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Remote work is gutting downtowns

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Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#211

Post by cyberpunk »

ar_lan wrote: post #178
wildrhythms wrote: post #3

These 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.

Living in the Bay Area, I really can't afford to live close to my office. I have to drive to Palo Alto from San Jose (or take the train). Pre-pandemic, my drive averaged 1hr to the office, and 1.5hrs back. So, I'm wasting 2.5 hrs of my life every day... to do the same exact job I do from home (not to mention cost of gas/car maintenance). I also get more done at home, because I haven't reduced my hours any, but I don'…

I really love it how even on days where our team is in the office, if just one person can't make it (quite likely) then almost all the meetings are virtual anyway. Sitting in a room together with headphones in zoom meetings! Brilliant. :D

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#212

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #199
ar_lan wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in the Bay Area, I really can't afford to live close to my office. I have to drive to Palo Alto from San Jose (or take the train). Pre-pandemic, my drive averaged 1hr to the office, and 1.5hrs back. So, I'm wasting 2.5 hrs of my life every day... to do the same exact job I do from home (not to mention cost of gas/car maintenance). I also get more done at home, because I haven't reduced my hours any, but I don'…

For a while, I used to commute from Santa Cruz to north San Jose for work. Since then, I absolutely factor my commute into my compensation, and anything more than an hour total commute per day is an additional premium. Factor in how terrible driving has become in the bay area, and I'm of half a mind to begin asking for hazard pay for commuting.

Especially on that Hwy17

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#213

Post by snapplebobapple »

smileysteve wrote: post #191
snapplebobapple wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

anecdotally, this is marketing bs / wishful thinking. I've been on a handful of flights in the last 2 years where the air system didn't work at all, and others where the climate control system was otherwise failing (80°F). This is accentuated by stale air when you embark and disembark when the aux generators aren't providing power.

How old were the planes that this happened on? There has definitely been a dramatic improvement over the years. I remember flying in the 90's and pretty uniformly feeling like I needed at least a good face wash, if not a shower after any flight longer than a half hour. Now this only happens when I am unlucky enough to get stuck on an old aircraft (i.e. the original westjet 737's still get me with this). I swear I saw a paper on this being tested showing particle diffusion on some newer crafter being really impressive for how it kept your particles around you until they were removed and replaced with fresh ones fairly quickly but I can't remember enough to find a link to the study to back this statement up.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#214

Post by brookst »

PraetorianGourd wrote: post #200
brookst wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super interested in your industry! What makes conversion of office towers to housing not viable? It's easy for me to imagine a lot of objections to converting one building, but hard to imagine insurmountable difficulties in converting 1000, where you can amortize R&D and specialized equipment across a huge number of properties. So, if you don't mind humoring me, can you sketch the worst / most expensive / most techni…

Think of the layout of a modern office tower. Nearly open floor plans, one or two multi-user bathrooms per floor, one or two kitchenettes per floor. Designs optimized for ingress and egress via a single path. Sound abatement is minimal. Support columns are in the open. So at minimum, you would need to plumb and power each "apartment" which would require essentially a complete replacement of the plumbing in place, as…

All good points, but given the prospect of getting a building essentially for free (minus tax/maintenance) and having substantial one-time costs... that sounds like a pretty good deal.

Many office towers have much higher ceilings than typical apartment buildings. Pretty sure a 12" subfloor would solve many of the issues you raise. And many office towers are designed to support multiple tenants per floor.

I'm not dismissing the difficulty, just saying that the scale economics seem very attractive for a high fixed cost, low variable cost, long term annuity investment. I'm either wrong or ahead of my time, but it's not like I've got the funding to put money where my mouth is.

> the blight that a lot of west coast city centers are seeing

I don't see how that's relevant. The shift to WFH is global; these problems/opportunities are just as real in London or Sydney or Shanghai.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#215

Post by brookst »

rsync wrote: post #194
brookst wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super interested in your industry! What makes conversion of office towers to housing not viable? It's easy for me to imagine a lot of objections to converting one building, but hard to imagine insurmountable difficulties in converting 1000, where you can amortize R&D and specialized equipment across a huge number of properties. So, if you don't mind humoring me, can you sketch the worst / most expensive / most techni…

If you search for it you will find a fairly recent episode of KQED "forum" that discussed this topic for a full hour.

