[asfasgasg]

"Stop liking what I don't like," in twenty inches? Listen, some people want a short commute. There's nothing bad about Google building housing near its campus. It's good for the environment, good for health, good for the city, good for employees.

Hell, it's even good for family, which the author seems hung up on. You know what you're not doing while driving home from work for forty five minutes? I would accept an arbitrarily short commute to work. If there were reasonably priced dwellings in the building I work at, I would live there. More time to play with my kid, cook dinner, or whatever else.

And then he goes on to complain about affordable urban housing. Well, is it sinister to live near work, or isn't it? I agree that WeLive's prices are very high for someone who intends to stay put. But . . . that's not what they're for? Should we get rid of hotels too?

[Bjorkbat]

I would argue that at the least it's a little absurd that we're resorting to corporate housing and "work-dorms" for lack of a better term when we could just simply shift more work to small and mid-size cities. Get your short commute, live in an actual house.

I mean, it's kind of silly to imagine a small cluster of Google employees in a metro of approximately 200,000 people, but at some point it has to sound less silly than some of the proposed ways of fitting more people into a metro with 3x-5x rent prices.

[AstralStorm]

There is but one risk which USA has seen in the past. When the company owns your living space, there is even stronger pressure on you to stay there, be productive and accept lower wages. When it also owns your food source, the threat is even greater. The result would be replacement of wages with "benefits" such as living. Technical indentured servitude also known as soft slavery. Technically you could move, except you cannot ever possibly afford to.

Additional stress would be put on people not in this arrangement as they would potentially have to spend more money to get at the same level. (Albeit there could be less pressure in the housing market.)

The next step in this slippery slope would be inheritance. Since company owns everything, your kids inherit little. Either that, or they inherit a position... Welcome to actual indentured servitude again. Company branded kids straight out of a few known dystopias.

Mostly because moving is a special kind of hell, especially with kids. Communities cannot form either way.

Some people like it, they're a minority though as far as I know.

[stakhanov]

...the thing about WeWork, however, is that you don't work for them, they work for you. Corporate housing was also done a lot in the post-WW2 reindustrialization of Europe. But coupled with strong tenant protections, it's not such a destructive force at the end of the day. A corporate couldn't kick you out of corporate housing just because you no longer worked there.

[AstralStorm]

All of this is fine until collusion...

With current US competition protections a cartel likely will happen a few times or more. Since there is "competition" between companies, even if all of them are doing the same thing.

[coldtea]

>...the thing about WeWork, however, is that you don't work for them, they work for you.

Give it time. Besides, when there's as large a dependency as "I get my livelihood through the services they offer" it might as well be the other way around, as one can't just drop them that easily.

[ronaldl93]

Golden Handcuffs

[lsc]

> I would argue that at the least it's a little absurd that we're resorting to corporate housing and "work-dorms" for lack of a better term when we could just simply shift more work to small and mid-size cities. Get your short commute, live in an actual house.

the problem is workplace choice. I can walk from my house to Broadcom, EMC, drobo, Palo Alto Networks, Dell, citrix, and hundreds of tiny tech companies. 10 minutes in an uber takes me to google, facebook, linkedin, etc, etc,...

This means that switching jobs has a much lower cost.

The problem with small towns is that each one is only going to support one big employer. You often must move next time you want a new job.

My favored solution is to simply upzone near train stops. I'd be happy to abide by a rule that I couldn't own a car in the city if you would sell me a small condo without parking near a train station. (I don't have a car as-is, for that matter, though this will likely change once uber stops dumping)

[jaggederest]

It would be handy if people could work from wherever they liked.

Maybe we could build a large system that allowed rapid communication. We could include a software layer, so that not just verbal communication could happen, but even information in all sorts of other formats.

We could call it the GlobalSys. Then commutes would stop being a problem.

/s

I've been working from home, wherever I wanted that to be, since 2011. All of this nonsense could be avoided by simply optimizing for asynchronous cooperation via the internet.

We could also avoid some of the approximately 12% of total energy usage devoted to maintaining office space, and some of the 10%+ of urban land usage taken up by offices and parking. That's all leaving aside the approximately 50%+ of all driving miles done for commuting purposes, the maintenance and manufacturing of automobiles for commuting, etc.

