Remote work is gutting downtowns
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I welcome these changes... Yes we'll need to rethink our urbanism, but if anything this switch feels like a coming back of what our urban centers are supposed to provide us.
Imagine parking spaces becoming local artisans/food stalls, conference rooms becoming event spaces, coworking spaces adapted to people's lifestyle and living patterns (e.g. a suburban cowork with childcare and a dog park).
"gutting downtown" might be true for those who are wary their office real estate investment will not have a positive ROI. But the way I see it, this change in urban patterns is a paradigm shift in wealth distribution patterns and in economic opportunities for leisure services, both locally and globally.
There’s an additional expense to try to repurpose these building as residential but it’s a massive one that won’t come easily. You can’t just turn modern office buildings into residential building by reworking the interior. Most wouldn’t meet residential codes (like bedrooms needing windows, emergency egress, additional plumbing and waste requirements, parking etc)
Commercial real estate is going to take a massive hit the next 3-4 years and that $435B number is a real estimate in the decline in commercial real-estate value. It comes from this study.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30526/w305...
Advocates aren't going to be happy about 3000 square foot luxury apartments rather than affordable ones...
That doesn't really hurt my feelings that much, outside of the 401(k) and IRA holders who will lose a lot of retirement money. Hopefully the plan admins and financial people involved in those plans will start dumping commercial real estate in favor of something with more legs before that 3-4 years is up.
I do wish there were more resources to help places experiencing rapid influx manage growth more intelligently. Towns shouldn't have to endure a big box store phase before investing in livable forms.
This reminds of when I worked for Hollywood Video Corporate (video rental business) in 2010 and the VP was telling us that brick and mortar video rental would eventually beat back streaming media. Every indicator was suggesting a different path and they chose to ignore it. They're gone now, streaming media is here to stay. Remote work is here to stay.
I see this same trend happening in Houston where I live now and I suspect it is happening in other large car-centric cities as well.
Patterns haven’t seemed to reverse really but it’s still easier these days to commute I the Bay Area then it was pre-pandemic.
For a long time, my office was always in the suburbs. Out of the 100s of people I knew in the office, I only ever heard of maybe a dozen living in the city and reverse commuting. They were always fresh out of college, and all gave up that lifestyle after a couple years because commuting out to the suburbs each day is challenging and time-consuming (no easy way to get from the rail station to the office, for instance).
Our company decided to move their headquarters into the city "to attract younger talent" a few years before COVID. What actually happened is that over the course of several years, the vast majority of people assigned to the new downtown office slowly stopped coming in at all and now nearly everyone works from home, and COVID of course only accelerated that. The younger people that live in the city are almost always on Zoom when they join meetings so it doesn't seem like they're taking advantage of the office much either now. Also, there were a small number of people who lived in the suburbs but favored city life who moved back into the city when the office moved there. However, anecdotally every single one of them that I know moved back out to the suburbs in 2020/2021 because they all became trapped in their small apartments with nowhere else to go because Chicago shut everything down for an extended period of time. Now that things are open again, no one that I know has moved back, and our office downtown is still a ghost town. On the rare occasion I've gone in, it's not uncommon to be the only person present on an entire floor of the building. I don't know how long the lease is but I have to imagine we'll scale way back on the space when it expires.
Not really true in my experience, having been around here for going on 20 years.
If anything, businesses had been (pre-covid) moving suburban campuses to downtown locations over that time.
The commute into the city in the AM, and out at PM is still the worst. Although worse may not look like much of a difference many days if you're not from around here.
Patterns have certainly shifted some after covid, but not enough to flip the commute as described.
The past 20 years have been the opposite though - suburban campuses relocating downtown, and at least on the North side of the city you saw a ton of urban renewal during that time. While Chicago saw net population loss, it saw a lot of growth elsewhere in the city.
You came across one of the more common "wives tale" tropes cabbies will tell you though. I've probably heard similar a dozen times over the years. You just nod and smile :)
After World War II the US built highways that destroyed most cities. Take a look at the 1949 image and then the 1981 to get an idea [1]. The root cause of many of America's continued problems, ranging from racism and classism, to oil and car dependency are linked to what we did over the years.
[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/24/7-photos-show-how-det...
Most US cities have a central business district that is majority commercial office space, with just enough retail/dining to let workers take lunch breaks. These are the areas that are dying. No workers, so the surrounding retail/dining is failing.
