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Comment by RestlessMind | Hacker News Reader

> Work from office is absurdly expensive for society.

That assumes everyone lives in American suburbia with one extra room for your home-office. Guess what, most of the knowledge workers live in dense cities with tiny apartments. Average flat sizes for various cities (sqft): Bangalore (1260), Singapore (667), Tokyo (710), Paris (520) etc. See this image for more details: https://files.buildworld.co.uk/average-home-size/03_Average-...

To make it permanent remote would involve a huge restructuring of those societies and that cost is much greater than maintaining office towers.

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Who the hell is trying to work remotely from their shoebox apartment? That's the point of WFH -- you can move out of Tokyo to rural Japan and live in a larger space for cheaper. Or rural France. Plenty of space in rural India.

Not much luck for Singapore tho, but that's the nature of the city-state.

> To make it permanent remote would involve a huge restructuring of those societies and that cost is much greater than maintaining office towers.

bollocks. MS Teams or Slack is cheap, and the cost of moving to a rural locale isn't hard. Smaller towns will develop their own amenities, and 2nd and 3rd tier cities would do well.

But I have been told for a very long time that no one actually wants to live in a rural space, that people are just forced to do so because of cost, or some other such thing..

or that people that live in rural spaces should not be allowed that because it harms the eviroment or something.

I have had many many many conversations where people tell about how wonderful urban life is, as how that is the best way for people to live, in shoeboxes where everything is in walking distance from them...

seems WFH is in direct odds with the "walkable cities" movement

> you can move out of Tokyo to rural Japan

> the cost of moving to a rural locale isn't hard

It seems you don't have any family and friends near where you live? Or you don't have any hobbies which are possible only in the cities (eg. being a foodie with a taste for various types of cuisines)? Or you are a native born who will find it easier to blend into rural communities who are typically more homogeneous? Unless you can only see costs in financial terms but not in social or personal terms?

Cost of urban to rural transition is HUGE, first at individual level due to social ties and personal preferences. And then at societal level due to personal preferences of the electorate. Dense cities are here to stay in most of the world.

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