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Comment by mono442 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how the real estate market will look like in the biggest cities in the coming years. I haven't changed jobs for quite a while so I don't know if this article is accurate but if it's really that bad, then I wouldn't be surprised if we see a big crash. After all, the appeal of biggest cities was always, at least to me, the availability of white collar, highly paid jobs. If these ceased to exist, I don't see reason why people would want to move there anymore.

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so: where do you go and what do you do? All your land and food is subject to property laws and the way things are going the owners will be allowed violence to enforce their rights. Essentially you'll be a serf again just like 99% of other people and 95% on this site (which sadly has owners very much intent to become our lords)

>so: where do you go and what do you do?

Literally anywhere else where a house doesn't cost 7 figures? I think you're missing the point of the OP, which is that nobody is going to want to buy overpriced houses in superstar cities, and that bodes badly for real estate agents.

Private equity will buy them all up and rent them out.

We will own nothing and be told to be happy or else.

White flight all over again but this time it’d be white collar flight.

But white collar flight to where? Rural areas don’t have any jobs. There are only so many businesses a town can support. What will people do?

> The building we exited was another one of the terrafoam projects. Terrafoam was a super-low-cost building material, and all of the welfare dorms were made out of it. They took a clay-like mud, aerated it into a thick foam, formed it into large panels and fired it like a brick with a mobile furnace. It was cheap and it allowed them to erect large buildings quickly. The robots had put up the building next to ours in a week.

> The government had finally figured out that giving choices to people on welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive. Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria. If the government could drive the cost of that housing and food down, it minimized the amount of money they had to spend per welfare recipient.

> As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum occupancy

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

1. medical specialists and hospitals 2. sports clubs and vibrant leagues 3. professional sports facilities 4. concerts: arts and music. …

5. Bars (and pubs, in appropriate cities) that you can walk to.

It's much cheaper to drink at home when you're unemployed though. I live in a country with seriously rising unemployment rate (highest in EU), and bars/night clubs are going bankrupt left and right here.

Younger generations are also drinking far less (and smoking more weed, in general).

Demand for all those services (with possible exception of essential medical care) will shrink if big portion of white collar workers end up unemployed. Without a job people simply won't have much extra money to spend on them.

> After all, the appeal of biggest cities was always, at least to me, the availability of white collar, highly paid jobs

You are definitely unusual.

Since remote work became more common because of Covid, remote workers have moved within the same city or moved to smaller cities. Only 4% relocated to rural areas[1].

Cities are appealing to most people because they have entertainment, variety, walkability, and many other benefits that rural places don't provide. The urbanization of America isn't only because work has changed, but because people generally prefer urban or suburban living over rural living.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11551397/

‘Smaller cities’ in the US are what most of the world calls ‘rural’.

Rural in the US is truly remote, not just ‘has farmland’.

> ‘Smaller cities’ in the US are what most of the world calls ‘rural’.

What? No it's not. In the study I linked and also for most people's purposes, "smaller city" is something like Milwaukee or Pittsburgh, a place with an urban center, a real downtown, some skyscrapers, and probably a few corporate headquarters.

Generally smaller cities are the surroundings and suburbs to cities like that.

To somebody that lives rurally in the US, a town of 10,000 is where you go to get groceries. 100,000 gets you a movie theater and shopping. Pittsburgh? That's basically a megacity.

Yes, that town of 10,000 is probably rural, and in the study I linked, people were not moving to those towns. They were moving to actual cities.

What are we even talking about here?

I can find data that points out two trends right now.

1. Decentralized growth into exurbs and rural markets. This is further driven by USDA home loans into those markets, where people can not only afford to live but buy homes 90min or less away from a metropolitan area (but living outside the metro). This move into exurbs and rural markets is reversing a 40 year trend!

2. Movement from major top-5 us cities into smaller cities with a university or two (Knoxville, TN; Boise, ID; and Tulsa, OK are seeing the highest inbound-to-outbound ratios). Major cities like New York and Los Angeles are still seeing net domestic outflows in 2026.

In fact the Yankees, Californians, and city slickers of all sorts are FLOODING into the southeast USA, and have been since they suddenly decided all at once in 2020 this is where they need to be for some reason. I've never seen so many foreigner plates in my life here in Alabama. (New York, California, etc.) Between them and the half of Mexico/Guatemala who already lives here, it's getting pretty crowded out here in rural nowheresville these days.

At least I can be thankful it's not as crowded here as East Tennessee, North Carolina, etc are getting to be. Yet. The very bad reputation of Alabama among a certain crowd seems to keep more of those types away.

The big reason people were in the cities was because of jobs. When remote work happened, all those people were still making big city pay, but could now move and live in lower cost areas (with fresh air, less crowding, etc.).

Affordable housing on big lots

We were discussing your belief that everyone in the world has a city slicker inside struggling to get out.

The views of rural people can be disregarded in favor of the superior City Person viewpoints, since that's what we're all secretly striving to become. Before long there will be nobody living in the country at all, because why would anyone want that?

No more fresh air or clean water for me. Nope, I'm moving to some city somewhere so I can enjoy living in a 300 sq. ft. luxury apartment with a pet cockroach. The only people still living out in the countryside will be my backwards hillbilly cousins, like in Hunger Games.

Is this where you believe things are headed? Because we all want to be you so much?

For the more rural states you need to take a zero off each of these numbers. A town of 1,000 in North Dakota would have shops, a town of 10,000, which would be the tenth most populous in the state, would have a cinema, and Fargo, with 250k people living in its vicinity? That's your megacity.

I don't think he's arguing for rural, just expressing concern about the *biggest* cities.

> entertainment, variety, walkability, and many other benefits that rural places don't provide

I appreciate all of this as well, but at the end of the day, I moved to a city with 80x the population of my hometown because of a (specific) job. Rent is also significantly higher, and if I had to consume my savings to survive here, I'd surely move out. Entertainment and walkability have secondary importance compared to putting food on the table and saving for retirement.

> Rent is also significantly higher [in a larger city]

For most people, pay is also significantly higher. Most employers adjust salary based on location.

Yes the broader economy would crumble without white collar jobs. They employ many blue collar jobs. It would be a huge shock to economic activity

Not only expect to see a "big crash", but expect to see total collapse of Capitalism with French style Revolution within 5 years. There will be blood in the streets literally not methaphorically as it should be.

We know people need to eat or else they die painfully. We also know you can buy food with money. We also know job gives money for majority of populus. We also know jobs are being eliminated completely within 5 years and then physical jobs also with robots.

So knowing this, if people have no job, no salary, no money to buy food with, they will get their food by force. It's just a logical conclusion.

And no, nobody will give you UBI, stop being naive. UBI has been depunked by economists numerous times, it just doesn't wokr mathmetically. World will transition to communism and the upper class will be simply eliminated physically as it has happened in the past.

Oh and this is a good thing btw

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