Back in the 50s/60s, white flight was a problem for cities - most of the middle class, white families moved to the suburbs. Most cities didn't have a large tax base that lived inside the city. That started to change over the last 20 years or so. Couple that with off-shoring or moving of heavy industry out of city cores and cities will struggle financially without white-collar/knowledge workers commuting in and spending money.
Western Europe doesn't have the same level of suburban sprawl.
Edit - the white flight I mention is closely related to the inner-city highways mentioned in the sibling comment. Suburban workers needed to get downtown, so (usually minority) neighborhoods were split in two or destroyed to built highways from the outskirts into the CBD.
Nobody lived downtown, and most of it was dead after working hours. Most of the office buildings had no street-level retail shops at all – there was no reason to go there except to work, or in the case of 2-3 of them, to visit the observation deck on the upper floor. The small area where (2) were concentrated didn't even have much in the way of restaurants or shops open. If you worked there, you drove downtown in the morning, came home in the evening. If you wanted to a concert, play, or ballet, you drove downtown, enjoyed the show, then drove home.
There was, and is, one unique thing about Houston. The tunnels. There is a network of underground walkways and areas connecting many of the buildings. There are some restaurants and shops, and during the lunch hour the area was packed. But you couldn't get to those tunnels without going into one of the office buildings, and they were only open working hours. Most of the stuff in the tunnels opened at 10am and closed at 2pm.
Government: police, city hall, courthouse, administration for city, county, state, and federal agencies.
Medical: usually a major or university hospital with various outpatient services in nearby.
Financial: banks, banking services, property and financial services.
Typically, just these 3 things were enough to compromise over 50% of commercial downtown properties. We're not even approaching cities that have a major HQ or specialty (manufacturing, tech, media, print).
For a lot of cities once a major tenant moved out, they really only had government and medical as the city's economic engines.
My city I've watched transform from being a violent, crack infest dump to a very desirable, fair weather place to be. And because of the loss of so much commercial business in the 90s they managed to avoid the glut of commercial properties. We pivoted to residential/mixed-use development in 2003 and it's really paying off now.
Our downtown doesn't do anything in particular (except maybe crypto) except be a place for socializing.
Some of the existing high-rise offices should be repurposed into housing, retail, etc.
The actual solution is large scale conversion of commercial real estate to residential. Some people like being downtown, with population density, ability to walk to lots of restaurants, etc. And converting ~60% of office space to residential will drive costs down, reducing financial motivations to move out of the city.
Property owners are fucked, and will see much lower returns than they expected. Some will go bankrupt. Buildings financed by banks may see foreclosure/auction, and some banks will lose money. That’s what interest is for.
But eventually these buildings will have new owners that bought them at appropriate prices, and new purposes as residences, and downtown will probably be an even better place to live, with a population that doesn’t go home to the suburbs every night.
tl;dr: probably a good thing for downtown; invest in office-to-apartment conversion companies.
Keep in mind that other alternatives are possible, including “St. Louis and Detroit in the 80s-2000s” style downward spiral into blight.
I have no interest in bailing out billion dollar property holding companies, but we need to do everything possible to encourage positive development. It does seem like many cities get it, the high line in particular seems to have spawned a dozen imitators which is awesome.
Adding insult to injury, office towers that have been constructed in the last 50 years are very expensive to maintain, mechanical systems are expensive and complicated, requires a full-time staff to run. They were built for utilization at very different price point.
I agree with everything you said, just want to highlight that this quote is the classic statement of a business opportunity.
There is a VC pitch here: a company that acquired distressed office space at scale, from panicked sellers, and with the expertise to do these conversions in a systematic, cost-optimized way.
Banks are going to want to unload these properties as soon as they appear, for dirt cheap. Someone is going to make a lot of money by approaching the issue as a tech problem.
Banks are already there for unloading these properties. I can show you million-square-foot office towers today that are essentially free to acquire, but you get to pay tax, insurance, maintenance, keeping the lights on and functioning for any future use, a few million a year minimum, with no revenue.
Some groups thought they could mine bitcoin, but the floor fell out of that. At the end of the day, since there are substantial costs involved with the tower itself relative to a warehouse, the tower should used for something that also requires a large number of people. A datacenter-type use is best if located near cheap electricity - not usually city centers.
Lastly, office towers are usually located amongst excellent mass transit, even in cities with poor transit options, but the typical office tenant (bankers, lawyers, financiers) will not accept mass transit as an alternative to 1 parking space per employee. But factory workers will if it works!
