'Zoom towns' are exploding in the West
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
The Le Corbusier spirit of zoning has wrought so much damage in the US. I dread the idea of having to jump in a car for 15 minutes to shop for groceries in a strip mall. Most suburbs really destroy natural community (and I suppose that was the point of Le Corbusier's ideas around planning: like the gigantic squares in Brasilia) too.
(I realize my comment here is all over the place, sorry!)
Which city is that? I'm not aware of any US cities with sane zoning.
To me that means no minimum square footage, minimal set back rules, no garage restrictions, no height restrictions, no restrictions on multi-units and ADUs, and limited or no restrictions on mixed use.
A move abroad seems likely in the next 10 years.
Do you know Robert Moses? I feel like those two people have pretty much ruined America, and almost no one has heard of them.
I just purchased a house in Golden, CO, where I have all of the things you're talking about - walkable, coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores in tolerably close distance.
I'm trying to get Golden to legalize a style of building that would make all of these good things more plentiful and more affordable.
I am writing about two competing "visions" for a block of what is currently a surface parking lot in downtown Golden.
One option is not pleasant, the other option is delightful, and illegal.
I bet it'll all be right up your alley:
A lot of my interest in this area comes from a life-long appreciation of (non-pejorative) anarchist philosophical thought. It's a lot harder to build organization from the bottom-up, but top-down organization loses so much implicit knowledge and context that it seems reasonable to investigate the former approach.
I'll check out your newsletter, it seems so interesting, thank you for linking. :)
criminally undervalued for people trying to understand why the world is the way that it is.
I talk extensively about Robert Moses in my newsletter, but as you might imagine it's hard to summarize a 1400 page book in a handful of emails, so I haven't quite figured out exactly how well the looping Robert Moses's story into the greater narrative I'm trying to convey.
I would love your thoughts on the newsletter as you read through it!
I just started rereading Jane jacobs's "the death and life of great American cities"
I'm sure at some point I'll be looping it into the newsletter as well.
I'm with you on the non pejorative anarchist philosophical thought.
Not necessarily anything to do with anarchy, but more about the value generation of spontaneous, self-organized, responsive, iterative, goal-seeking behavior at an individual level.
Have you heard of "The problem of political authority: the right course and the duty to obey" or "seeing like a state: why schemes to improve the human condition fail"
as if you're reading list isn't already long enough, these might be worthwhile additions.
It's more interesting to me than video games (though at times it can be vastly more frustrating than even the worst video game!)
I expect this is a project I will be working on for a very long time. It's actually rather comforting to feel like I have something that could span decades, and remain satisfying, relevant, and renumerative.
Thanks for the kind words!
It's not Le Corbusier. Zoning in the USA started in the late 1800s, an effort to regulate light and air in cities, and turned by the early 1900s into an effort to keep certain industries and ethnicities out of "good" neighborhoods.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/28/a-history-of-z...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-19/the-birth...
https://fee.org/articles/the-racist-history-of-zoning-laws/
https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...
https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2016/02/american-zoning-as-...
The first zoning laws in SF were used to selectively drive out Chinese people.
Just want to make sure that this often hidden part of zoning is above the fold.
It's also largely why racial segregation and housing wealth has not changed at all over the past 50 years. The laws are used to prevent integrations if communities, ensure that infrastructure like schools are unevenly distributed, and enforce our current racial divisions.
Social mobility with money looks like second homes becoming first, with huge investments and then questions around socialised cost of roads, infrastructure in general.
If you do the local taxes right, it evens out, but the price of land and housing rises for the non-mobile locals and it makes for some awesome "you're not from around here" issues.
The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.
I'm with you on subsidies, but it's worth noting that historically, cattle, sheep, etc. were often raised and grazed on land that wasn't (and mostly still isn't) suitable for growing crops, usually because of some combination of elevation, slope[0], soil, or lack of rainfall. Animals are mobile, so you can move them around on a larger area with relatively sparse vegetation that humans don't consider palatable[1], or even migrate them seasonally on an even larger territory.
So, within some limits, animal husbandry in areas otherwise marginal for agriculture can convert poor ground cover to high quality protein (and other animal products). As long as overgrazing is avoided, this seems to me to be a decent and sustainable arrangement.
