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Comment by wbl | Hacker News Reader

If you're the Treasurer of Cupertino, this cannot be a fun thing to hear about.

I’m working on a pet theory that the pandemic will cause a brief period of reverse urbanization. These happen sometimes, such as UK during WW2. Long term cities are still a good bet as urbanization has been happening as long as we have recorded history.

I have some small hope that the cross pollination out of major urban centers will help reduce some of the urban/rural/liberal/conservative polarization. Fingers crossed.

I hope for this too, less in terms of politics but in terms of spreading the country's wealth more evenly from the coasts to the middle of the country. But same general idea.

It was also true in the US. Many major cities were losing population from post-WWII until about the late 1990s. (So not that brief.)

Actual cities downtown were losing, but the metro areas were not. This was (mostly white) flight to suburbs, but this was still people living in urban areas rather than the country side.

Now that the suburbs are all built out and getting more expensive, I doubt the same phenomena can happen. There's a limit how far you can go to stay close to the metro area.

True. Although most metros (SV being somewhat of an exception) you get 60-90 minutes out of the downtown and there is much cheaper housing available. (And many of the offices aren't even in the downtown anyway.)

I live a (non-rush hour) hour from Boston which I still consider "close" to the metro in that I can drive in for the evening and have even commuted in--admittedly a long commute. But I'm in a small semi-rural town. It's not true rural cheap but it's a lot less expensive than actually in the city or close-in suburbs.

Yeah, but if you don't need to commute regularly, which widely available high speed internet makes possible, you can push out a good bit further.

It already is happening. It will probably take at least 2 years to "return to normalcy" so depending on your definition of brief it's come true.

Consider the tourism all those empty offices could bring.

Imagine the retrofit housing possibilities of the Apple UFO. It could be a self contained city.

A cyberpunk Kowloon walled city in the ring sounds cool. But consider that Cupertino has fought tooth and nail to prevent an abandoned shopping mall from being converted into legit housing. Seems unlikely that they would go for it.

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