Remote work turns America into Suburban nation | Hacker News Reader

Remote work turns America into Suburban nation

fortune.com

30 pointsmanojr1367 comments

To me, remote work makes cities a more attractive place live than the suburbs. A family doesn’t need 2 or 3 cars anymore. You can live and work in a walkable neighborhood and get most of your errands done during the week, avoiding times of congestion. Work from a cafe or park instead of a basement or garage.

You may be right. I found when working from home that leaving to run errands suddenly became a burden. Pre-covid I could stop at the store on the way home from work to grab a thing. With those opportunity trips gone, every trip has to be deliberate.

You don’t need 2-3 cars living rurally either. My wife and I dropped down to 1 vehicle a year ago with her being a stay at home mom and myself working remote.

Growing up in the suburbs with two parents working, and myself and my brother both playing sports on different teams, we would've had a hard time getting by with less than 4 cars.

Rideshare doesn't eliminate the need for private vehicles, but reduces the need for the Nth vehicle.

Unless you have kids. The school systems are generally better in the burbs.

Unless you have money/connections. Most cities have private schools with excellent rankings.

And that kind of defeats the purpose. You’re better off paying the money for house in the burbs and get the better school systems.

To each his own. I lived in San Francisco for 30 years. I lived in Richmond VA for the 10 years before.

I now live in a nice suburb. It has bunnies and the occasional coyote. It is green. It is quiet.

I don’t hear sirens all night. I don’t hear shouters all night. I don’t hear my neighbors footfalls. Open the window and I hear song birds.

On r/sanfrancisco someone was making a case for how safe it is. That simply was not my experience. I was assaulted and beaten one morning in front my flat. My garage has been broken into 4 times. Before my neighborhood was gentrified a few years back there was an open gang war with multiple murders a block from my house. The killings stopped when when the thugs were priced out of the market creating another problem of haves and cant possibly ever haves.

The only thing I miss is the corner store that stocked bumpers and the variety of high quality food.

What are "bumpers" in this context?

Going from the context of the original post, it's quite obvious that He bought (car) bumpers from a junk-yard that also sold high-quality food. Which, to me, sounds like a viable and wealth-generating business model.

I couldn’t imagine how they can combine as the hygiene of this food place must be terrible. It’s like buying a sandwich from a car mechanic shop

I think this is the split discussed in the article. About 20% of the people would rather live in cities. Work From Home is giving us the freedom to choose where to live, and I don't see how it's anything but an absolute win.

I've lived in a 'zoomtown' for the last four years. It's great. My area isn't walkable, but it is bikeable. When I leave my house, there's a 50/50 chance I'm on my bike instead of in my car. I have more privacy and quiet working than I had in offices, or in my urban core apartments. Peak traffic sucks, but it's not as bad as peak traffic in a city. I can afford something like 6x the space compared to SF/SEA/NYC.

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the downsides I have experienced in zoomtown.

* Local government is corrupt, but without a city paper no one notices or cares. I know urban cities have corrupt local governments too, but the looting and shilling is more blatant here. No one seems to care or be informed on local issues.

* All of my flights have a layover now.

* Limited cultural opportunities.

* Everything is getting slightly worse as more remote workers are moving here.

* Medical care was notably better in the city, and I have limited access to some specialist.

The Suburbs are great, and what does it mean if the cities are only sustained by forcing individuals/parents to come into them 5 times a week for their livelihoods? Why aren't workers eager to live in densely packed urban environments if presented this alternative, that has been traditionally disparaged by so many?

I live in dfw, about 3miles SW of downtown Dallas so not a suburb. I have to admit, suburbs have a lot to offer. The northern dfw suburbs are more walkable than downtown Dallas for your daily needs. It’s not hard to find an apartment or house in Plano, Frisco, McKinney or other northern suburbs with direct access to a network of biking trails and walking paths to get to the day to day places you need to go. Maybe I’m just old but they’re quite nice places to live. I would consider moving except for some family things that keep me in oakcliff.

