in the years to come.

This doesn’t work as much on most of the west coast but any city which was big a century ago probably has nice railway suburbs which are walkable because they were built before the one person, one car assumption became the foundation of American urban design.

I think areas like that will see an uptick in interest from people who weren’t keen on an hour+ daily commute into a major city but are far more willing to consider it if you’re talking a few times a month.

Before we bought we looked around in a few cities and were really struck by the quality of life difference it makes when you drive occasionally but not by necessity. Even the younger residents in newer, pricier suburbs tend to pack on weight and health problems unless they’re absolutely rigorous about going to the gym and have the schedule to support it. The white-flight suburbs built in the decades after Brown v. Board are often actively hostile to a healthy lifestyle (no sidewalks, winding roads, transit happens in other zip codes).

> winding roads

Don't get me started on the folly of single-path, non-grid road planning. It's literally encoding the assumption "There will never be more than X people living here" into the city fabric.

And then in 10 years people wonder why traffic is so bad...

Exactly - and there’s a wicked cascade effect where people get angry that their commute which is “supposed” to take 20 minutes (i.e. 30) now takes 50, and feel that they’re allowed to speed and run stop signs to make up the difference. I stopped using Waze/Google Maps because the estimates are always wildly low and Waze tends to route you through roads which were never designed to be safe at the limit.

You would rather commute and sit in office as your social activity instead of doing sports/dance/art at your own leisure?

I would think people hated going to the office when offices were bland and isolated in remote locations. Cities are heavily adapted to separate work/office locations. They 'll adapt to remote, like they always do. People will need to invent new ways of life.

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