[0] Terraces can deal with slopes to an extent and slows erosion, but don't always conveniently lend themselves to large scale mechanized agriculture. Solutions to the other challenges also don't work everywhere.
[1] It's worth noting that the domesticated animal least picky about what plants they'll eat is the goat, many varieties of which, when not moved frequently enough, can completely denude an area by eating plants and bushes down to the ground, climb trees to eat all the leaves they can reach and even stripping the bark, which kills the tree. Which makes goatherding a likely driver of desertification in already stressed ecosystems.
And no, the soil is being depleted of all minerals and life. It’s better to spread farming out.
Most places in the US get at least ten inches of precipitation annually. Very few get less than that.
With that much rainfall, a lot of homes can be self supporting with catchment systems, grey water reuse, etc.
Edit: Anyone interested in some best practices should look at what Fresno County is doing. They get an average of 11 inches of rain annually and they were basically desert before a canal system was built in the late 1800s.
In some years, their ground levels have risen because of their water policies and practices. In contrast, much of the rest of California and the Midwest are experiencing subsidence as water tables permanently and steadily fall.
Natural Resources Fresno County is unique among California counties in the range of natural resources (forests, riverways, and wildlife habitats) that encompass its vast terrain.... Two major rivers, the Kings and San Joaquin, flow through this rich landscape, providing the County with its most prized resource, water.[0]
[0] -https://www.co.fresno.ca.us/departments/public-works-plannin...
Yes, water’s a huge issue in the southwest. It’s also managed differently in different places. But from what I saw in LV, I think it can be a solved problem. It is not a constraint.
Edit-But let’s assume water is a constraint. Then why don’t we add to the needed infrastructure projects a project to pump water in from the coast? I’m sure there’s a feasible and affordable way to do it since we already have the highway systems. Just run some pipes alongside it - powered by solar? Doesn’t need to be running 24/7.
Even if your locality has to foot the bill for some huge, expensive water projects like those, it's still going to cost a tiny fraction of your household expenditures. Whereas scare land in popular cities will cost you the bulk of your income for decades.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen anyone normalize the energy production potential of an area based on the energy needs that are localized for that area.
Wellington, CO is discussing increasing the tap fee for building a new home to $67k, in a place where homes typically cost $380k.
I live near Santa Fe, and the mid-to-long term forecast for water supply is pretty dire. Humans have lived in the area for a long time, and it's not likely to become completely dry. But will there be enough to support e.g. a doubling of the county population? This seems unlikely, even with the sorts of changes in use and infrastructure that you mention.
Ask anyone there who isn't making their money directly off of California money how the influx of California money is working out for them and they won't paint a rosy picture.
Fake news. It pours foreign currency into a local economy that was already 80% based on tourism and which has a depreciating currency. Does selling tourists plastic trinkets and taking them on boat trips cost young local children plastic toys or prevent their fishermen dad from having his own longboat? Ofcourse not. Pre-COVID, money was being shoved as fast as it could possibly be shoved into a tiny island where people have tight-knit yet large family structures. All the locals on Bali are richer and better educated than they otherwise would be.
I think the worst thing about it may be that it's basically a classic case of the Resource Curse, except instead of oil they have beautiful beaches/etc.
Lastly, there isn't really a shortage of land. The island is 5,780 km². I've driven between all 4 coasts and 90% of the time you are seeing nothing but empty nature. https://mapfight.appspot.com/us.ct-vs-bali/connecticut-us-ba...
Not necessarily. In the early days, perhaps, when businesses were run by locals and the type of tourist who would go, would use local services.
Now as a place develops, outside money / developers / owners move in, providing higher quality accommodation, fine dining and the once local business owners are employed as cleaners for a pittance.
It is a pattern repeated since the 60s and 70s with the hippy trail when large amounts of people started to visit these places. Once pristine paradise locations are now over developed concrete monstrosities catering to the higher end - out pricing the travellers who first went to the place and the profits all exported to other places
so their business didn't succeed. It's not the tourist's responsibility. Nor are the competition wrong to out-compete them.
What?
The money from tourism goes to elite few locals who own most of it, and it eventually slightly trickles down the rest of folks living there, the income disparity is on a level we simply don't see in the west. You won't see those folks since they still live in their tiny hut far from busy tourist centres of the south.
