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Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
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Re: Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
#32Manhattan will be fine. It's reinvented itself many times before.
100 years ago it was filled with warehouses and factories. Those all left and never came back, and they were renovated into housing and offices.
If the offices leave, all those buildings will be renovated into WeWork like spaces (if not WeWork itself) or into more housing. Especially if everyone is working from home, people will want bigger places to rent. A single person may want two or three bedrooms (one for them, one for the office, maybe one for a guest). Not everyone can or likes to work from home, so if offices start closing, a lot of people will still want an office like place to go to to get away from kids and family or just to get more space.
New York is still a cultural center. People will want to live there.
Re: Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
#33I’m a bit sad how remote work is likely to hurt my social life I have many close friends that grew out of the intimacy of solving problems together. We could casually hangout IRL after work. Our partners and kids would get to know each other. In turn, that growing trust would feedback into a more positive workplace. It’s not the only way to make friends, but it was an easy way. Now my relationships with coworkers can…
> I’m a bit sad how remote work is likely to hurt my social life
Interestingly I see it the other way around, I can now focus on having a social life and seeing people outside of my work. No more 3h commute!
Re: Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
#34I’m a bit sad how remote work is likely to hurt my social life I have many close friends that grew out of the intimacy of solving problems together. We could casually hangout IRL after work. Our partners and kids would get to know each other. In turn, that growing trust would feedback into a more positive workplace. It’s not the only way to make friends, but it was an easy way. Now my relationships with coworkers can…
Conversely, imagine living in a lovely small town that has an active social life and a commercial scene, fuelled by the scores of people moving out there with nothing better to do in the evenings, who want to get out of the house. People who don't spend all their energy commuting into and out of a city each day, people who are free from the crowded lonelinesses of the subway, and the hyper-busy trendy weekend coffee-…
At the risk of sounding picky, I am statistically much more interested in socializing with a randomly chosen person from this website than a randomly chosen person from my town (excluding my household).
Even my kids’ friends’ parents are often tedious to hang out with. “Can you believe ?” Or some town gossip that is interesting only to the other half of the conversation.
I have non-work friends, most of which I met locally, but there’s a common interest beyond “you happen to get your mail delivered by the same person”.
Work socializing has some advantages for introverts. You don’t generally have a lack of topics to discuss; if one gets boring, you can switch to another.
Re: Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
#35It's even more pronounced in SF, and it's probably the best thing that has happened to the city in decades, minus the obvious catastrophe of the pandemic itself. A nice studio apartment in a decent neighborhood can be had now for $1500; something unthinkable a year ago. Hopefully this can help start to revitalize the city's culture into something more than a monolithic tech frat party.
Are rents still decreasing? I look on craigslist from times to times and I think I'm seeing less apartments available than like 3 months ago.
Although I'm looking at the prices and for what I used to pay for an old 1br, I can get the same but 3br and a parking in low pac height.
Re: Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
#36Remote is not the end all, hybrid is likely here to stay. And NYC is best place to live/work as a young person...At home all day on the computer? Sure rather have thousands of options for the evening instead of a dozen..
> And NYC is best place to live/work as a young person NYC is the best place to live/work if you don't plan on having children, which is the ultimate arbiter of whether a given environment is indeed "good for young people" or not. If it wasn't for the flood of people moving into NYC from regions where people still have kids at higher rates, the entire city's population would quickly collapse. It's a genetic graveyard…
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Re: Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
#37Indian here offering a slightly different perspective. I absolutely love remote work. Even before pandemic I used to work with remote team all the time only from office. Theirs stigma associated with remote work here. Employers don't trust their employees. But if some employer does offer me remote with same pay as that of in the city I would love to work remotely precisely because - I can work from hometown where liv…
Great points. For our friends outside India -
- 50 Lakhs = 5 million = around 70K USD - EMI = Monthly Mortgage Payments
Re: Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
#38I’m a bit sad how remote work is likely to hurt my social life I have many close friends that grew out of the intimacy of solving problems together. We could casually hangout IRL after work. Our partners and kids would get to know each other. In turn, that growing trust would feedback into a more positive workplace. It’s not the only way to make friends, but it was an easy way. Now my relationships with coworkers can…
> Now my relationships with coworkers can feel more transactional.
That is not just about personal relationships, that applies to work effectiveness as well.
There were hundreds of conversations over a month I had, which came from someone noticing me waiting for a coffee, come up and ask me something somewhat arbitrary - knowing that I'm free right now without any actual broadcast.
The same sort of serendipity used to happen during lunch, with people mentioning their new idea which ends up being something that boils down "oversampling all the signals to 1MHz, but then store it in a columnar db as a wide table".
The interaction process was entirely additive, with no commitments to start a conversation.
Right now, every meeting is scheduled or preceded by "are you free?", which immediately triggers a priority conversation or scheduling conflict one.
Making things which weren't transactional, into a "I have set time aside for you and only you" which is where everything starts becoming prioritized around who to talk to rather than what they have to talk about in particular.
Re: Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
#39Manhattan especially is conducive to remote working IMHO. There is an incredible amount of collective wasted time due to the nature of commuting into and out of Manhattan. That's not including the more difficult to measure mental and emotional toll of such commutes. Most people working in Manhattan probably do not live in Manhattan...or even the other NYC boroughs. A huge chunk actually live across the river in NJ. I…
Even if you live in the boroughs, it can still cost a huge chunk of time to get in. Between walking, waiting for and riding the subway, it takes me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to get to my office. That's 40 hours of dead time a month, and I'm so happy to have it back.
Yeah, I would gladly work extra hours for my employer if it meant not having to waste it on commuting. I see it as a win-win for both myself and my employer. I wouldn't mind an occasional trek to the office for certain meetings, etc.
Unfortunately my employer does not see it that way. Exerting middle-managerial control over employees is considered more important than productivity.
Re: Remote work is here to stay – Manhattan may never be the same
#40Manhattan will be fine. It's reinvented itself many times before. 100 years ago it was filled with warehouses and factories. Those all left and never came back, and they were renovated into housing and offices. If the offices leave, all those buildings will be renovated into WeWork like spaces (if not WeWork itself) or into more housing. Especially if everyone is working from home, people will want bigger places to r…
> New York is still a cultural center. People will want to live there.
New Orleans is also a major cultural center. Some people will pay up to live around culture. But the vast majority of people paying NYC prices are doing so because of access to high paying professional jobs. There's a reason that San Jose is nearly as expensive as NYC. There's not a single major city in the world that survives off culture alone.