What makes conversion of office towers to housing not viable? It's easy for me to imagine a lot of objections to converting one building, but hard to imagine insurmountable difficulties in converting 1000, where you can amortize R&D and specialized equipment across a huge number of properties.
So, if you don't mind humoring me, can you sketch the worst / most expensive / most technically difficult requirements for converting an office tower to apartments? I suspect you're probably right, given you've got domain knowledge and I don't, it just feels like one of those problems that becomes more tractable at scale.
So at minimum, you would need to plumb and power each "apartment" which would require essentially a complete replacement of the plumbing in place, as well as the electricity. And since the units are distinct, you would need to meter and isolate each unit. You would need to ensure that each "apartment" had a reasonable exit for fire safety reasons. You are restricted by architectural/engineering decisions that were based on an open layout (aforementioned supports).
Think of it this way, have you ever seen the progress as a tower is built? Isn't it remarkable how the "shell" or exterior seems to get finished in a blink, but the rest of the "innards" take 4 or 5 times as long to finish? In this case, most of the "innards" would need to be re-worked. Huge capital investment with unclear returns (nobody wants to live among the blight that a lot of west coast city centers are seeing).
Many office towers have much higher ceilings than typical apartment buildings. Pretty sure a 12" subfloor would solve many of the issues you raise. And many office towers are designed to support multiple tenants per floor.
I'm not dismissing the difficulty, just saying that the scale economics seem very attractive for a high fixed cost, low variable cost, long term annuity investment. I'm either wrong or ahead of my time, but it's not like I've got the funding to put money where my mouth is.
> the blight that a lot of west coast city centers are seeing
I don't see how that's relevant. The shift to WFH is global; these problems/opportunities are just as real in London or Sydney or Shanghai.
Offices and housing look similar from the outside, but are quite different on the inside, and both practical and regulatory problems are quite large.
If you've got offices that can't lease, the only thing left to do is sell it at a price a developer thinks they can turn a profit
Tiny little studio, but we've never been particularly materialistic, a murphy bed massively opens up the space, and no office to go into means once the day is over we're a step or short train ride to really anything we could imagine doing without having to worry about gas/Uber pricing. Went for a lovely bike ride early in the morning, the city is practically dead at ~4:30AM. Whole Foods is just as expensive as it was in the suburbs of Phoenix, and our local Trader Joes is cheaper than the Fry's (Kroger) was out West. Then you have the street produce that absolutely slaughters any prices I've seen anywhere.
It's a little bit of work to find reasonably priced restaurants, admittedly, but there still are 6-10$ plates out here if you have the patience to look. I do miss In-N-Out.
Though really I think this is an indictment of the current state of Phoenix more than it is a reason to praise Manhattan... I'm sure any of the many lovely "flyover" states in-between would have much more livable pricing, and the drive cross-country showed that Arizona has some of the highest gas prices in the country.
Plan to move onto Wisconsin after a couple years, another plus of working remote (with companies that are very open/willing to support us in that choice).
Especially as the "city" fills up with "city people" they hopefully will stop voting so strongly against "city".
It'll be interesting to see if the obverse is true.
My suspicion is that the US will continue to self-select along political and social lines, as it seems to have been doing since ~2000.
Ha!
Imagine if, as in EU cities, one could live above one's shops and workplaces, with no car needed -- and no transit as part of the daily routine!
Very few places in USA is this feasible at scale, NYC being one of the few. Even there, when I preferred to walk (no transit) to work which required me to live in Midtown, I was looked at like I was nuts -- why wouldn't you live in Brooklyn or Upper West Side or Chelsea or East Village?
Because my aim was to not spend life on a commute.
Love that you don't commute, shows it's possible. It's also possible to have one of those Midtown or Financial District jobs and not commute at all day-to-day. Then when you want a different neighborhood for variety, use transit.
PS. Side benefit in a town where square meter residential space is so limited: no home office necessary, you can just "step into your office" downstairs or across the street.
PPS. If you're one of the "avoid Midtown" folks but like to wander around and browse food, check out the pedestrian corridor called "6 1/2 Ave" very Harry Potter style. The southern end starts at ~ 50th and runs up to ~ 56th. There is an Asian street food concourse between 50th and 51st that's new, another food hall at 52nd, and an amazing French bistro up between 53rd and 54th. The food halls essentially let you try food cart experience year round or in the rain.