The idea of good western tourist money lifting equally everybody out of poverty is seriously naive, in any undeveloped country. Plus OP mentioned additional load on underfunded medical services.
>The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.
You're being far too nice by choosing the example of a digital nomad living in Bali.
A much closer to home and harder to ignore example is what SV money has done to places like Denver, Boulder and is doing to Boise.
I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.
And before any east-coasters or Mid-westerners start laughing, NYC money is doing a very good job destroying upstate, PA and VT. Masshole money is crapping all over NH and ME. Chicago is slowly eating more and more of Wisconsin and Michigan. This is a relatively universal problem at least in the US.
Can you go into more details? I feel like this is a dangerous kind of statement because it is hard to draw a line for people to say what shouldn't and should be.
Here is why the statement feels dangerous, it doesn't make arguments directly related to the group and can easily be expanded to: "But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when [people of color, poor people, lacking education, etc] move in. It shouldn't be that way."
Perspective is always valuable even applied to what would be the unpopular opinions.
When poor people move in they don't have the resources to tell everyone else what to do and they don't tend to pick fights with whoever is there first. When rich people move in they get the government to cater to them and local laws change, often to the point where what was previously normal behavior (burning brush, discharging guns within city limits) is no longer even legal. They often pick fights with the local businesses ("I don't like how that second generation pig farm I knowingly bought property adjacent to smells" or they complain about the environmental impact of some third generation junkyard not because it's not folowing the law but because they find it unsighl). Furthermore they co-opt locals with their money. People who genuinely hate all the other changes they bring bury their heads in the sand because the newcomers are spending more money at their business (or whatever) until it finally negatively affects them personally.
I would much, much, much rather have poor people move in than the white collar crowd because the former has bigger problems than me and the people around me Doing It Wrong(TM).
Entitlement is people with money thinking they can and should be able to change existing communities to their liking, just because they have money.
It's weird, but there seems to be a common blind spot about certain kinds of wealth-enabled antisocial behavior.
I guess you could do preferential tax policy but that almost requires high taxes as a prerequisite which is a non-starter in a lot of places.
I don't think something like that necessarily needs to be some kind of constitutional mechanism. It could be a social norm, kinda like the ones that discourage people from casually insulting others and which punish them if they do.
Though I suppose if you're looking for a constitutional mechanism, clearly defined but longish residency requirements for voting probably wouldn't fall under the category of "voter suppression" (which I take to mean policies designed to indirectly disenfranchise certain kinds of voters for partisan political advantage).
Until The Great Migration happens (or something like it), and suddenly the long residency requirements look precisely like racism ... unless, of course, you've had the in place for 300 years already.
I think that voting is among the least significant of the acts of "new arrivals", particularly if they have money.
> I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.
Definitely agree. I live in Salt Lake City, and we're seeing the same thing here. A large part of it is failing to adapt to the local culture. I don't think it is just a growth thing, since Utah's population has been growing rapidly for a while due to the high Mormon population and it's only been recently, when the composition of new residents has changed that problems have started to surface.
Did you mean to link an example of that with the [0]? I'm curious to read about that.
As just one example, I'll take homelessness. Utah did so well with solving its homelessness crises until recently that you would find articles in Bloomberg, NYT, etc., asking "will Utah be the first state to solve homelessness?", stuff like that. The reason Utah was so good at dealing with homelessness was a strong coupling between the Mormon church providing social services, the police departments being lenient with the homeless, and the local governments helping to redirect the homeless to the church (social) services. When a new mayor was elected and a new person became police chief this balance was shaken up and the whole system came apart, so now our homelessness problem is about as bad as everywhere else.
For what it's worth, I'm not from Utah originally, I'm not religious at all, feel no desire to be so, and was never Mormon, though I have gone to a couple of their church services as a guest. So these are just my observations and I'm trying to be as fair as possible in giving them.
> When a new mayor was elected and a new person became police chief this balance was shaken up and the whole system came apart, so now our homelessness problem is about as bad as everywhere else.
You listed 3 reasons, 2 of which has to do with the church, the third reason changed with new mayor, so now it all fell apart?
What happeneded to the mormon social services? Were they not successful without the local government redirecting people to the church services (which should be illegal?, separation of church and state)
I don't think it is illegal for the government to redirect people to faith based charities, any more than it would be illegal to redirect them to secular charities, however, I am not a lawyer.