[lsc]

Personally, I am a lot less effective when I work from home. I need the social pressure of being in the office around other people that are working to stay focused.

But I've hired some incredible people that I totally wouldn't be able to afford in person who were able to be pretty effective working remote. I have worked with people who are absolute monsters when you leave them alone at home with a problem. Certainly, some people are far more effective working remote than working in the office. I'm just not one of them. In my experience... I am in the majority here.

(interestingly, I think I'm a better manager when managing remote than managing in person, the opposite of my effectiveness as an individual contributor. though I think that might also have had something to do with the sort of people I've managed.)

Right now, the market values people willing to go into an office who are able to communicate well face to face and get work done in that context a lot more than the market values people who are able to make themselves effective while working remote, though, and I think that's in part due to the preponderance of people who are more effective workers when they are physically near other workers? But... certainly part of that is that management is behind the times.

[jaggederest]

I don't think that management is behind the times. I think that the fundamental problem is that management has no real way to value individual contribution, and thus no way to pay people according to their value, rather than tradition, random guessing, or whatever their peers make. It's easy with salespeople, which is why so many work independently. It's much, much harder with an engineer or product designer.

Remote work requires better ability to follow the money through the process and that kind of close accounting is very threatening to a lot of people.

I also think that if we invested similar sums of money to what we spend on office space instead on collaboration technology, you'd see the effectiveness differential between remote and onsite work go down substantially.

[KC8ZKF]

The commutes would stop being a problem for what is still a minority of workers. If you are in manufacturing, retail, construction, food service, etc. telecommuting is just not an option.

[jaggederest]

> Broadcom, EMC, drobo, Palo Alto Networks, Dell, citrix, and hundreds of tiny tech companies.

> google, facebook, linkedin, etc

Any of those qualify? That's what the parent post was talking about, and that's about a million people in the bay area alone that could skip a commute.

I did say some. The whole point is, for anyone who can telecommute, they should. As a matter of not just personal freedom but social responsibility.

[imtringued]

I think the assumption is that these people can afford to live closer to where they work because of the reduced housing demand.

[eksemplar]

We just need better city planning. It used to be that the core of the city was stores, then came a ring of expensive apartments then industry then suburbs.

That division doesn’t really make sense now that industry isn’t really polluting and people are buying much of their things online.

[mhneu]

This is an interesting insight.

Yes, as industry has changed and retail has changed, city layouts should change too. It’s not just suburban malls that are affect by changing retail.

[whorleater]

>some point it has to sound less silly than some of the proposed ways of fitting more people into a metro with 3x-5x rent prices.

This ignores the reality that a lot of people want to live in urban areas

[stakhanov]

I agree that the way forward has to lie in companies being more willing to locate job opportunities where people are, rather than expecting people to relocate to where companies are willing to provide job opportunities to. It's completely silly that such a big part of the value being created by clusters of economic activity, such as large corporates, startup clusters etc, should end up in the pockets of landlords who happen to own real estate there, plus generating inefficiencies like traffic congestion etc.

[jahewson]

Interesting use of the phrase “just simply“.

[adamsea]

I think you may have missed a central, if not primary point of the article.

From TFA:

"It is time, too, that we begin to understand that the great wave of popular resentment sweeping across advanced societies is partly about the way the modern economy shreds some of people’s most basic emotional attachments. We all know the modern rules: millions of people have to leave where they grew up to find even halfway dependable work; and they find that creating any kind of substitute home somewhere new is impossible. For people at the bottom of the economic hierarchy, life proves to be unendingly precarious and often itinerant."

[asfasgasg]

I don't buy that "the great wave of popular resentment" is driven by the type and quality of housing options provided to techies. I can buy that life proves too itinerant for people at the bottom, but as far as I could see, the types of housing and services described in the article do not represent a delta for the people at the bottom.

[coldtea]

>"Stop liking what I don't like," in twenty inches?

No, stop making the workforce into indentured slaves, in regular print.

If it was just for those that "like it" it would be fine (and not under discussion -- people could work like that in 1985 too, if they were so inclined).

The troublesome part is the whole culture that grows around this, and infects work relations and expectations even from unwilling people.