Our grocery options will improve as soon as the german discount chains set
Frys is not more expensive than TJs [0] When you drive east from AZ, you drive past the cheapest gas in the US[1]
[0]https://www.frysfood.com/savings/weeklyad/ [1]https://gasprices.aaa.com/
You’re making the statement that Phoenix is a great place, and a great place to drive, if you don’t mind driving for your errands, etc.
They clearly don’t enjoy needing to drive everywhere, and NYC is a great place to be if you don’t want to have a car centric life.
They also claim that many other states compare favorably to Phoenix, middle-America states. Suburbia, drive-centric states, like almost all of US.
They left Phoenix _because_ it is a kind of place with a "great road system." A place is either great to be, or great to drive in, but not both.
Nearly everything about the advertised American way is the opposite, so just unsubscribe and enjoy the few areas of the US that cater to it, they are more expensive for rational reasons
A lot of singles and DINKs like this sort of arrangement, but a community that has few or no children is dying, if not already dead.
Mobility is less of an option once you have children embedded into the community. Moving across the country is exciting and fun, until it means uprooting your kids. That's how a city, town, neighborhood maintains stability. Transients are not a long-term solution.
Cities chased out families with ever-increasing costs. This worked okay as long as business needed to be conducted in cities. That's no longer the case, turning our urban centers into glorified roadside RV parks.
Its just a reminder that no matter what your pay and benefits "we are family" is always bullshit. Their goal is to simply extract maximum life from you at any cost. Despite increasing employee safety (no need to drive), reducing overall employee costs, and increasing employee health and welfare overall they will take all of this away. You can even find shills and company men here in this very forum touting the "astounding benefits" of office work.
At my current gig all of our remote benefits were taken away to encourage us to come into the office but the company would not say, officially, remote work is over.
Fuck these people.
"Oh it's like a den for them"
Well, ancient people didn't close the damn den every night.
In my own city even though my millage rate is going down because of new developments going up it's being offset by values going up.
Roughly speaking if the mill rate falls from 1.0% to 0.9% but your property went from $1 million to $1.2 million you now pay $10,800 instead of $10,000. But the rise in property prices still caused the mill rate to go down.
Some people like the amenities and will prefer the city. And that's fine. But most people I've known in life tend to be on the other end of the spectrum.
What's annoying to me is that this big reshuffling of people ends up putting a lot of people in areas that don't have the infra to handle it yet, and also messes up house prices and such in said areas. But that's a whole other topic.
Let's say you work from home and make your lunch. Previously you'd buy ready-to-eat lunch. While you still buy ingredients and pay for energy, you don't pay for someone to prepare it and then sell to you, prepare the housing of the eatery and so on. Effectively some GDP was lost. Next, let's say you grow some of your own veggies...
The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter. All it takes is one inconsiderate person to not cover their mouth and everyone is getting ill. And it happened all the time.
I had a commute time that ranged between one and two hours over that stretch as I'd lived in a couple of different places, but that wasn't even extreme. I knew people with 2+ hour commutes each way which they did for years on end.
I understand there are a lot of people who need a place to work away from their home, but who is going to voluntarily return to an office when they don't need to just to prop up your portfolio and obsolete businesses? Why should they?
It's like the argument that people should support local businesses instead of buying from Amazon. If Amazon is cheaper and more convenient, why would someone buy anything elsewhere? (It's not like those businesses are going to help with your rent or food costs).
A few years ago I thought personal masking didn't really matter. Wow, I was wrong! And not catching bs colds from weirdos on the bus or the grocery store makes it worth it.
My face isn't that pretty anyway.
Day to day i'm not religious about masking, but for things like public transportation, airplanes, etc I try to always have face protection on.
The standard for AC/H for offices is 3-4.
You can site all the statistics and propaganda in the world about plane ventilation. It clearly isn't enough to prevent viral spread (I don't care about air changes per hour or cfm or anything else, the only endpoint worth discussing is viral spread--I give precisely zero fucks about how fast the air is moving around). I'm using n95s on planes from here on out.
I'll take my mask off to eat/drink in the air, which I didn't do the one time I had to fly mid-pandemic.
I've been on a handful of flights in the last 2 years where the air system didn't work at all, and others where the climate control system was otherwise failing (80°F). This is accentuated by stale air when you embark and disembark when the aux generators aren't providing power.