"which should be illegal" - is exactly an example of the coastal attitudes that are disrupting a very well ordered, high trust society. Consider that this state basically solved the homeless problem by violating a sacred principle which, fully expressed in coastal cities, neither seems to actually help the homeless nor the residents around them. It's possible that the firewall between civic and religious institutions isn't a universal evil.
"Separation of Church and State" being a sacred principle is quite ironic.
I think one of the biggest political problems in the US right now is the fixation on dogma for its own sake. It's happening all over the political spectrum and predictably leads to the dysfunction of polarization (where factional dogmas conflict) or dysfunction of purity (where there's little dogmatic conflict, because the dogmas are always incomplete). We're probably overdue for an era of pragmatic compromise.
Now if they were busing them over and unloading them directly in the waiting hands of the church, without consent, then that sounds less like independent organizations.
Like what?
It's not SV money ruining these cities - it's local restrictive zoning laws that limit the construction of new property, while driving up the price of new construction and existing construction.
Denver, Boulder, and Golden ALL have implemented severe growth caps:
From Attempt to emulate Boulder 1% growth limit across Front Range stirs controversy (Denver Post) [0]:
> Since Boulder in 1976 instituted a 2% limit on dwelling unit increases in city limits, the idea has proliferated. The city revised it down to 1% in 1995, the same year Hayes said he pushed a growth limit of the same rate into effect in Golden. This summer, Lakewood voters approved an almost identical municipal law local officials are in the process of implementing.
SV money isn't ruining cities. Their own city councils and legislators are catastrophically mis-managing their cities.
There is plenty of space for everyone who wants to live somewhere, if you let price signals coordinate a desire for various locations with an ability to pay to consume more or less land area.
I'm starting to build momentum for a fix in Golden, CO, but it sure feels like a long slog.
[0]: https://www.denverpost.com/2019/11/16/boulder-1-percent-grow...
San Francisco is perhaps the worst, but these problems are widespread.
> City councils legally prohibit landowners from adding dwelling units to their own property.
Remember - all this "pent up" demand for housing is a result of homeowners being denied permission to modify their own property.
Historically, all cities evolved from fields because landowners incrementally upgraded their own property, when the price of rents justified additional improvements.
In the 1920s, city councils gave themselves permission to prevent property modifications "for planning purposes", and the US Supreme Court never struck it down.
The early goals of zoning were explicitly laid out by the mayor of Atlanta in 1922[0], with gems like:
Zoning will keep the apartments out of the private house sections. The coming of the apartment drives out the private home.
The residence districts are further subdivided into three race districts:
R1 or white residence district.
R2 or colored residence district.
R3 or undetermined race district.
The above race zoning is essential in the in interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race. Care has been taken to prevent discrimination and to provide adequate space for the expansion of the housing areas of each race without encroaching on the areas now occupied by the other.
I gave a high-level overview/rant on zoning, racism, and Denver here: https://twitter.com/josh_works/status/1294726871574179840
My next order of business is to help other non-out-of-state-developers start moving to Golden.
Along the way I want to make golden become a more affordable place to live, and also an even more desirable place to live.
(I know - it's a tall order.)
I've been connecting with folks who live (or want to live) in the area.
Feel free to send me a message (email, twitter, whatever) and I'll try to help you in this goal!
I'd much rather you move in than some rich out-of-state-er who's working on their second vacation home.
How do you do this?
I have friends who live in Northern Ontario that now have remote work jobs in Toronto (programming, graphic design, IT) they wouldn't have been able to apply for beforehand because of where they live.
At the same time the housing market in my area is going bonkers because city people are moving here to work remote too. So it’s a toss up all around
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/irenelevine/2020/09/15/zoom-tow...
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/01944363.2020....
If you start looking, you will find places like high end apartment complexes with many amenities that are close to public transportation offering deals and discounts with inventory that would have never existed in the past. You will also start noticing that the lease lengths are also clearly formed to align with some kind of forecasting or predictions being made in hopes that the next moving season will normalize thing; well beyond what is normally expected.
For the Bay Area specifically there are also tens of thousands of apartments being completed right now, including about 10k in SF and several 1000s in downtown Oakland. This will naturally reduce rents.