I would advise against using cities in Texas as your baseline of comparison when people mention "cities". Texas grew up well after the automobile was a thing, and didn't have the same external pressures that pushed urban growth towards density around specific areas (harbours, rivers, etc.).

Also, the sprawl and government structure is such that "suburbs" are both larger, and better able to plan/direct and fund their own growth. (And yes, these incentives also further promote the idea of growth/expansion vs density and reinvestment into an existing geographic core)

Texas truly is its own thing.

I’ve lived in the suburbs of Dallas (far north Dallas, to be more precise). Walkable is not a word I would have used to describe it. Even ‘nearby’ things are far by walking standards.

For example, there was a grocery store literally down the street from my first apartment, but it was still about a twenty minute walk each way, and the next closest store was a lot farther.

One thing I do recall is being astonished at just how far you could drive and still be in the suburbs.

It's the other way around, the denser inner cities subsidize the sprawling suburbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

This depends heavily on the city metro being considered and the definition of 'suburb'. For example, in the Philadelphia metro, this is definitely not the case. The counties surrounding the city are far wealthier than the city county, and many area businesses are located in those surrounding suburban counties, with only small offices in the city.

The suburban schools, for example, are funded almost entirely by local taxes, while the city schools get a large chunk of their funding from the state (which of course is tax money in large part from the rich counties.). Even things like the area transportation network (SEPTA) derive a significant portion of their revenue from the suburban to city train lines (because the fares are much more expensive than intracity routes)

I find this typical argument relies on counting 'suburbs' as the poorer and less dense exurb/rural communities that are an hour+ outside the city. For the census purposes, they are considered part of the metro, but nobody would consider them what is typically considered a 'suburban area'

The source of the surburban wealth is the city. Proximity to the urban core is the resource used to acquire that money. Those people work high paid jobs or own businesses in the city, then pay their local taxes to the surburb where they live. So the surburbs have better schools etc because of money extracted from the city.

> many area businesses are located in those surrounding suburban counties, with only small offices in the city

I understand why you'd have this impression and in some very exceptional cases it can be true. But look at the gross product of the different counties in your area, not personal income. I doubt this assessment holds up.

I have no idea why this is getting downvoted. Make a case, if you disagree.

And then the suburbs of the city decide to break off into a separate city and take income tax revenue with them

Is that supposed to be... bad?

I imagine most suburbanites NIMBY precisely against that, it probably won't happen.

Seeing that they benefit from the city it is. It wouldn’t be bad if the school system funding comes from property taxes.

The argument was about subsidies, which can be measured by looking at tax revenues and sources of funding. An esoteric argument about 'proximity to the city is the source of all wealth' isn't well-defined or falsifiable. One could make the argument that Philly's proximity to NYC is the resource it uses to extract money, since NYC is much larger, wealthier, and relatively close.

Right, so what are the sources of funding of those suburban tax revenues? The core of the relationship will be there.

Seems like a pretty straight forward solution would be for the city to tax the business the difference in this lost revenue, if they feel the relationship is unfair, no?

American political arrangement usually makes large cities economic and cultural outliers of the states where they reside. State governments of states containing a single large city like eg NY and IL usually prohibit exactly this, and most other sorts of rebalancing in favor of the city.

Yea. It blows my mind when people bring out the "80% of people live in cities" statistic because they see something that says 80% of people live in "urban" areas.

I did a deep dive once to see what the government considers "urban" and found that the place I used to live was considered "urban."

This is the main "town." The rest of the town/county is just houses, apartments and a "town center" which is just a ton of stores, restaurants, entertainment, etc.

https://www.spotsylvania.va.us/718/Public-Works

I suppose though, because its not truly "rural" its counted as "urban."

Isn’t cost perhaps the main factor? There are many factors for many people, of course, but it seems like usually living near the downtown center is much more expensive than living in the suburbs, at least in terms of price per square foot. If prices are higher in urban areas, that suggests there’s evidence people actually are eager to live downtown, but suburbs are also very popular where I live as a way to have more space for the same price, or a lower overall price; you can get a newer larger house with a larger yard for less money in the suburbs compared to downtown, but the catch is you have to drive everywhere even on the weekends.