That's a myth from the early pandemic. Viral dose doesn't correlate with disease severity:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-relationship-viral-do...
the likelihood of becoming infected may rise with the size of that "dose."
So a small dose might still prime the immune system even if you don't get sick.
This is correct.
> So a small dose might still prime the immune system even if you don't get sick.
This does not follow.
If you don't get infected following a small dose, you'll have fought it off with your innane or intrinsic defenses. You won't generate any humoral immunity, form T-cells or B-cells or neutralizing antibodies and won't be any better off for the next round with the virus.
Working in a grocery store, especially as a cashier, can be unpleasant to disgusting at times, especially when cash was a bit more common. I think you’re around everything all the time that your immune system tends to beef up a bit.
Conversely, the kids are getting hammered in winter time the last few years after covid after not getting sick between 2020-mid 2021.
I’m not so sure that humans evolved to avoid illness, despite how unpleasant it is.
Wearing masks does not compromise one's immune system: it just shields you from exposure to respiratory bugs. Kids are getting hammered because people have relaxed on wearing masks, so they are now more exposed than before.
I have always looked at Japan as a mixed bag of things that the entire planet will be doing in 10-100 years (yes, even sex bots and other forms of liberal individualism). I am so glad that at least parts of the west have caught onto the practice of masking up when sick, if there were ever a silver lining from the pandemic.
I'm still looking for a solution to the mask straps biting into my ears on planes, but a few hours of discomfort is still way better than being sick when I get to/back from my destination.
If you fly a lot, there are also very likely commercial solutions for this.
Try getting a proper N95 instead of a flimsy ear-loop mask: https://www.amazon.com/3M-Aura-Particulate-Respirator-9205/d...
COVID-19 is 10.5 um. Water droplet to carry them just a tad bit above.
Hydrostatic testing to get that 50um in N-95 mask were based on 8.0 pH Latex hydrostatic droplets.
COVID-19 best infection spread rate is at 5.8-6.2 pH (opposite spectrum of Latex's pH).
So, more will pass thru that mask unhindered.
Nonetheless, the dispersal rate is lower only if the infected wears it. Tough to make a public policy on that to this day
The mask is rated to capture 95% of airborne particles generally, but it’s efficiency doesn’t correlate to the spacing within the filter media.
Now if they would construct a hydrostatic test using 5.8 to 6.2 pH aerosolizer, then the data becomes more robust.
Give it a few years without exposure, and you will have very hard time if you have to get exposed again. I did 2 years for remote work with a single day with long exposure each week, after a few years with low exposure.
I then had a kid, it took at least 3 full years once it got to day care for my immunity to get trained back to normal. Middly sick at least 4 months total per year, strong fever and/or weakness 4-5 times per year.
I'm all for limited exposure to dangerous infections, but for the sake of everyone, we have to keep our immunity active to stay healthy, and this happens by getting sick times to times.
Or do you think kids get enough exposure at school? (assuming schools don't keep going remote too)
edit: I suspect the article only states that life long immunity does not wears off. I don't challenge that at all.
> we have to keep our immunity active to stay healthy, and this happens by getting sick times to times
Is going to the grocery store, out to dinner, having friends/family over not enough exposure? Genuinely curious about the science if you need to be around kids (directly or indirectly via co-workers) to build or maintain a "strong immune system".
If anything I'd expect the lack of activity to cause your immune system to be hyper-aware and you'd get less sick. Trade-off is allergies and autoimmune disease.
That's not really how it works afaik. The immune system can only respond quickly and effectively to the things it knows. If you spend 3 years outside society and you come back, your system will be 3 years behind on disease evolution. When you finally do get exposed, you'll have a much stronger immune response because it's an unknown threat.
Compare this to a immune system that has also never seen the latest variant, but has seen the one before -- it'll be much more effective at recognizing and fighting the threat early, and the person might not even notice they were exposed.
Is that true? I'm not sure. Another question is what does it mean to be "known". I'd get a cold or a flu every year. At what point has the virus mutated sufficiently so that I don't have an effective immune response? This is also a great point to get vaccines. Best of both worlds.
I don't think anybody really knows, this is an active area of research. What is known is that, the more similar a virus is to something you already had, the more likely your immune system is to be able to respond quickly enough that you don't show any symptoms and don't even realize you were exposed. And if you do show symptoms, it'll be more likely that they will be much milder than for somebody who wasn't exposed previously to something similar.