The thing is that Bay Area real estate price pressure is supported by the arrival of people from abroad, and this process has come to an abrupt halt. Prices will go down. This does not provide evidence of an accelerating process of people moving to Moab, Utah.
Is there evidence that migration in and out of cities/states has slowed, or just that rate of address change has slowed. Both can be true at the same time. You can have fewer people switching apartments in city, while also having more move out of state or county.
The solution is to actually use this Internet thing we have built and make place far less relevant. The only blessing so far from COVID is that it has forced this issue and overcome probably a generation of institutional inertia, helping people escape the unaffordable housing trap a lot sooner than they otherwise could.
The US has no housing problem if you broaden your hunt to the entire country. There are tons of really nice small to medium sized towns, and if you like having access to something more urban there are also numerous medium sized cities with functioning downtowns and affordable housing in decent neighborhoods.
One of my friends is travelling+working across western states, but he's the only person I know. Another friend tried going to Truckee (Tahoe) and eventually ended up back with his parents after a couple of months.
So far, I would guess this is happening but to a much lesser extent that what most think. It'll definitely be a trending in that direction though.
[1]: https://officialmonttremblant.com/the-mountain/snow-guns/
[2]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/lists/skiing/10...
That being said, when we're scheduled to go back (next June), I plan on trying to work completely remotely, and then attempt to travel in a much more extensive way.
The only problem is finding good internet. All they’ll tell you is if that have wifi or not even consistently working wifi. I learned quickly You gotta research this part deeply yourself.
I've been using my work flexibility to avoid the popular crags and boulderfields on the weekends, but on the rare weekends I have been out, the popular crags at the New River Gorge have been absolutely packed.
I know few people who are unsuccessfully try to buy "non-metro" houses: either prices are to high, or deals closed in just couple hours of property being listed.
There is no shortage of non-dilapidated double wides and 1500ft^2 houses in rural areas.
What there is a shortage of is recently constructed nicely optioned turnkey 1500-3500ft^2 houses. Basically if you're looking for the kind of house you find in an inner suburb with good schools in BFE it'll either be hard to find or expensive.
Rural areas often don't have that. DSL is usually asymmetric, and doesn't have anywhere near the required upload bandwidth.
My aunt and uncle live near Binghamton, NY and their new neighbors are high income people (a Googler + Attorney) who plan to stay for a year or two. Fixing up the house and putting a pool in is still less than what their Manhattan apartment cost.
We also still have a place in San Francisco, but we're spending 70-80% of our time in Tahoe.
We spent the whole month of June here, and when we booked our place to stay, Placer county was not allowing short term rentals, so we booked for a full month to get over the threshold. While we were here, restaurants and other things opened back up.
About mid-June we started looking at houses. We made one offer for asking price, and got it accepted, right at the end of June. Overall I think we were fairly lucky. There were some stories of places going for substantially over asking price, which is rare for the area. But the largest impact was that housing supply is low, and houses moved really quickly.
It's typical for houses in this area to sit on the market for 3-6 months and sell for right around or slightly under asking price. This summer we saw a house go up on Zillow, on Wednesday, and we hemmed and hawed about it until Friday, then told our agent we wanted to tour it. The house was already off the market by that time. We saw plenty of places hit there market, and go into contract within 2-5 days.
We looked at several that we're real fixers. Like an 1100 square foot A-Frame that had a terrifying set of disclosures, probably needed at least a down to the studs renovation. All the electrical replaced, plumbing replaced, etc. Everything was DIY, not to code, etc. It sold in a handful of days for at least $500K, and certainly needed another $150K in work.
The place we did end up getting, we only got to see because our agent knew the seller and the selling agent. We got to tour it before it hit the multiple listing service and we had an offer in before it actually went on the market. It did hit the MLS for a few hours, but the buyer ended up wanting an easy sale, so accepted or asking price offer.
This kind of quick sale is typical for the Bay Area, but not at all for Tahoe.
I'm not keeping as close an eye on the market now, but overall asking prices are up, and people are still buying quickly. Also all the local contractors are very busy.
The other issue (and we're part of this problem) is that a lot of former rental houses are being put on the market, so locals are having quite a hard time finding a place to rent, and having to end up in places like Reno, which is roughly a 45-60 minute drive away. SFGate has an article about this exact issue here: https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Bay-Area-transplant...
