After covid we have some vague stats and yeah not everybody enjoy full remote. But 1) there's a large pool of people that do, 2) you can have hybrid 3) unless no other colleague goes to the workplace you may enjoy some workplace social context 4) we need to reduce energy expenditure and not commuting seems like a massive gain.
I expect that over time our use of space will adapt to this new reality but it will probably take a decade.
I definitely see older or taller office buildings renovating and rezoning to become mixed co-working and/or living spaces suited to remote work.
Not just that but also I could see commercial space be divided up into premium one-person office spaces wired with fast internet and set up for video conferencing.
I hope this is the direction we see, but going from offices/commercial to residential is a much heavier lift than just zoning. Like, just consider the plumbing situation in a reasonably large office building. People living there will require more significant renovations than just putting up new walls. It is fixable, but it isn't cheap, and because it isn't cheap, "will it happen" gets some question marks.
Right now I do hybrid work and it’s great, it’s easy to get away from the house and work from a nearby city. There’s little-to-no traffic where I live, so the commute is short and enjoyable. If I want after work I can jump in the car and drive to the mountains or go pick something up at the store, or go see a friend. The car operates on my schedule.
Moving away from this seems like stepping back into the 19th century. Usually when I hear people complain about cars they live somewhere that’s over-crowded with poor road infrastructure, traffic, and inflated taxes and energy costs. Sure if you live in that scenario maybe commuting sucks, but most of the USA isn’t like that.
So (honest question), you think people doing remote-friendly jobs are in dense urban areas and don't contribute to car emission much ? so when these guys relocate far away, they're going to switch from public transportation to car ?
I don’t think this, I know this. Today the Census dropped data showing there was a net population loss in SF and NYC. If you look at a map of energy use by county (e.g. Google image search for “energy by county”) it shows folks leaving places like NYC and SF are going to increase their energy use.
This is what is happening. Over the past 2 years, people have left cities with solid public transit (SF, Chicago, NYC) and have been moving towards car centric areas in places like Arizona, Florida, Texas.
Yup. We are reversing a lot of efforts society put into reducing sprawl. More and more cookie cutter houses built on what was once a forest… taking with it tons of wildlife.
This was already happening prior to WFH spurred by pandemic. Housing prices were sharply increasing in many major cities, causing people to relocate elsewhere due to lack of affordable supply.