Thank you! Will find and listen.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#216

Post by lamontcg »

sokoloff wrote: post #175
jghn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the plane's filtration is good, if the person 3 feet away from you is coughing it's not going to be that good. I'd rather rely on the combination of filtration & a mask. Defense in depth. Day to day i'm not religious about masking, but for things like public transportation, airplanes, etc I try to always have face protection on.

Pressurized airplanes have air changes per hour in the 12-16 range. That's above the ASHRAE recommended 6-12 air changes per hour for places that may contain viruses. (Obviously, ASHRAE isn't the CDC or healthcare organization directly, but they do know a few things about standards setting for HVAC.) Excellent filtration isn't as relevant when the average air molecule is in the aircraft for only 5-10 minutes. The sta…

The studied COVID outbreaks on planes show that this still isn't sufficient. I'm also pretty sure I got sick from the kid sitting directly behind me on the plane when I got influenza.

You can site all the statistics and propaganda in the world about plane ventilation. It clearly isn't enough to prevent viral spread (I don't care about air changes per hour or cfm or anything else, the only endpoint worth discussing is viral spread--I give precisely zero fucks about how fast the air is moving around). I'm using n95s on planes from here on out.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#217

Post by lamontcg »

clcaev wrote: post #162
ahelwer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I went from being sick roughly one week out of every 1-2 months before covid to only getting sick maybe once a year now that I mask in public places, thoroughly wash my hands with soap every time I arrive somewhere, and occasionally wash my phone. Never going back. This whole "train your immune system" thing is BS. Hygiene is important!

I muse to myself, without a shred of evidence, that masks do "train your immune system". Since they are no where near perfect, pathogens do make it though. However, the "initial viral load" is much smaller, giving your body more time to mount an effective defense. So, I would like to believe you are not neglecting your immune system by masking. Rather, by not overloading it, just being less sick than the unmasked, on…

> However, the "initial viral load" is much smaller, giving your body more time to mount an effective defense.

That's a myth from the early pandemic. Viral dose doesn't correlate with disease severity:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-relationship-viral-do...

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#218

Post by trap_goes_hot »

TwoCent wrote: post #144
Jiejeing wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no scientific basis for this assumption (the idea that you rake in immunity "debt" by not getting sick, leading to worse symptoms /when/ you get sick).

It seems plausible that the immune system requires stressors to function well, and the absence of stressors may reduce immune system "strength". Selye's general adaptation syndrome seems applicable here as a first approximation. Muscles atrophy from disuse. Why not also immune systems?

The immune system is never dormant. It is constantly engaged. We don't live in a sterile environment, don't eat perfect sterile food, don't breathe perfect air, etc. There are multiple aspects to our immune system, and a lot of them are being stressed daily.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#219

Post by neutronicus »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #163
rbanffy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in the city is great for young people who have no kids - lots of entertainment options a short walk away. It's noisier/busier/dirtier (EVs will help A LOT with noise and pollution). Living further out is much nicer when you have kids - more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore.

And nowhere for them to go by themselves? Living in the suburbs as a tween/teenager is death.

Tween, maybe. It's pretty normalized for families to add [a] car[s] as kids age into driving so in practice affluent 16-year-olds lead pretty independent social lives. And this was the case for my own adolescence back in the early-mid aughts so I imagine now there's both more stuff in the suburbs and more widespread car access for teens.

As an urban father of a three-year-old I'm actually anxious about how much stuff seems to be 21+ or expensive in my city (Baltimore). In principle we're a short electric scooter ride from trendy eateries, coffee shops, theaters, music venues, etc. But my wife is super-scared of crime and traffic so I don't know if this will actually translate into him being more independent than a typical suburban teenager.

Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns

#220

Post by sangnoir »

prpl wrote: post #139
MengerSponge wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most everyone I knew when I worked in a grocery store basically never got sick, including my dad. He’s get sick once every 4-5 years maybe. People would call in sick, but it would be to miss a day. Working in a grocery store, especially as a cashier, can be unpleasant to disgusting at times, especially when cash was a bit more common. I think you’re around everything all the time that your immune system tends to beef…

This comment is an indirect appeal to nature: protecting yourself from exposure to pathogens is better than low level exposure if your intention is to not fall ill. I've seen a number of ill-looking grocery store employees (coughing, sneezing, sniffling, the works) before, during and "after" COVID.

Wearing masks does not compromise one's immune system: it just shields you from exposure to respiratory bugs. Kids are getting hammered because people have relaxed on wearing masks, so they are now more exposed than before.

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