The other anecdote is that up until a couple of weeks ago it was still quite busy in town. People working at the local grocery store were commenting that it's the busiest shoulder season they've ever seen. Typically this time of year, this place is nearly a ghost town.
Both me and my partner have been working remotely since the start of March and expect to continue at least well into next year. Perhaps permanently.
This has been happening for years, at least around South Lake Tahoe, due to rentals being put up on AirBnB. I've talked to numerous locals over the years while on ski trips and they've all said the same thing: if they're renting it's usually in Nevada and they drive to town every day. During big storms a lot of folks can't even make it to work at all.
Anyone who doesn't already own a house there and works in any of the businesses is unable to rent, and they normally commute from one of the larger towns, 40-60 mins away (over pretty bad roads, up and down mountains). It's gotten so bad that businesses are considering putting on buses for their staff.
And if you want to hear a 45 minute rant, mention AirBnB to anyone who lives in Santa Cruz and doesn't own property :)
It's really a lot more complicated than mere political will.
I'm thrilled that remote-friendly is starting to become mainstream. I wish it had happened under other circumstances, though.
So the Majority of people want to continue to work remote, I would put out there that the only people that want to go back into the office are are busy bodies and control freaks. (Lookin' at you Satya)
IMHO Working from home solves the problem of, "Stop the chitty chatty and get back to work", and it partially solves the problem of "Hey man, stop riding me like a rented mule".
So spending less time polluting the planet travelling in shiny metal boxes to go to giant concrete boxes to sit in tiny metal and fabric cubes is a bad thing?
I'm going next level on remote. Got a sail boat and I'm going full water world. I'll say hi to Kevin Costner for ya.
Here is why I prefer an office. It gives me a hard separation between work and home. It forces me to be on a schedule (which I prefer). I have a short 20 minute commute so it is a time to listen to podcasts I otherwise wouldn't make time for. I like the camaraderie of a team, wfh feels lonely to me. I enjoy grabbing lunch with co-workers and then we often play a game before going back to work. These things work for me and enrich my life.
A lot of people prefer that, but solving that doesn’t require “an office” (i.e. a place far away from at least some people, causing at least some long commutes), but rather just that your job give you a stipend for renting a hot-desk at a work-sharing space that’s near to you. (Basically equivalent to them paying to have an extra room built into your house that you only go into to work, but for urbanites where that’s impractical.)
> camaraderie of a team
I don’t know about you, but my work Slack has about a similar level of camaraderie to any Discord group-chat I share with my friends.
> we often play a game before going back to work
Online games exist!
(Though arranging this is kind of finicky; it requires that everyone already have a particular online-game client installed and signed up. There’s no “pick up and play” kind of group gaming available here.
IMHO there’s a niche to be filled in collaboration software for one that seamlessly supports sharing entertainment — playing games together, watching TV/movies together, etc. — embedded within the workspace view itself.)
> grabbing lunch with co-workers
I mean, you could just keep talking to your coworkers while eating lunch, if you like. Make a #breakroom or #lunch channel.
You could even make it a video call, if you want to induce the same physical pain in people with social anxiety at the idea that people are watching their eating habits. :P
Certainly, none of these things are low-friction at first, or particularly low-friction even in the steady-state today. But they’re things where the friction could be greatly lowered. If tons of people are going to stay remote, that’s going to provide a good market for companies to create new products for.
(I’m betting on VR groupware, myself. Some spiritual descendant to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project, for an age where that actually is something most people might want. Literal “virtual offices”, with an unlimited number of unboundedly-large virtual spaces in which to position whatever shared or private app-window views you like. Especially if consideration is made for it to also gracefully degrade into a less-immersive analogous view — e.g. a 2D infinite-zoom layout of all the open app-windows — for people accessing it on screens.)
Or, y’know, people whose whole job consists of “chitty chat”, such that remote is making them less efficient at doing what you pay them to do. The type of people that, when given the choice between individual offices and a private group workspace room shared with their team, choose the shared workspace, because their work actually occurs entirely on the shared table while talking to their colleagues, not at their own desks.
Basically, think: people who brainstorm all day; people whose productive output is either ideas or decisions.
Academic researchers are like this—90% of their work is figuring out what to try or how to try it, and this process is accelerated by bouncing ideas off of others; and, in the end, actually attempting something often requires many hands to set up the required apparatus.
