This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities.
[0] https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2023/juli/filez...
At various times it's been train, bus, cycling, walking.
So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.)
But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options.
In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).
It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition.
Of course, there's also a selection effect; more interesting things to spend money on causes people to spend more money. (That's why people who earn more per hour tend to work more, not less.)
Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world: the dense cities are more in demand and more expensive than the middle of nowhere.
If nobody can build "enough housing" in their cities, to make their cities as cheap as their rural land, I think that tells us something. We can' simply take demand entirely out of the picture, since adding more supply is both (a) a lagging process and (b) a process that itself helps promote more demand by necessitating more service business, more jobs at those businesses, etc. I.e., if you make the land more attractive to everyone, everyone who wants to use that land for their business or residence has more competition for securing a spot on it.
This is a great observation, if a problem is occurring all over the place maybe the solution isn't simple.
The cool stuff in these cities is highly centralized and just building more housing a little further out doesn't spread it automatically.
If you build a high rise apartment tower in Yonkers it might not sell. Move much loser to Manhattan and you run into all the problems of building in an area that's already pretty dense.
Maybe cities are just more productive economically, so people earn more, so they can pay more.
I think where having more housing helps though is making your city more diverse. If you have fancy housing for doctors and grungy housing for artists, your city will have a better art scene than if you only have fancy housing.
If you're in a city that's doing well, you have a lot of residents with money to spend. Enough to incentivize a lot of development aimed at those residents. But that jut further chokes out anything that would only serve those with incomes in the lowest percentiles.
Building housing helps, certainly, but there's a differnence between "building housing that keeps the growth engine running" and "building housing that keeps the bottom-tier population served and keeps people from being pushed into homelessness" (especially when redevelopment is financially most practical in cheaper parts of town which can cause more displacement of more economically precarious people - replacing that grungy housing, for instance), and I don't think market-based approaches will ever be enough since the financial incentives to serve the bottom of the market naturally are much smaller than to serve the middle or the top. And I think this is demonstrated by how the densest first-world-cities across the world often have affordability issues.
Grungy housing was new fancy housing - decades ago.
I guess if the government is willing to build Soviet style grey blocks then you can have new but modest, relatively cheap housing.
But the "just build more" path of least resistance is to bulldoze today's grungy housing to build tomorrow's new housing, and most of the time that doesn't make it easy for the existing displaced residents find enough replacement grungy housing at rates they can afford.
So I think there needs to be something more than just laissez-faire building.
Although if they were homeowners before, they probably didn't mind selling their house, seeing as they did it.
Some physical factors that might matter are underlying land value, single stair laws and similar things making building layout worse, how many 1br vs 3br units there are… not whether it looks old or not though.
You can't identify affordable (subsidized) housing from the outside in cities where it exists.
Tokyo is the main example that isn't in this situation.
Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.
Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.
...or more effectively, by abandoning the flawed concept of single-family zoning, thereby allowing market forces to increase housing supply where it is needed.
I've had coworkers who lived and worked in Beijing without cars - they still had 40+ minute each direction commutes. And that's a city that was extremely aggressive in expanding its transit. It's just a basic queuing/graph problem, though.
If people only make cases for transit by straw-manning the worst part of cars and ignoring the worst part of mass transit it's gonna take a long time to convince enough people to spend the billions needed to make it happen, since most people aren't stupid and they know that there are cons of public transit too, not just unalloyed pros.
Different parts of US, Australia, or Europe will respond differently even when subjected to the same policy. So I don't think any one answer is correct as a general rule.
I don't think cities are actually out of room. Maybe they are, but it's not obvious to me that this is the case.
> Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win.
Not for the people who live in smaller towns because they prefer living in smaller towns.
> And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.
Not all small towns are poor. And regardless, a lot of people with money coming into a town very often causes prices for everything (especially housing) to increase, pricing poor people out of the area. And if you're poor, you probably can't afford to move elsewhere.
Not saying that these problems are inevitable, but there are certainly lots of examples of them happening. What I am saying is that this is a very complicated thing with no clear outcome for any particular place.
USA Population growth rate is now at about the lowest it has ever been. All the previous generations had to also build houses and the supporting infrastructure. It's not rocket science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
Remote work allows people that work in exporting services to live anywhere. They bring cash into the economy, and any town with a good sense of economics should be trying to bring those people in. Might they temporarily raise prices in the town they move to? Yeah, but they moving out of a big city also lowers prices in that big city, what about the folks that were outpriced there, and now might have some breathing room?
Wow. This is the opposite of the US where most small towns have depressed real estate values and negative growth rates. What is Australia doing differently?
During COVID some people left the biggest cities to live somewhere without lockdowns. This was a fairly small number in absolute terms but it pushed prices up in specific desirable local market and really stretched services. That's slowly reversing now.
This is happening everywhere. My hometown in Europe is by the sea and has nice weather. Since remote work, housing has become ridiculous, both in price and availability. Locals can hardly afford it anymore. But I do think this whole situation will balance out eventually, we're really just at the beginning of a new global trend.
The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes.
Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.
If that ever gets developed, it will revolutionize the world.
Also, some jobs were moved online during COVID (eg. teaching) but it is clearly demonstrated that they work better in person.
Conversely, companies will sometimes locate themselves in suburbs just to make it harder for employees to leave. IIRC that's why IBM is in Armonk.
Some people like living in big cities, usually because they're young and starry eyed about the "possibilities" of them being interesting. Quite often they grow out of this, and get to hate the big cities and their stress and uglyness....
Less concentrated human habitation is not without cost…
Hedonistically, everyone wants to live on a big lot on a low-traffic road... with friends, family, and work/shopping/services a short distance away. If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.
The costs of concentrated habitation are less than the benefits - there's enough tax base and density to support roads and (emergency or mundane) services and businesses. The costs of distributed habitation are higher, and don't work if the entire nation switches to that kind of housing.
Environmentally and sustainably speaking, the "productivity" of big cities is zero.
Cut from the outside, a city like New York would die in a few months when food dissapears, with people eating one another. Cut from urban centers, rural towns and villages will continue to be able to drink and feed themselves just fine.
They only exist because the people living there are subsidized, for water, food, and other such essentials, from outside. Even factory production lives outside those cities.
That's how they started actually, when the rural production because so larger, as to be able to sustain not just itself, but also a parasitic, mediating and administrating, urbal class.
>If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.
There's nothing inevitable about this, it's just how US suburbs were designed, to be car-centered.
In decentralized suburbs with local walkable distance shops (walkable as a stronger condition as opposed to merely "a short distance away"), and with local jobs and more extended work from home, it doesn't matter if they "spread out", because you don't have to drive a "a big, polluting car fast through", as the need to go elsewhere is less frequent: work, socializing, shopping is nearby.
Add a good public transportation service, and you don't even need a car.
I know someone who does Den Haag-Amsterdam every day but he's Japanese so he is trained in the art of salary man.
When people are allowed to live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best, most expensive cities.
*for some particular jobs
That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace.
There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks.
So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation.
So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation.
Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.