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Remote work is gutting downtowns

businessinsider.com

51–60 of 262 posts

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#51

The headline relies on a definition of "cost" I do not accept. Cities will get less tax income, sure, but their outlay is also less. Their actual costs could be radically reduced by changing zoning laws to enable residents to live near their place of employment.

In many cities, high-rises office towers pay multi million dollar tax bills. It's nearly free revenue that doesn't really cost the city any more effort to serve. Taxing office space is the only mechanism cities typically have to tax the business community to help pay for the services is it provides to its residents. That revenue evaporates, and will have to be balanced by increased residential assessment or fed/state government bailout.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#52
I had a long talk with a Chicago born cab driver when visiting a few years back. He explained to me that Chicago used to be a conventional city where the businesses were downtown and residential was a donut around that. Traffic was congested into downtown in the mornings and out of downtown in the evenings. As the city grew and commutes into downtown from the suburbs worsened, the businesses started moving out of downtown into the suburbs to be closer to their employees. This left downtown with low occupancy. A few people eventually got wise to the situation and started turning a lot of the unused downtown commercial space into residential space. Fast forward to today and the traffic patterns have reversed, with congestion out of downtown in the morning as people commute out towards the ring of businesses and into downtown in the evening where people now live.

I see this same trend happening in Houston where I live now and I suspect it is happening in other large car-centric cities as well.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#53
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. And I would say the broader distribution will actually be good for the environment as whole. Or at least it could be.

Walk me through that thinking? Downtown residents walk and use transit. Places with broader distribution of people typically rely on roads because transit isn’t economically efficient. My intuition is that higher population densities are more environmentally efficient because more people can be served by any resource. Are you thinking otherwise?

I do not see how it could be more efficient from a first principles perspective.

Energy = force * distance = mass * acceleration * distance.

Broader distributions means increases in distance means increase in energy consumption.

And usually having more space means having more stuff, which means an increase in mass, which also results in increase in energy consumption.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#54

downtowns are picking up. With remote work my wife walks downtown and gets lunch etc. Places like SF though may struggle because parts of Sf are not inviting - car gets broken into, have to lock bike going into stores etc

Downtown SF has horrible QOL issues and will take a long time to recover. Downtown Columbus has had no problems continuing to thrive, because they don't tolerate shitting in the streets and shooting up in front of restaurants.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#55

A bit off topic; I of course understand that I'm an odd situation and not representative of the broader trend at play here... But moving into remote work inspired my partner and I to move into Manhattan from the sprawling car driven nightmare that was Phoenix. Tiny little studio, but we've never been particularly materialistic, a murphy bed massively opens up the space, and no office to go into means once the day is…

Sorry your Phoenix experience was so bad for you. It's great out here though. Don't know why the top comment is dumping on Phx as if it doesn't have a great road system.

Our grocery options will improve as soon as the german discount chains set

Frys is not more expensive than TJs [0] When you drive east from AZ, you drive past the cheapest gas in the US[1]

[0]https://www.frysfood.com/savings/weeklyad/ [1]https://gasprices.aaa.com/

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#56
I'm continually surprised by the resiliency of the urban housing real estate market given the remote work transition. Why pay such a huge premium to sit at home? I understand wanting to be where the action is, but e.g. the New York rental market just seems insane.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walkable cities with mixed use development. Change the use of downtown.

To what?

Someplace people want to live, work, and play.

Some of the existing high-rise offices should be repurposed into housing, retail, etc.

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