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Remote work has the potential to make neighborhoods more dynamic. With more people at home, there's more demand for nearby coffee shops, entertainment, food options. I prefer the decentralized neighborhood approach to the hub and spoke model where you commute to a big city from the boring suburbs.
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Then you run into local zoning. I for one would love more mixed zoning in neighborhoods on city boundaries, but too many entrenched interests at the moment
I live in the UK and local shops, restaurants are ubuiquitous. Is that really something that is actively legislated against in the US?
Yes. Zoning in the US tends to be restrictive and exclusionary, as in a given area is zoned for one type of use to the exclusion of any other. This means an area zoned residential does not allow any commercial use, not a local grocery, not a restaurant, not a barber shop. Furthermore, residential zones tend to be further restricted in order to preclude any sort of MDU or even townhouse, it's common for suburbia to have miles and miles of "single family" (exclusively detached residential) zoning.
And this is not small cities in the boondocks, Seattle, Charlotte, Arlingon, or San Jose, are above 80% single-family zoning.
Personally - I don't want to live in a city, or a town, or even a neighborhood. I don't mind seeing my neighbors but I don't want to hear them and I don't really want to interact with them. I'm perfectly happy driving 30 minutes or 45 minutes into town to run errands. I don't think that living out in the suburbs (or further) is "boring" because I don't like crowds and I'm not going to do anything that people in cities do for "fun" anyway.
I'm living in a suburb now because I need to be close to work - and for my career involving hardware, that's unlikely to ever change. But if I could truly work 100% remote and I knew this would last me 10 years - I'd move somewhere further away in a heartbeat.
If you think the world is made up mostly of people like me - you think remote work is going to devastate cities because who in their right mind would want to live there if not for work? If you think the world is made up mostly of people who want to live in cities in the first place - you think remote work will make cities better because a lot of disadvantages of city living are due to the need to accommodate a daily commute.
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> convert office buildings into housing Can't be done. Office buildings of significant size are not engineered for 24/7 human occupation. The sewer will be inadequate. The water will be inadequate. Retrofitting this would be spectacularly expensive, if it's even possible, as mechanical and plumbing chases are sized for the original design requirements and are difficult (if not impossible) to alter. It may be possible…
Even ignoring the effort needed and it's cost: who want to reside in former office buildings if now downtown areas start to be depopulated from local workers and so services built for them?
> cities must let developers convert office buildings into housing This is an Activist piece - not an Analysis piece. You cannot trust facts reported in an article that's advocating change. It cherry picks a number of facts in order to further the arguments.
> convert office buildings into housing Can't be done. Office buildings of significant size are not engineered for 24/7 human occupation. The sewer will be inadequate. The water will be inadequate. Retrofitting this would be spectacularly expensive, if it's even possible, as mechanical and plumbing chases are sized for the original design requirements and are difficult (if not impossible) to alter. It may be possible…
Put another way, what matters is the maximum volume the electrical, sewer, HVAC, elevators, emergency power, etc can handle. If it is scoped to handle 1,000 people for 8 hours of a day, it will do just fine for 300 people 24 hours per day.
> Also, when some natural disaster hits and the city loses power? You can't go home. Your home is 50 floors up.
I mean, you’re acting like 50-story residence buildings don’t exist, when in fact they do in many cities already.
Some cities, perhaps. I live in a large (for the Midwest) city in the heartland and previously, being a software engineer around here topped out at ~150k if you had 25 years of experience. (This was literally quoted to me by our most “illustrious” local company, which is just a big government/bigco contracting place). I got very lucky in finding a highly unusual job paying >>> median wage (but still very light compar…
I am planning on living on a farming locale like yours. Being a software professional what is your internet connectivity like ? If wanted to run a fiber how much would that cost ?
I don’t think you could even get a response from someone at the local ISPs to laugh at you for asking about running fiber though, so you do have to pre-check that if (since) it’s important to you. (I did). It’s ATT and Spectrum (née Charter) around here.
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The real concern is that companies that are 100% remote will pick Romaina and not Iowa.
Why is that the real concern? Are Romanians (or Indians for that matter) somehow less deserving of higher pay than Iowans?
The same goes for people in Romania who absolutely understand the exact same thing. They prefer jobs to be in their country.
It is legitimate for people to worry whether jobs will be where they live or elsewhere.
Remote work has the potential to make neighborhoods more dynamic. With more people at home, there's more demand for nearby coffee shops, entertainment, food options. I prefer the decentralized neighborhood approach to the hub and spoke model where you commute to a big city from the boring suburbs.
I would love more concentrated neighborhoods like I’ve seen in many places across Europe many other places across Europe dont have this or most people arent conveniently located but my point is that this doesn't seem to be an option at all in the US, unless you are in a nice development within one or two cities. not an option in the suburbs anywhere to my knowledge.
My long-term prediction: Rural areas and exurbs will up-class, housing the higher-paid remote workers. The remaining non-farming rural poor will be priced out of these properties and will have to live in cities, in ever smaller apartments and eventually pods. The nice services that often are only available in cities currently will distribute more evenly geographically, negating a lot of the benefits of city life. Thi…
There are still huge returns to concentrating nice in-person things besides work in one place. Nobody is attending zoos, museums, or restaurants remotely.