Given what we could read about covid, exposure is a combination of length and probability of sharing air with sick people. Public transport is a short exposure with many people, evening with friend, long exposure, but less people. Kid: well for all the sickness they have bad immunity for, and the long length of exposure, you have good chances ti get something that you never had or have no immunity for anymore.
My experience is that I now use public transport every day and I have two kids, I get sick time to times, but much less than a few years ago.
I rode the subway every day for years and rarely got sick, but a few weeks of a kid in daycare and it was all coming at me at once.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-...
I don't have citations handy, it's just something I've seen mentioned here and there some months ago, as a possible explanation why after 2 years of lockdowns, many more people seem to catch the common seasonal diseases.
Some things like the uptick in RSV can be explained by children being initially exposed to RSV a bit later than usual, but for your average adult that's not really relevant.
When I visited Hong Kong in 2008 I was amazed by how many people wore masks (presumably because they were either feeling sick or were worried about getting sick). It's too bad that post-COVID masks have become associated with authoritarian government overreach in many parts of North America.
I wonder why?
Everybody is always entitled to their values and preferences of course, but it's really hard to see how a chance of getting sick once a year is a worse outcome than a guarantee of missing out on normal society permanently, particularly when you can do everything about as perfectly as you possibly can and still get sick.
Besides, if "normal society" means miserable unpaid commutes and cold offices with bad cafeteria food and a lot less time and energy for the things in life that really matter, then I'm quite happy to miss out on that. I'm not living in some kind of self-imposed total isolation, if anything I'm more active outside work these days, and my whole life feels a lot healthier (and that sure helps too)
It's really depressing that even with the pandemic, the ratio of people covering their mouth didn't seem to have increased at all.
Living further out is much nicer when you have kids - more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore.
I'm part of a DINK couple and could not imagine leaving an urban area. There's so much more to do, so much easier to get around, etc.
I suspect we'll be in that space in about 10 years or so, when being next to a good hospital with excellent geriatric services will be more important than having trees to climb.
> more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore
Or „nowhere“ as in doing commercialized trendy stuff? Of course, when pop culture is pushing that lifestyle and people are glued to the screens, it ends up as a sad state of affairs.
Last time I checked, teenagers still eat food and socialize in the physical world. It's not a huge reach to understand how suburbs stifle and constrain that (nor has that changed particularly in the last 20 years).
It was frankly so miserable I have resolved never to live in anything even remotely approaching a suburb again - in the UK I’d countenance the idea of living in a village with at least two pubs, but actually live in a city where I can walk to dozens of different events, bars etc every night if I want to and never see a situation where I would accept anything less.
The NYC suburbs are vastly different to suburbs in TX or CA, of course, and many are much more livable simply due to having a train to NYC.
As an urban father of a three-year-old I'm actually anxious about how much stuff seems to be 21+ or expensive in my city (Baltimore). In principle we're a short electric scooter ride from trendy eateries, coffee shops, theaters, music venues, etc. But my wife is super-scared of crime and traffic so I don't know if this will actually translate into him being more independent than a typical suburban teenager.
Such an amazing movie...
You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, rbanffy. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Once remote working has started we said screw that and moved further away from downtown. Now we own a nice apartment with a garden (unthinkable before) and go the city only when required.
Mine (Dublin, Ireland) is still about an hour on the tram (for EUR 2) from where I live, so I'm not saying it's perfect, but my manager, in the Atlanta area, is a two-hour drive away from the office. That and he starting meetings at 6AM (because Dublin) makes me support remote working even more for the ATL teams.
I gladly traded the rich cultural life and world-class restaurants for a walkable city and a house with a small park one gate away from the back yard.
Even considering the occasional invasion of the house by a bunch of screaming little 10 yo's who are my daughter's gang (who lives mostly on the same street).
Honestly, remote work allowed us to stay in the city (our preference), if I'd had to keep commuting I don't know if raising my kid would have been workable for us.
Pre-pandemic, my drive averaged 1hr to the office, and 1.5hrs back. So, I'm wasting 2.5 hrs of my life every day... to do the same exact job I do from home (not to mention cost of gas/car maintenance).
I also get more done at home, because I haven't reduced my hours any, but I don't waste time in the break room grabbing coffee and chatting. I don't know what the overall data is, and if I'm just a productive outlier or if that's a general trend.
If I'm ever required to commute again, I 100% view it as a pay decrease.