> you can get a newer larger house with a larger yard for less money in the suburbs compared to downtown, but the catch is you have to drive everywhere even on the weekends.

That catch is the reason that it is cheaper - it’s built in to the price

All of those parameters are combined into desirability. Everyone has different needs (at different times)

Kids ? Suburbs: Larger house and schools

Young adults ? density and night life

Young adults having kids ? Suburbs

Kids need a large house? Not places to play outside with their friends? What is a kid going to do in the suburbs that doesn't rely on being ferried around in a car for hours each day?

I grew up in the suburbs and walked out my front door to play with my friends. There were probably 15 kids around my age within 100 yards of my house, 50 in my neighborhood.

Kids need bedrooms, more kids need more bedrooms. Especially as they grow older, teenagers probably should have their own bedrooms.

Urban living doesn't often give much space for kids.

Also have you ever been in a suburb? They usually have parks and playgrounds everywhere. Especially at the school that the kids attend, which is likely easy to walk or bike to for the kid.

Some suburbs have community centers.

Some suburbs in Calgary have private lakes with parks and playgrounds that kids can go to whenever they want. They can go skating on the frozen lake in winter, swimming in summer, in walking distance to home and without their parents.

Also in the suburbs houses have yards, which are even better than parks and playgrounds in some ways. My friends and I dug up a huge trench network in his parents yard one year. His parents were chill about it, we were allowed to go out with shovels and pickaxes and dig as much as we wanted really. Why not? They weren't using the yard for anything else and we had fun with it

I live in a suburb. There's a huge park in safe walking distance where they can explore in the woods, fish in the pond, play on the multiple playgrounds, play sports in the baseball or softball or soccer fields or half court basketball court. Or do any other kind of activity in the big field.

Or they can hop on the bike trails and head to the library or recreation center or the gymnastics center.

If they're old enough there's also bus lines right outside my door that connect them to the largest light rail deployment in the hemisphere.

There's also all the space for indoor activities if they'd like, they don't need to go anywhere to partake in a lot of different activities at home. Because, we've got space for crafts and a garage and yard.

I would love to live in a dense urban environment, but the suburbs are cheap. Though in my case I live in a rural area, not suburban, because it's even cheaper. But we're working on a move to a dense urban low-car environment (Utrecht) because it's painfully lonely out here.

Moving to Netherlands?

That's the plan.

Good luck!

Suburbs that people don’t leave are just small towns.

This is highly location-dependent. In the north east it might be the case (I’m thinking of the commuter belt for New York City, towns in NJ, CT or Long Island which are towns in their own right), but suburbs in Texas (for example) are a hellscape of strip malls, often without any kind of sidewalk or amenity besides 17 different churches and a Sonic.

The people who live there might only want those amenities. As work from home continues, we shall see what grows up. Probably a whataburger.

Perhaps that is the case, but thanks to suburban zoning no one will ever find out.

Suburbs have uniquely hostile road geometry for pedestrians, that's why they get a bad rap, but it's also a security feature.

Not at all. A small town has a town center, a residential area clustered around it, and nature or farmland surrounding that.

Suburbs sometimes have a town center but often it's much more amorphous with different strip malls and such. Everything is spread out. There is no place where you're at the heart of the town, in the center of activity. And even if there is such a place, it's probably driving distance, just like everything else. You need a car because everything is spread out because all the areas of activity are surrounded by parking lots.

I live in the upper Midwest. A growing number of small towns have evolved away from the "town center" model, and now have a mostly vacant / decaying downtown, and strip malls anchored by big-box stores, at the edge of town. Or, the same thing but with the stores in a neighboring town. In other words, the small towns have re-structured themselves as suburbs without the urb.

The exceptions are towns with a hospital or college that can retain some vitality in the downtown area.

Yep. I grew up there. Chrissie Hynde's song "My City Was Gone" is right on the money.

Maybe remote work means that suburbanites will stop preventing cities from being nice places to live? (because of regional politics, suburban drivers have a say in things like how much highways and parking a city ends up having to maintain)

The single largest advantage of remote work is being able to live in a lower cost of living area with more land.