Marketers are like this, in pretty much the same way: ideas percolate, reach consensus, and then applying the chosen ideas requires horizontally-scaled grunt-work.
Executives are like this. What is an executive but someone who sits in meetings all day? Managers may interface with people actually doing work, but executives only interface with other executives. They may as well all be co-located, so they can continue to bump into each-other and argue/negotiate in smaller groups “after work”—like a legislative body when it’s in session.
Ironically, my productivity has also been getting measurably worse.
I've realized that I need IRL interaction with my co-workers that's outside of scheduled Zoom calls. I like running into them in the break room and making small talk while making a coffee. I am in a large organization, and having that interaction also gets me talking to people who aren't my direct co-workers.
Pretty offensive to those of us that literally can't sustain ourselves mentally in isolated environments. That or we are ADD like rabbits so we either start drugging ourselves heavily to "take part in work from home culture" or well, welp.
1 month Southern colorado - terrible internet
Denver, SLC, Seattle, Baja - all no problems
The key thing that's helped is directly connecting with ethernet.
There is a little bit of pain, initially, but if they step back and compare life in an economically prospering place (rich people coming in) versus an economically declining place (rich people and opportunities to earn money leaving), they would realize they are actually lucky.
One might say well those aren’t the only two options, and I would say, yes they are. The world moves faster and faster there is no “stasis” anymore. You’re on the up or down, volatility is higher, and you need to stay on the right side of it.
>people complaining about the demand curves moving
>There is a little bit of pain, initially
Demand curves move in decades!
Nobody wants life to suck for a couple decades because a bunch of people showed up and turned the local economy upside down. That's a huge fraction of a lifetime. If you're unlucky your kids might even be born at the start of it.
>economically declining place
You call it declining and I call it stable and sustainable.
The world will always need soybeans, dairy products, corn and timber. The machinery to produce these things will always need to be fixed. Yes the people employed in that capacity will decline over time. With current birth rates and options for geographic mobility I don't think this is a real problem. It just means more kids will grow up to move to the cities than stick around.
>You’re on the up or down, volatility is higher, and you need to stay on the right side of it.
This seems like a world view minted where the primary industry is a volatile money fire. Not everywhere is like this, yet.
I have a small (~25ish person) software company based here and it's going to be a challenge to recruit this winter (we're hiring for senior devs) simply because it will be impossible for anyone to find housing here until the end of the ski season!
That's not how that actually works and small communities need to start preparing for more of this. This is likely only the beginning of a long trend that will reshape the US and if it isn't addressed proactively by locals, small communities will suffer because of it.
Remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
People with money who move in are probably not there to play sugar daddy to your town and kiss all its boo-boos and make everything all better.
Boomers. Their entire retirement portfolios depend on keeping property jacked up for the foreseeable, to later sell to a magical entity with money.
DHL from Shenzhen to here took almost a month.
I am very, very glad I can work remotely, and rack not so bad salary in a very cheap country to live. Yet, moving anything physical takes an extraordinary amount of time, and shuts down any productivity.
This could be a massively beneficial thing if we play our cards right.
That said there is another, huge thing that's happening in real time, good for some, not so much for others: local talent (i.e. US, Can, EU) will now be competing with the 'rest of the world' in a major way for more mainstream jobs.
This means the bifurcation of the wealth of globalism could be even more exacerbated.
We saw millions of manufacturing jobs leave the US for other parts.
The 'big winners' were capital holders, senior managers, execs - their wealth increased dramatically.
The other 'winners' were anyone that could maintain a decent job in the aftermath - they saw massively lower prices in commodity goods, and an unbelievable expansion in diversity of consumer products
The 'losers' were those in the working class, who never quite recovered.
Well - 'white collar workers' (and probably this means 'you') are going to be under that kind of 'threat' as well.
The kinds of jobs that are going to the Philippines, Vietnam, India etc. is going to go way up the value chain.
It means further concentration and increase in surpluses with those who 'have power'.
It means probably even more expansion in buying power for those who can keep decent jobs.
But the numbers of those who are going to 'get left behind' may increase substantially.
This is like 'NAFTA+globalisation' on steroids.
I've just hired a firm to do some tech work in E. Europe, and a team to do generic design work in Asia and the prices are ridiculously low and the quality is good. It's not a place to do advanced work (it can be, but you have to dig for that) - and although it means 'more work can be done' and an expansion in some ways, I can only feel for the pressure on wages locally for tech-related work.