Being able to walk to pick your kids up from school, stop at a coffee shop on the way home, not have to worry about car seats, or waiting in an idling car for 30 minutes for your place in line, it can be a very nice life.
The format was threatened by the arrival of fast food, served over the counter and with more payment flexibility than traditional automats. . . . Another contributing factor to their demise was the inflation of the 1970s, increasing food prices which made the use of coins increasingly inconvenient in a time before bill acceptors commonly appeared on vending equipment.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Automat
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_%26_Hardart
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_detector
Edit: removed first sentence "It's like a failure of imagination is cyclical." which had to do with H&H and other's ability to pivot, which H&H did in spades.
And I would say the broader distribution will actually be good for the environment as whole. Or at least it could be.
Downtown residents walk and use transit. Places with broader distribution of people typically rely on roads because transit isn’t economically efficient.
My intuition is that higher population densities are more environmentally efficient because more people can be served by any resource. Are you thinking otherwise?
Energy = force * distance = mass * acceleration * distance.
Broader distributions means increases in distance means increase in energy consumption.
And usually having more space means having more stuff, which means an increase in mass, which also results in increase in energy consumption.
But the bulk of the environmental impact of civilization seems like it is more efficient at density, though I suppose the negative effects may be more concentrated and visible (a few big trucks making deliveries rather than a huge number of small vehicles)
It is just me noticing my own behavior patterns and extending it to the greater populace which is not correct.
I had a pleasure to live in village, small city and big city.
I feel I use much more resources in bigger city. Distance to the mall is similar, but all the free-time activities in the city consume energy. While in the village I mostly just walked the forest and worked on the garden.
It is also much more easier to manage waste. Food waste goes to the garden. Cardbox goes to fire place. Also, water travels only few meters from the well before it is used.
Anyways, kudos for recognizing that your behavior may not be typical. For me, the main attraction of rural living would be the ability to have a hobby machine shop, multiple cars (sorry, am enthusiast). And I’d probably drive in to the city in the absence of transit.
1.
One alternative is to revitalize the tons of walkable second-tier cities that are sitting there rotting, and to connect them with intercity transit.
I love NYC, but the problem with concentrating everyone there and in SF, is that it drives up real estate prices and creates a desperate crush to acquire property. Yes, you can say "YIMBY", but even if that were politically feasible, it couldn't keep up with in-migration if there were only those few choices (NY and SF). It would badly bifurcate society, between those who had managed to secure a toehold, and those who hadn't.
(In fact, it creates a culty Bitcoin-like dynamic, where those who have sunk the cost to be inducted (by buying property) are then incentivized to preach the benefits and keep the values up.)
Then, because people would be so desperate for money to live in these places, they'd waste their lives on corrosive professions like surveillance advertising, instead of doing work that actually helps people. That may sound familiar.
And, most importantly, geographic concentration would, arguably, go hand-in-hand with economic concentration -- with the formation of economic "chokepoints" and the concentration of monopoly power.
2.
Even the medium-urbanist decentralization of (1) would however leave people dependent on monopolies for the provision of basic ecological services.
What good is it to concentrate in cities, if all food is produced by one or two huge agricultural conglomerates? This is a condition of total dependence.
As an alternative to urbanism, Permaculture-type people do have interesting ideas. But they require land. Their methods also -- let's be honest -- come with a dramatic reduction in what we call "living standards". But if "degrowth" can come from an increase in autonomy, then that might be a trade worth making. It's one I think young people would consider.
We would probably see some amount of homophily among people, if they reorganized along these lines. There are many incompatible tribes:
- The Colorado ski-bro kombucha-chick tribe.
- Various Black Israelite and Egyption-religion back-to-Africa tribes.
- The Kanye West cult of vaguely Trump-sympathetic heterodox permie stuff.
- Indigenous revival movements. They're likely to have different language but similar interest in the environment.
- Various trad-religious tribes, like the Mennonites and Amish, but you could totally see Benedict Option Catholics or even Evangelicals going this way. Again, they'd just talk a little differently.
They wouldn't combine as a single "diverse" community, but you could see any and all of them borrowing permie ideas from one another.
In the past I have spoken in favor of universalist ideologies (I like that they help me to get along with more people), but they might be at odds with this kind of pluralism. That would need to be worked out.
3.