(It's the same notion as undercutting).

[asfasgasg]

The people affected by these types of housing situations (except those in China) are generally wealthy, even by first world standards. Referring them as indentured slaves (not a thing, by the way -- there are indentured servants, and slaves) is unreasonable.

[coldtea]

>not a thing, by the way -- there are indentured servants, and slaves

I was making a point, akin to "wage slave".

Just because you entered a contract doesn't mean you weren't coerced into it (the inverse is the perennial argument of those OK with no minimal wage and sweatshop labor).

[18973294]

>"Stop liking what I don't like,"

That isn't the argument though. The argument is that people who don't want what you like are forced to do it.

>Listen, some people want a short commute.

This is like the "would you like to help the disabled" line that people selling things on the street say.

>Hell, it's even good for family, which the author seems hung up on. You know what you're not doing while driving home from work for forty five minutes? I would accept an arbitrarily short commute to work. If there were reasonably priced dwellings in the building I work at, I would live there. More time to play with my kid, cook dinner, or whatever else.

I had to live below a family with 3 kids for a year. There was constant running on my ceiling. "thump thump thump" all day and night. Apartments are not really designed for kids. In fact, they aren't really designed for anybody, which is why everybody buys houses where it is possible. I don't feel like I have any privacy here because there are always people very close to me. Most people just shut all their windows and pull the blinds down. Living in a windowless box is not ideal.

>Well, is it sinister to live near work, or isn't it?

I think he is complaining about the fact that you have to move away from where you grew up and that the options available for housing are basically a dorm room.

[8bitsrule]

If I recall my oater history correctly, the ranchers used to house ka-boys in 'bunkhouses'.

Back to the article, though: the idea of 'Roams' where travelling contractors hang out and ply their trade, IS a new and a intriguing development. Pretty much the opposite of a cubicle & commute life.

[toss1]

True, and if you really want to examine the history, go back to farming, where there was a zero commute -- you woke up and walked over to the barn to start caring for the animals, then breakfast, and walk around the barn to tend the fields.

For craftsmen and merchants, seems they typically lived in the same building as their shop.

I didn't see anyone complaining about that as somehow degrading the human experience.

Seems like no big deal, just what is the most practical living/working arrangement in a given situation.

[systemtest]

Look at the bigger picture. I spend 1.5 hours per day commuting, but the higher pay means I have to work less.

High paying job, LCOL area: 6 months, 21 working days per month at 9.5 hours per day is 1197 hours per year.

Mid to low paying job, LCOL area: 11 months, 21 working days per month at 8.25 hours per day is 1905 hours per year.

It is a choice to make. Spend an extra hour each evening with your family or spend every other month completely with your family. The magic of geo-arbitrage.

[vertexFarm]

I think you're deliberately confusing what they're talking about. Sure, having a walkable urban center where everyone lives close to the things they need and they don't create dystopian traffic is great.

But company housing, tenements, indebted servitude, working hours from can't-see until can't-see, is all a spectre from our not-so-distant past which we have mostly forgotten about. Well it's coming back. A labor revolution gave us such amazing leaps in dignity and basic humanity which were sorely lacking after the eruption of the industrial revolution. We take that entirely for granted now, like it can't come back and get us. It can.

People in America are just not educated enough about the horrors of the labor revolution. Our own, not the communist's overseas. Unions exist in this strange historical agnosticism, and people only know them as some kind of cartoon, a mob-ruled bureaucracy that enables hilariously lazy laborers to cite ridiculous rules and get in the way of progress. Well they weren't always that way. It is not common human decency that stops the captains of industry from merely hiring private police forces to mow bad workers down with rifles and artillery. That's our past as well as our cyberpunk future. That stuff can come back if we don't keep maintaining the levee between it and us.

People have an instinct to normalize and rationalize things which happen slowly compared to a human lifetime. Well there's a very real and disastrous difference today in how people work and maintain a decent living. It's becoming more and more like back when a decent living was only reserved for the insanely wealthy, the richest of the rich. Everyone else toiled in disease and squalor fourteen hours a day, breaking their bodies, without any possessions of their own; everything belonged to the company, and they worked just for the privilege to live a week at a time. It really wasn't that long ago. We like to hope that if it comes back we'll still be behind the fence of the upper-middle class, safe from the horror. But the vast majority of us won't.