Folks, if they can remote you in Utah, they can also remote someone else in Kiev, and this is a very material thing to consider.
This is going to be hugely impactful for trade negotiations in the future because what we have now will be a 'race to the bottom' for labour laws, working conditions, etc. and large corporations will be very happy to 'not think about' how much of that cost is simply be externalized, off the balance sheet. 'McCorp' does not care that there is no financial oversight, shifty accounting principles, meagre commercial law, limited human rights in 'Country XYZ' - all they will see is the direct issues: labour input costs, and then maybe the 'quality of outcomes' but even that is sometimes secondary.
... you cost X, but your peer, 10 time zones away costs 1/2 X.
... so who is at risk of getting 'eliminated and/or moved'?
Because if the '1/2 cost' team can do the job, it won't be them.
It's very basic math.
Again, it won't be everything, but many things.
I can see happening in India where 90's and 00's an IT job was sure shot way to earn upper middle class life. Now a large number of them who entered 10-15 years back are looking at mid career layoffs and next job will be most likely downgrade. Another large chunk of employees are going to be pushed toward contract jobs instead of full time as companies target for 100% utilization of staff.
If you want to make distributed work, then you need to be OK with asynchronicity rather than demanding synchronous work.
And to be fair, because of tax and timezones, it's more likely that this stuff will be sent to Europe rather than SE Asia, and you definitely won't get long-term people to work 1pm to 9pm to overlap with the US West coast.
Go buy a fucking hobbit hovel and stay there.
What would make more sense is simply to move the office to the Midwest, and interact with other branches or businesses remotely.
This would seem to give the best of both worlds - cheaper cost of living, and physical interaction.
Presumably, they'd do it the same way fully-remote companies have always done it. Either you onboard people remotely, or you travel to meet up in person for onboarding. You don't need an office to do that.
The company laptop shows up at your front door and you get on the phone with the hiring manager who tells you how to log in.
I started in April and I've never met any of the people I work with in person. On my team, only one of the people was ever in the actual office.
It isn't a problem. Takes a little longer to build trust with people, that's about it.
> It isn't a problem. Takes a little longer to build trust with people, that's about it.
It is a problem, because there's more to being on a team than getting a laptop and doing assigned work. Losing workplace human contact may be find for some people, but for me the loss has been palpable. The change is necessary given the circumstances, but that doesn't mean it's fine.
This gets at some of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/opinion/work-from-home-lo....
I work with hardware and being able to have someone physically look at a schematic with me or explain something to me in person greatly shortens the amount of time it takes me to understand them.
Edit: I also think we don't know the long term effects being remote has on innovation. It seems like people congregate in cities because the rewards to being near people are greater than the costs. Is technology really so good now that it can offset all the years of evolution we've gone through to make us into the social animals we are?
For anything abstract I would argue that the people who are able to onboard and form teams and ideas remotely are inherently the best for the job and likely produce a disproportionate percentage of any teams output. In my experience when you remove middle management (as it happens when you go remote), you want to only hire those people adapted to remote and self-directed work.
I would argue that location based and remote teams are fundamentally different companies. Similar to how tech first and tech-second companies are fundamentally different. I can't think of a single tech-second company that was able to move into the tech-first world. Some local companies might be able to morph themselves into remote companies, but as we see today, they will both lose a lot of staff, and even change their product eventually.
I'm lucky in that I have an office that's open so I can still have access to the fancy microscopes etc (as well as to more able sets of soldering hands/equipment), but being largely remote has definitely made distributing prototypes across the team for development and QA much more difficult (not to mention if mods to those prototypes are necessary).
I generally preferred working in the office pre-pandemic, but it wasn't strictly necessary. I also hated living in the bay area. I finally got all the i's dotted and t's crossed and I'm now living somewhere I vastly prefer (far fewer people and a whole lot cheaper). I've only been here 3 weeks and it's already hard to imagine going back.
Just because you can't see how it could work doesn't mean it can't. I know from experience it can. That doesn't mean that it will work in every situation for every person, but there is literally nothing in the world that fits those requirements. Some things work for some people, and not for others. EVERYTHING in life is like that.
Remote working is no different.