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Comment by vehemenz | Hacker News Reader

You'd have a stronger argument if remote work didn't have the potential to increase rural living and exurban sprawl, both of which contribute massively to energy waste and ecological destruction. At least in the US.

Boom cities were never the problem. The problem is commuting, which stems from a lack of housing.

Forcing everyone out of the cities creates a worse set of problems. It means more wasteful roads to nowhere and doubling down on our third-world transportation infrastructure. It means more clearing of wild land, one of the best resources the US has if you've done any traveling at all. It means more boom-bust bedroom communities and vacant strip malls. It means more culturally insulated communities and Trump-like politicians.

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Demand for homes in dense cities outstrips supply though, and I suspect this will continue to hold even if all office jobs offered remote work as an option to those that want it.

Nevermind the fact that only a fraction of all jobs can be meaningfully done remotely, and a majority of employees wouldn't take the option if it was offered anyway.

You can argue that remote work drives demand for larger spaces, but again this comes down to the housing shortage. There's no reason that more 2 and 3 bedroom apartments couldn't be built if taller buildings were actually allowed to be built in the cities where demand for housing is high.

Why do you imagine that rural towns are all terrible suburban sprawl?

The issue is that we have allowed our built environment to become too centralized. In that sense the Boom Cities ARE the problem. Instead of one strip mall a dozen corner stores on an old school, "It's a wonderful life" small town main streets we have Times Square, and a bunch of overbuilt "new urbanist" attempts to mimic the magic that took 200 years to build.

Leon Krier has made this point visually here. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUX70P7UYAEchHS.jpg:large

I don't really agree with your post, but wow, that is a beautiful and profound image.

>The problem is commuting, which stems from a lack of housing.

I think you'll find that a great many people don't want to live in the denser areas where offices often tend to be. You can scold about that all you want, but you could make cities arbitrarily dense and a lot of people, indeed more, wouldn't want to live in them if they weren't making a commuting tradeoff because of work.

If you're going to quote a line, quote the context. The OP was talking about "boom cities" as a problem, which they aren't by themselves. The problem is the unaffordability of the cities, caused by lack of housing, which leads folks to live outside of the city and commute.

My main point was that arguing for remote work/sprawl was not a ecologically-friendly argument. Sure, lots of people want to live in the middle of nowhere. But the negative externalities, looking to the future, are many, and they are something to consider when trying to praise WFH as a potential solution for anything.

Yes, everyone that reads this forum supports WFH because they benefit directly from it. From a birds-eye view though, looking at urban development and the cultural decline of isolated populations in the US, it looks like it could be a disaster.

That seems like a perfectly fine amount of context to quote to me. You could make cities as dense as you want and many people would explicitly choose to live in an area where they can have a private yard. There’s no strategy of densification that will preserve that for everyone.

You can make the inside of your box as amazing as you can imagine and some (not small) segment of people will opt to live where the sun can shine into their yard.

Wouldn’t wfh decrease the cost of living in the city, since currently most high paying jobs make living within commuting distance a requirement? To make an extreme example, cost of living on the Bay Area should go down if wfh becomes widespread. There are other reasons to want to live in SF aside from getting paid a high salary in tech, so housing prices should “fallback” to whatever people value the culture/scenery… at. What you would probably see is a more even (and healthy) distribution of growth in all metro areas instead of being centered in a few with all of the cost of living increases associated with that.

I'm not sure SF is a great example. For most tech workers, they're giving themselves a worse commute by living in the city rather than somewhere else in the South Bay closer, in many/most cases, to where their office is. So, yes, their jobs may be a major reason they're in the Bay Area overall, but mostly not in SF itself.

This is of course much less true in industries like finance.

Depends when I worked in London id have loved to be able to live near the office in Red lion Square or in a flat with a view of the Thames.

Or Fitzrovia

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