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999900000999

The point is to keep local economies alive.

It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop.

However, offices are straight up abelist , if you have mobility issues it's absurdly hard to commute.

Commuting isn't really needed here, if I was in a wheelchair I'd take this to court.

Full tin foil hat time, if remote work was the norm the entire commercial real estate sector would collapse.

Most modern cities would collapse as well. So many industries are based around commuting, or supporting office workers. Hell, normalized remote work might destroy our entire economy.

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It's not about us, it's about the guy who delivers lunch, or the girl who owns the bagel shop.

Isn’t that just an instance of the broken window parable? There’s nothing to prevent the bagel shop locating adjacent to a residential area instead of an office park - then society sees the benefit of WFH and tasty round breads.

Northern Virginia has seen this with food trucks. Since late 2020, I'm starting to see food trucks posting up in the evenings in various residential neighborhoods (almost like how ice cream trucks trawl the streets in summer). This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago -- not worth it for the truck owner. But now they're moving to where people are, which is the upper-middle-class neighborhoods where everyone still WFH. Incredible to see a line for dinner at a food truck parked in the middle of a residential summer street in the suburbs.

All this to say: there are ways to keep evolving how things are usually done.

Where are these trucks? I’m in Reston, but I imagine the trucks are mostly clustering in Falls Church or Arlington? All I can think of is there’s sometimes a food-truck-event at the local park-and-ride, usually on the weekend, but it doesn’t seem very consistent.

Presumably if you had bagel shops in every residential neighbourhood, each would sell less and have largely the same fixed costs and so prices would have to be higher.

Possibly, but I imagine they could get by with less square footage, and in a less expensive space, so rent would be substantially less. But, yeah, oven and other cooking apparatus is probably the same regardless of scale (up to whatever size starts requiring duplicates).

And from a societal perspective, saving on commute time/expenses but with $15 bagels is still better than wasting 2+ hours/day, additional car expensises, and only a $7 bagel.

You forgot labor.

A huge bagel store will use humans more efficiently than a small one.

One big problem with "lots of shops" is that they require lots of retail workers, workers who spend much of their paid time not working. Prices reflect that.

It's unclear to me why urbanists think that wasting humans on retail is so important.

Stuff at small stores costs more money than stuff at big stores. As you point out, labor efficiency is one of the reasons, but there are others too. Regular people know this very well. The “urbanists” active in HN threads are typically well-off enough that they don’t care about whether their grocery bill is $50 or $60. That’s good for them, but expecting everyone else to follow suit is rather out of touch.

Correct, but where's all that trillion dollar commercial real estate going ?

Cities don't have much of a reason to exist, at least not in their current form, with WFH.

> Cities don't have much of a reason to exist, at least not in their current form, with WFH.

Are you assuming people would rather live in suburbs and countryside then? I would definitely still live in the city, and my first thought of offices closing was "great, more space for residential buildings".

Not everyone, but you'd have less of a reason to consolidate so many people in a relatively small space.

It's much much cheaper to live outside of major cities. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, office buildings are a massive source of tax revenue for cities.

This is the entire reason you have this push to bring everyone back.

>> Cities don't have much of a reason to exist...

Ideally, people should be able to live where they want to. If that is in a city, great, otherwise they can live elsewhere and work from home. I don't see any great benefit in forcing people to live where they do not want to be.

> Full tin foil hat time, if remote work was the norm the entire commercial real estate sector would collapse.

They just need to slightly change focus. People still need a place to work even if remote.

Instead of trying to rent out that 20Ksqft building to some corporation, start renting out individual private offices within that building to people nearby who need a place to work remotely that's not their couch.

I've been renting out a small office room since the pandemic started, right near my house. Almost zero commute but still a separate work area. I lucked into finding someone who is happy to rent me one office room in their building.

But many commercial real estate owners still don't get it and don't want to deal with individuals. There are a few empty office buildings in the area which I know have nice offices, but they keep looking to rent the whole building out, so it continues to sit empty. I know there's demand since most people I talk to who are working from their living room love the idea of a local office when I mention I have one.

Just curious, do you pay for this small office out of your pocket or does your employer subsidize it?

Or are you self-employed?

I pay for it out of pocket. Yes, it'd be nice if companies also moved towards standardizing paying for remote office space, hopefully that'll become normal.

But the office payment is less than what I was spending in fuel having to commute, so in that sense I'm still saving money compared to pre-pandemic commute life.

I’m happy to go to a bagel shop in my neighborhood.

I just get my own bagels from the grocery store. Society relying on bagel up-sellers is largely a symptom of office life

My sandwich café sells sandwiches with such a variety of fillings that me trying to replicate that would lead to a lot of wasted food. Everything from asparagus, pickled carrots and smoked cheese to avocado, broccoli and burrata.

Plus, there is something about just going to a breakfast where you can just people-watch the passersby without food preparation or cleanup.

Most modern cities would collapse as well.

Cities have much more to offer than office work. Restaurants, entertainment, shops, museums, sights. People that choose to live in the city often choose for those amenities, not a nearness to the office. Getting rid of offices might actually lead to a city that is denser with those attractive activities and therefore more welcoming for people to move there and enjoy those activities.

For many American cities the CBD/downtown (and sometimes older streetcar suburbs) are the only profitable areas in the sense that they pay more in tax than it costs the no city to provide municipal services. Newer suburbs and exurbs don’t pay their way and are subsidised by the centre and unsustainably financed.

I've heard that story before, but never seen any data that substantiates it. I'm interested in it. Where did you come by this opinion?

Why can't I have lunch delivered to my house or visit the bagel shop from my house?

This is location specific, but one reason is because American cities were irreparably ruined by suburbanization.

People working from home still want their bagels and lunches.

> The point is to keep local economies alive.

What seems to be happening is that local economies in smaller cities are booming, because people no longer commute to the bigger city. So it's more a shift.

I was born socialist country and since state owned everything, they would keep a factory afloat just so it keeps people employed even if it operates on losses. That is not sustainable. Sooner or later it had to collapse. We don't have classic peasants anymore because society recognized that keeping them in business we had to compromise too much in other areas of society. At some point the mentioned delivery guy and girl with bakery will be in the same situation and this is just prolonging the inevitable.

We do this in the United States as well. We're still building tanks the military doesn't even want.

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