Good. Urban real estate is due for a correction.
Remote work is gutting downtowns
101–110 of 262 posts
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#102A 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…
Same thing here, people were shocked when I moved from Colorado to Manhattan’s UES to work remote, but it’s been the best decision I’ve ever made.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to get the bus to work about 10 years ago because parking in the city became so expensive (I stopped long before Covid hit). The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter. All it takes is one inconsiderate person to not cover their mouth and everyone is getting ill. And it happened all the time . I had a commute time that ranged between one and two hours over that stretch as I'd lived in a coup…
I've had funny conversations about why I still wear a good n95 on public transit (planes included). My right-leaning and remarkably well educated parents are incredulous. A few years ago I thought personal masking didn't really matter. Wow, I was wrong! And not catching bs colds from weirdos on the bus or the grocery store makes it worth it. My face isn't that pretty anyway.
They might be right about the actual plane ride because the filtration systems on modern (read 20 years old or newer) are really good. Public busses tend to be a disaster for air filtration though, especially in winter when no windows are open. I wish there was some better research/more accessible research on this.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter. All it takes is one inconsiderate person to not cover their mouth and everyone is getting ill. And it happened all the time. Give it a few years without exposure, and you will have very hard time if you have to get exposed again. I did 2 years for remote work with a single day with long exposure each week, after a few years with low exposure. I then had…
> Give it a few years without exposure > we have to keep our immunity active to stay healthy, and this happens by getting sick times to times Is going to the grocery store, out to dinner, having friends/family over not enough exposure? Genuinely curious about the science if you need to be around kids (directly or indirectly via co-workers) to build or maintain a "strong immune system". If anything I'd expect the lack…
>If anything I'd expect the lack of activity to cause your immune system to be hyper-aware and you'd get less sick
That's not really how it works afaik. The immune system can only respond quickly and effectively to the things it knows. If you spend 3 years outside society and you come back, your system will be 3 years behind on disease evolution. When you finally do get exposed, you'll have a much stronger immune response because it's an unknown threat.
Compare this to a immune system that has also never seen the latest variant, but has seen the one before -- it'll be much more effective at recognizing and fighting the threat early, and the person might not even notice they were exposed.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter. All it takes is one inconsiderate person to not cover their mouth and everyone is getting ill. And it happened all the time. Give it a few years without exposure, and you will have very hard time if you have to get exposed again. I did 2 years for remote work with a single day with long exposure each week, after a few years with low exposure. I then had…
I think this is based on a misinterpretation of the hygiene hypothesis... exposure to germs helps when you're a child yourself but not after becoming an adult (AFAIA). This is supported by https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/05/all-social-...
I understand I have no authority on the subject, but, aren't we well aware that immunity wears off at different rates depending on the strain ? A lot of sickness only affect the children, and once for their lifetime, but there is at least covid for we know the immunity wears off. Surely there are many others.
edit: I suspect the article only states that life long immunity does not wears off. I don't challenge that at all.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#106These seeds were sowed when cities cashed in on commercial real estate, pushing residential zoning further and further out of the city. Wake up call: nobody wants to spend longer than they have to on an unpaid, unpredictable commute into the city anymore. So while these downtown businesses are getting 1/3 of the foot traffic that they used to, all the supermarkets and shops a few miles down the road are raking it in.
Yeah—the stores in our area (which is a bedroom community for Baltimore and to a lesser extent DC) are doing great.
Which is funny, because after 2008 it felt like a lot of the bedroom communities / strip malls struggled and went down hill (lack of demand I guess) - and it felt like a whole wave of young people were only wanting to live in the city.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#107These seeds were sowed when cities cashed in on commercial real estate, pushing residential zoning further and further out of the city. Wake up call: nobody wants to spend longer than they have to on an unpaid, unpredictable commute into the city anymore. So while these downtown businesses are getting 1/3 of the foot traffic that they used to, all the supermarkets and shops a few miles down the road are raking it in.
Europe arguably has better public transportation and shorter commutes. I am still seeing this happening (don't have any data to back my claim, just my experience). If I have to guess here is more about the housing cost being the issue. Buying is prohibitive given the average income and most new units are only for rent. In the last 6 years I spent more than 140k CHF in rent (close to Zurich). Once remote working has s…
> Europe arguably has better public transportation and shorter commutes
Mine (Dublin, Ireland) is still about an hour on the tram (for EUR 2) from where I live, so I'm not saying it's perfect, but my manager, in the Atlanta area, is a two-hour drive away from the office. That and he starting meetings at 6AM (because Dublin) makes me support remote working even more for the ATL teams.
I gladly traded the rich cultural life and world-class restaurants for a walkable city and a house with a small park one gate away from the back yard.
Even considering the occasional invasion of the house by a bunch of screaming little 10 yo's who are my daughter's gang (who lives mostly on the same street).
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#108I 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 dow…
I live in the Chicago area and this is just not true on a large scale at all. The commute into downtown Chicago on a weekday morning is extremely busy (especially pre-COVID), whether by car or rail. The reverse direction is nearly empty. Even as I write this at 9:15am (with rush hour ebbing), you can see this for yourself on Google Maps - the inbound lanes on all the highway arteries are all orange/red, the outbound lanes are all green.
For a long time, my office was always in the suburbs. Out of the 100s of people I knew in the office, I only ever heard of maybe a dozen living in the city and reverse commuting. They were always fresh out of college, and all gave up that lifestyle after a couple years because commuting out to the suburbs each day is challenging and time-consuming (no easy way to get from the rail station to the office, for instance).
Our company decided to move their headquarters into the city "to attract younger talent" a few years before COVID. What actually happened is that over the course of several years, the vast majority of people assigned to the new downtown office slowly stopped coming in at all and now nearly everyone works from home, and COVID of course only accelerated that. The younger people that live in the city are almost always on Zoom when they join meetings so it doesn't seem like they're taking advantage of the office much either now. Also, there were a small number of people who lived in the suburbs but favored city life who moved back into the city when the office moved there. However, anecdotally every single one of them that I know moved back out to the suburbs in 2020/2021 because they all became trapped in their small apartments with nowhere else to go because Chicago shut everything down for an extended period of time. Now that things are open again, no one that I know has moved back, and our office downtown is still a ghost town. On the rare occasion I've gone in, it's not uncommon to be the only person present on an entire floor of the building. I don't know how long the lease is but I have to imagine we'll scale way back on the space when it expires.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Carr's "The Big Switch" in reverse. Technology ushering in a decentralization effect. And that's fine. Work at home. Communities buy micro reactors, Starlink ready to go. Low carbon produce that doesn't have chemical shit all over it. Maybe testosterone rates go up, maybe cancer rates go down. Probably a good idea all around.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids[1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/N1KvgtEnABY
I guess a lot of people got triggered by the first words and never finished reading after the downvote.
Such an amazing movie...
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you might be right. It is just me noticing my own behavior patterns and extending it to the greater populace which is not correct. I had a pleasure to live in village, small city and big city. I feel I use much more resources in bigger city. Distance to the mall is similar, but all the free-time activities in the city consume energy. While in the village I mostly just walked the forest and worked on the garde…
I think the logical mistake is that I am able & willing to live simpler life in the village. But that won't be true for most.
The people I know who don't live in a city drive much more than people who do (I don't mean the suburbs of course, I mean little towns)