Even if you're in the office 2 days that opens up a commutable area that's far far larger than before.

For me, that advantage is third or perhaps lower on the list, behind "saving time almost every day" (#1 for me) and "having much more control over my office environment [that I spend 35-50 hours per week in]" (a fairly close second).

I’ve been wfh for about 10 years now. The biggest advantage to me is no work clothes and no dry cleaning. No driving is up there too.

What kind of jobs have you had where the clothes need to be dry cleaned? I’ve worn jeans or chinos to work my whole career and I worked in banking.

Well it has been 10 years :) but typical office style like pressed khakis, button down shirt, and uncomfortable shoes.

I think a lot of people don't realise that you can wash most shirts. I wear dress shirts all of the time and I've never dry cleaned one.

I kind of enjoy ironing though, it's a nice ritual to present my best self to the world.

That’s not the advantage for me: even when living in the middle of the largest cities around - once across the street from the office - I preferred remote work since it is designed for those who deliver value rather than those who cosplay value generation via socialization and micromanagement.

The ability to decouple wages from CoL is seen as a huge existential threat to existing power structures. If workers began to believe they have choices, then the old model of management simply doesn't work as well.

This is just an added perk as far as I'm concerned.

I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding the choice of lead stock photo in this article.

I think the term of art is "hallucination."

Despite working from home in a fantastic job, I'm having a bit of a hard time believing that we're not in The Bad Place right now.

“One of the starkest depictions may have been in The Good Place, where a suburban development was (spoiler alert) revealed to be designed by an actual demon experimenting with a new circle of hell.”

The neighborhood environment in The Good Place is basically a StrongTowns dream; totally walkable, moderately dense, mixed-use, not a car in sight. Not actually a great example for this article.

I don’t think the set design was supposed to resemble suburbs; I think the quoted line was just an independent joke. But I’d agree in the sense that using The Good Place as a hook for this article is a little bit of a stretch. Maybe the writer just wanted something fun & catchy for what would be otherwise boring.

Allow me an european point-of-view (most EU and USA people would disagree): I read in comments various positions, but actually all of you are talking about the "Riviera model" witch means a densely but not to dense area populated by homes instead of multi-families/high rise buildings.

That's IMO is the best form of city in the actual level of tech and social evolutionary stage: cities with big buildings are simply too dense to evolve, buildings get old but can't be really replaced because it's too costly and it's too complicated relocating many families, makes different owners of parts of them to rebuilt etc => dense cities can't evolve, they are too dense.

Far less dense areas do not have the density benefits for culture, economics, generic human social life. The middle ground is the Riviera, where some works "in the office" but at a short commuting range, in small buildings spread between homes, some works remotely. Today that's good enough for local services too exists, good enough for remote workers, good for EVs since almost all have personal garages, place for p.v. in the vast areas of the world where it's meaningful, sustainable for logistics (retail and so on), it's new in most places so we can start over aging but not-much-replaceable infra, for tomorrow drone delivery it's possible, flying cars as well if we really reach this step soon enough in decades terms.

There is only a but IMO: those who profit from many other humans dislike such model: it's centered on a distributed economy where all can earn a bit without excesses so poor's live far better, rich earn far less and a strong middle class rule by mere numbers and effective decision power and awareness. And that's IMO why so many "high in the pyramid" want RTO and many "low in the pyramid" fear the future of dense cities as new kind of labor camps/ghettos.

Decentralization of office work will have effects that ripple out for decades to come. There's nothing inherently superior to urban, suburban, or rural living. Everything is a tradeoff. We'd all be better off if more costs of infrastructure were more directly connected to those utilizing them.

Living in a big city would be great, except its ridiculously expensive. Real estate prices are considerably different pre-covid and post-covid.

An entire generation of young people are growing up who will never be able to afford a house/apartment in a major city.

Once they start renovating office buildings into housing everyone will flock to the cities. Most people don't want to live in suburbs. Even many of the people who think they do would be happier in a small town surrounded by farmland or nature.

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