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Comment by memen | Hacker News Reader

I think it is the same as with cars. Introducing cars improves the access times of a lot of things, but as a result, supermarkets, hospitals etc. are now more sparsely distributed than ever. Everyone has a car anyways, so it makes sense to increase the actual distance.

Same goes for internet access. Every bank used to have offices with customer service in every small village. Now only some of the larger cities have an office if you're lucky. We make things as accessible as we need it to be, so reducing time to access does not necessarily improve the situation in all perspectives.

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I agree with the example about cars, but will point out that the ability to distribute things much more sparsely in space is a massive upside, because it means space itself gets so much cheaper.

You can pretty reliably half your mortgage in most parts of the developed world by accepting an extra half hour on your commute - if you commute. This trend is likely to only intensify as incomes rise, the Linder Theorem [1] becomes stronger, and people become less willing to accept even a 5 minute addition to their commute in exchange for saving tens of thousands of dollars over the course of their life. (Which makes sense - 5 minutes over a 40 year career for a $100/hr salaried professional comes at a cost somewhere north of $150,000).

[1]: https://www.opus1journal.org/articles/article.asp?docID=145

This makes sense to me, but my impression (not backed by hard data mind you, just years of glancing at housing prices) is that the step increase in remote work triggered by COVID simply caused housing (i.e., residential space) prices to skyrocket in most places relative to their pre-COVID trends, surely due in part to the sudden influx of people who could make longer or no commutes work for their remote jobs. Metropolitan rents did see a temporary drop that lasted through something like mid-2020 through mid-2021, but housing prices continue to set all-time highs.

Anecdotally I definitely saw the same patterns. If I had more time I would dive deep into the economics papers generated by this natural experiment, because I would be fascinated to see what kinds of real estate ripples it caused.

Intuitively, I don't think most fully remote workers who moved moved to genuinely remote areas - maybe to smaller cities, and the outskirts of those smaller cities at that, but the amenities of any city above 100,000 or so genuinely are quite nice to have handy. I wonder if rural areas saw much of an uptick in absolute, but even in relative, terms.

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