Historically people moved to the cities because that's where the work was. What will drive people to cities when that's no longer true?
Granted some people really enjoy "density" but I suspect most people prefer more space / a yard / etc if the lack of commute enables then to spread out.
Of course, these things are also self-reinforcing cycles. If people move out, housing prices come down but a lot of the amenities that lead many people to live in the city in the first plce may go away as well.
If you own a bunch of downtown commercial real estate, you don't need to be a business guru to see that you could be making a lot more money if you could rent that space out as apartments.
Yup, my question is - do we expect this to hold when downtown is no longer the place to be for work.
My wife and I moved out of Boston due to the pricing, but if we could afford it while maintaining our current savings rate we’d move back in a heartbeat even though we both have remote jobs. The density allows for so many choices in food and entertainment that you can’t get in the suburbs or countryside. And that’s without even accounting for the lack of needing a car which is a constant headache in terms of maintenance and logistics that I wish I could just be rid of
I totally get how at the period of life before you have kids, the city has advantages but once you have kids that formula flips quite a bit (eg: you care about access to Thai food less, while the backyard starts to matter a lot.)
To put it in the terms of my up-thread post - that still sounds like a relatively smaller total demand vs before (eg, before COVID I suggested buying a larger place so we could have kids in NYC and I would have an easy commute - now I couldn't care less about being there vs my nice burb)
I could afford to live in the city if I wanted to but I choose not to.