A natural answer is to say that there can be "gains from trade", and that not everyone needs to live in the same way. That there can be both cities and rural areas. But,
a. I am doubtful of permaculture's ability to create the kind of surplus needed to sustain urban populations, and
b. we would have to be very careful with the introduction of too much financial intermediation, lest we simply recreate the conditions we now have today.
I'm not sure what the punchline here is, except --
- that issues of political economy need to be factored in here, because they ultimately determine how nature's resources are distributed;
- that power is best when not concentrated; and
- that I'm looking for ways beyond the dichotomies implied by these posts ("dense" vs. "not dense").
I think you have this reversed.
It is draining to share a space with sycophants fake-smiling and fake-laughing, and superficial people ("dress for the job you want" and similar bullshit). And the few loud people without empathy that distract others while they try to focus.
Just let people be represented by what matters: their work. Do you do good work? let that be what matters.
Let people work from a quiet place instead of cargo-culting the open office layout hoax. Finally, working from home, we can actually do work instead of waiting for loud people to shut up. And yes: many times, the reason I went for a coffee walk was to wait for some loud person to shut up and I know I am not the only one.
If you want to meet face-to-face to read my face expressions to know if I am lying to you or I am hiding something, or you need to see me sitting in a desk, then instead of doing that, then just don't fucking hire in the first place because you don't trust me. If you have trust issues, instead of opening an office, go see a therapist.
Even though I care about other people's well-being, I don't care about your appearance. And thanks to remote work now nobody gets distracted by your appearance, and that is amazing.
Now that we are all interacting electronically, I cannot wait for the next generation of collaborative tools that auto-flags toxic behavior. Or a solution that does sentiment analysis on what people say in real time, such as "You sound sad as fuck, can you please cheer up a little bit?". Or "insults are not OK, please go see HR after this meeting".
Cities will get less tax income, sure, but their outlay is also less. Their actual costs could be radically reduced by changing zoning laws to enable residents to live near their place of employment.
Chicken coming home to roost.
Imagine what converting 50% of NYC offices to residential would do to foot traffic and rents. City living has the potential to be far cheaper than suburban due to economies of scale. They only weren’t prior due to the concentration of high paying jobs, which presumably are going to shift to remote/global and have far less of a concentrated impact on local economies
Before people say it’s not cost viable, it is in many cases, and was already being done precovid.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/11/14/dc-area-leads-the-w...
Traditional "downtown" America was killed or mortally wounded by Walmart many years ago. In fact, the town I grew up in got a Walmart in the mid-90's and now it has a robust stretch of highway with every "big box" vendor. Guess what happened to the quant brick building downtown that used to have every store one could need? The town I would bike around every day, meet my friends and where my mom and her peers worked? Dead. It's now a mishmash of crap stores and empty storefronts despite hosting a decent college.
I'm thrilled that there's a chance (at the moment) to escape that nightmare. I will never willingly commute in a car ever again.
"Barcelona has launched an ambitious 10-year plan to reclaim the city’s streets from cars and cut down pollution with the creation of green spaces and public squares.
One in three streets in the heavily polluted central Eixample district – the 20th-century grid devised by the engineer Ildefons Cerdà – will become green zones under the scheme, giving priority to pedestrians and cyclists, and 21 public squares will be created at intersections...."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/11/barcelona-laun...
People are still living they are just doing it somewhere else and the money will follow.
If cities want to do civilizational-destroying activities like not prosecuting shoplifting or eliminating cash bail, then they can suffer the consequences of not having any residential tax revenue.
Cities are going to have to offer more than just expensive housing for boomers and brunchers. Cities need to be a place where anyone can afford a place to live and start a business and a family. Residential housing should not be left to the commercial sector.
Surely you realise that these people are more deserving of your money than you yourself. The climate is a small price to pay for it of course
Looked at another way: “remote work is easing competition for downtown real estate, providing an easy route for cities to deal with housing crises in urban cores.”
> Dense downtowns in Austin and New York have seen steep increases in rental demand, a sign that people continue to be willing to pay a premium to live in a social district.
(^^from the article)
People, especially young people, still find NYC desirable enough to pay a lot for rent.
There are cities with downtowns where people live in them. Not every city follows the American model of concentrating commercial activity in the center and having most people live in unsustainable suburbs. That's the problem.
This is what America gets for building shit cities that no one wants to live in. This is fundamentally a problem with a lack of mixed zoning and American style suburbia.
Places like SF though may struggle because parts of Sf are not inviting - car gets broken into, have to lock bike going into stores etc