Glad to hear it. Employers treated their workers like cattle, stuffing them together into ever shrinking spaces. I'll never go back to that torture.
Remote work is gutting downtowns
151–160 of 262 posts
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#152These 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.
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…
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Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#153A 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…
Once you realize that privilege means being able to afford prioritizing movement and your health, you'll take the socioeconomic exemption that walkable cities provide
Nearly everything about the advertised American way is the opposite, so just unsubscribe and enjoy the few areas of the US that cater to it, they are more expensive for rational reasons
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#154How about an alternate headline: "remote work revitalizes small towns, allows people to spend more time with their friends and families"?
If you haven't felt it already the management consultants and CEOs are doing everything they can to damage remote work. I even heard the other day from one of these types that "studies show in-office work is more productive".
Its just a reminder that no matter what your pay and benefits "we are family" is always bullshit. Their goal is to simply extract maximum life from you at any cost. Despite increasing employee safety (no need to drive), reducing overall employee costs, and increasing employee health and welfare overall they will take all of this away. You can even find shills and company men here in this very forum touting the "astounding benefits" of office work.
At my current gig all of our remote benefits were taken away to encourage us to come into the office but the company would not say, officially, remote work is over.
Fuck these people.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It can be done, it can be tolerated, it's just not a very good or competitive product I agree with everything you said, just want to highlight that this quote is the classic statement of a business opportunity. There is a VC pitch here: a company that acquired distressed office space at scale, from panicked sellers, and with the expertise to do these conversions in a systematic, cost-optimized way. Banks are going…
I work in the adaptive reuse industry converting history office buildings into hotels or apartments. We've looked at a number of modern era office towers, and housing is simply not viable. To your point though.. ironically, urban factories and warehousing seems to me to be the best use. Can you build a small electric vehicle or iPhones with the assembly line going from top to bottom? Banks are already there for unloa…
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 technically difficult requirements for converting an office tower to apartments? I suspect you're probably right, given you've got domain knowledge and I don't, it just feels like one of those problems that becomes more tractable at scale.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#156Good! There's finally a way to escape the awful, soul-sucking residential zoning prison that keeps people trapped in a suburban hellscape. The idea of settling into a 1+ hour daily commute for the rest of your life is genuinely depressing & terrifying.
I'm thrilled that there's a chance (at the moment) to escape that nightmare. I will never willingly commute in a car ever again.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#157HBO Max has a documentary about the Automat, which was once America's largest chain restaurant. You could put in coins and receive food from small automated doors and spigots at the Automat. Its downfall came with expansion of the suburbs, as there were fewer people remaining in the city center after work. The present crisis of city centers seems similar. I'm not sure if the relevance of city centers has basically be…
The term automat refers to a model of food distribution. [0] The movie [1] is about a specific firm, Horn & Hardart [2]. I don't think I'd agree with a thesis that suburbs were the direct cause of H&H's automat chain's decline. Logistically, there is a balance of preparation, freshness and transaction latency. The automat inverted freshness and transaction to prep latency from trad restaurants. The arrival of "fast food" used standardization to decrease prep and transaction latency from trad restaurant levels while maintaining freshness levels. In terms of payment tech, I'm not able to find a reference but my recollection is that automated bill accepting technology not common until the 1980s. If automats were unable to accept bills then they would be unable to offer higher value meals without human intervention (and lose their transaction latency advantage). [3]
The format was threatened by the arrival of fast food, served over the counter and with more payment flexibility than traditional automats. . . . Another contributing factor to their demise was the inflation of the 1970s, increasing food prices which made the use of coins increasingly inconvenient in a time before bill acceptors commonly appeared on vending equipment.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Automat
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_%26_Hardart
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_detector
Edit: removed first sentence "It's like a failure of imagination is cyclical." which had to do with H&H and other's ability to pivot, which H&H did in spades.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#158Gutting the downtowns of major cities perhaps. I personally think that remote work will be a bit of an equalizer that’ll allow more people to live in more affordable areas of the country. While it’s not glamorous, my hometown has 3,000 sqft lake homes for sale ranging from $350-700k. I have a few friends who have moved back home with their remote jobs and they are funneling that money into local bars and restaurants which desperately need it.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same perspective here. Even as a rural-boy-turned-inveterate-urbanite, I'm happy that people who don't want to live in the city are decreasingly forced to live in the city due to their jobs. There are plenty of people out there like me who were looking to escape to the city but who were stymied by all the people living in the city who wanted to escape to the country. I just prefer density and walkability/bikeability.
I think the more people are living where they want to and not where they're forced to the happier people will be in general. Especially as the "city" fills up with "city people" they hopefully will stop voting so strongly against "city".
> Especially as the "city" fills up with "city people" they hopefully will stop voting so strongly against "city".
It'll be interesting to see if the obverse is true.
My suspicion is that the US will continue to self-select along political and social lines, as it seems to have been doing since ~2000.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#160Earlier 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…
> 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. When I visited Hong Kong in 2008 I was amazed by how many people wore masks (presumably because they were either feeling sick or were worried about getting sick). It's too bad that post-COVID masks have become associated with auth…
> COVID masks have become associated with authoritarian government overreach
I wonder why?