On youtube, Notjustbikes states that mixed commercial/residential areas solve most transportation problems. Living in such an area, I absolutely concur.
Remote work’s toll on cities
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Re: Remote work’s toll on cities
#62Remote 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.
Urban planners and other entrenched interests are a huge obstacle to progress in the US.
humorous way to say it, since architects and their cousins, urban planners, have had vast and creative ideas for decades, while local government, real estate sales and their colleagues, real estate lending have crushed their hopes with coffee each day.
source: professional urban planning office in California
Re: Remote work’s toll on cities
#63> 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…
Conversions from business to mixed or residential have happened so it's not an impossible thing either e.g. 70 Pine Street.
And while business buildings are not internally designed for 24/7 occupancy, their accesses are scoped for much higher occupancy as businesses tend to have denser occupancies than residential.
So most of the problem is the interior setting, which has to be retrofit anyway.
> Also, when some natural disaster hits and the city loses power? You can't go home. Your home is 50 floors up. Nobody is walking that.
Residential towers exist all over the world. And that's literally what Billionaire's Row is.
Re: Remote work’s toll on cities
#64poor-man's market research:
Would you (not your belief about others) be interested in co-working / co-living locales, in different countries (think Costa Rica, Tenerife, Zanzibar) with excellent maintained QoS connectivity, and (higher tier offering) where your right to work (local work visa) for your home-country employer / clients was looked after by the company hosting the network of sites? Goal: to liberate you to maintain your employ but hopping from locale to locale on a monthly or even weekly basis, with diverse life experiences to go with it.
(cue HNers posting links of offerings that already exist but I promise from experience don't really offer at any ubiquity or scale)
Important caveat: assume your home country's tax regulations have no contest with your working physically from outside its borders.
Re: Remote work’s toll on cities
#65Some 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'm both excited for you and worried that over the medium to long term, companies will adjust the pay down to match people's locales and such salaries will be lower over time from more competition. But as I said, excited for you as it currently stands :-)
I think - and obviously this is speculation - that “real” software companies (where their primary product is a software thingy with appropriate unit economics) will not really be able to lower comp regardless of where it is. There’s a reason engineers in SF get paid 300-500k TC easy, and it’s because they generate multiples of that in return. Software is ridiculously high-margin and (not to toot our collective on horn, but) it’s not something anyone can just do, especially at the mix of technical and soft skills that many FAANG type places require you to be at once you’re at senior/staff levels.
And let’s be honest, if places really could, they would’ve already outsourced to people where COL is 99% lower instead of 20-50% lower.
I do think people tend to overestimate how much cheaper it is to live in flyover country. Even real estate isn’t that% much cheaper unless you’re literally buying a farm with no good internet. And iPhones cost the exact same. So it’s not like companies will be eyeing Kansas as the next India or Estonia. It’s just not enough of an arbitrage to be worth it. Most places I looked at recently were only geo-adjusting base comp by either 0 or 10%.
This is all for senior software eng positions though. Junior and mid positions might be a very different story due to supply being so much higher.
Re: Remote work’s toll on cities
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Is it a real concern? Obviously if you live in Iowa, yes.
Re: Remote work’s toll on cities
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I bought a house in a suburb a few years back. There is a little convenience store in the neighborhood a few blocks walk. Also a little Italian restaurant. It's pretty neat but this is the first time I've had this in 25+ years. Generally residential means residential. Nice part is it's pretty hidden inside the neighborhood so almost all clientele is local. I probably wouldn't like it if it was convenient to a major road and traffic was pulled in.
Re: Remote work’s toll on cities
#68My 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…
this has already happened a few times. then the cities get cheap, people move in, gentrification happens, poor people move out of the cities and repeat
Re: Remote work’s toll on cities
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is that the real concern? Are Romanians (or Indians for that matter) somehow less deserving of higher pay than Iowans?
I think that it is because speaker is an American and for Americans, business being in America is better then the one in Romania. 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.
My question was mostly retorical. I know that prioritizing fellow citizens is common in almost every country. But I think it is in most cases not morally justifiable, especially in the US where almost everyone is descendent of low single-digit generation immigrants. Not to mention 0-generation immigrants especially in California. (It wouldn't surprise me if there are more highly paid Californian SWE with family in India or China than in Iowa.)
Re: Remote work’s toll on cities
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for remote positions, how does that work? Does everyone move when they change jobs in a city?
You could. Lots of people do things like that. You could also live near public transportation that might change the definition of "near" for some workers. I personally have never gotten a new job in the same city as my last.
> I personally have never gotten a new job in the same city as my last.
If you don't mind me asking, how old are you?