Working is taking up more and more of our days. Gone is the 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours leisure. It's going back to "as many hours as you can physically go without sleep" once again. No benefits, no retirement, no healthcare, no affordable higher education, no affordable family housing aside from company closet tenements with communal utilities, next to a corporate campus but far from a town center. Out in the suburbs with one company store. That will come back in our complacence. Fewer opportunities than our fathers.

[wincy]

Geez man just relax a bit and move to a smaller city. I make 100k and live in a 2200 square foot house with 3 grocery stores within walking distance and a 10 minute commute. Life is pretty easy, I make websites for my companies marketing team. I don’t even have a high school diploma. Nobody is pressuring me to work as many hours a day as possible.

California and New York are not the whole world, and things are really great for raising a family in the Midwest. Both of those places seem like a dystopia borne of the city councils own design and people’s willingness to live in a bad environment.

And billionaires aren’t going to treat everyone super terrible because any billionaire knows if the peasants aren’t getting their bread instead they want the riches heads. That’s not really a great gambit if you’re ultra rich.

[HumanDrivenDev]

Geez man just relax a bit and move to a smaller city. I make 100k and live in a 2200 square foot house with 3 grocery stores within walking distance and a 10 minute commute. Life is pretty easy, I make websites for my companies marketing team.

Unfortunately not all of us live in America :( 100k USD for a run of the mill web-developer is just not going to happen where I am (New Zealand), and housing is much more expensive too.

[nisten]

If you're ultra-rich you can just go to your backup home in New Zealand and comfortably watch all your peasants starve.

[voltagex_]

100k is far, far beyond what a lot of people earn.

[adamsea]

The problem is your 100K income is exception not the rule. Many if not most people are struggling.

And, history shows pretty conclusively the supremely rich have no problem keeping the peasants from their bread, so to speak. The rich either crack the whip and the peasants knuckle under, or, the wealthy delude themselves in thinking all is well right up to the guillotine.

[LandR]

A mid-level web developer where I live might make $50-55k a year.

US $100k a year salaries are not the norm world wide.

[vertexFarm]

It's not about me, it's about statistics. About how these situations are affecting steadily larger amount of people, and percentages of them are affected very badly. If you think that it won't eventually affect the midwest, you haven't checked your history. If you think industry won't treat us so badly for fear of revolution, you haven't checked your history.

I know it's pretty ridiculous for me to run out in the street and start chanting the end is nigh over a little change in our culture. But it's not just one little change. It's a sum of many changes which have added up over the last few decades and the trend that it represents. It's not about now, it's about where that trend is going in the near future. Believe it or not, things will not remain this good if we are apathetic about it. That is not the default state of society.

If you have read up on the history of what people have been through in this country and the world as a result of the first industrial revolution, you would also be wary of the second which is coming about right now due to automation. It's worth extreme vigilance.

For the record, I don't live in New York or California either. I'm in an industry which was once full of steady salaried jobs, but now it's entirely shifted over to gig-economy contracting. Getting insurance is a nightmare and eats up my margins. What was once a very livable job now hardly pays for an apartment. It's specialized work that requires technical skills. I work very long hours and practically every weekend. I am not proud of that, and I know I need a change of career, but once again--it's not about me, it's about statistics. It's naive to expect that everyone can change their career to whatever the best career is at the moment. You are being obtuse if you think everyone can get your job and be in your living situation, which I am happy for by the way. That's fantastic.

The United States was once a country about building physical things, manufacturing and construction and mining. People made a good, dignified living off that for a while. That time is obviously gone, and contrary to what certain political parties think, it just won't be coming back. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube as they say--or rather you could if you had a toothpaste packing machine, but they're on the other side of the world and they're automated now anyway, so it wouldn't matter if we did bring them back. That work is gone.

I think what people don't often consider is that making software, networks, apps, content, websites, etc. is our new labor. A huge portion of our society is now doing this, as everyone here knows. A few decades ago, it was super-specialized, highly educated, protected work. That is changing.

We are the new labor, and our work is the weft and warp of the middle class in several cities and communities in this country. But that shouldn't be taken for granted. We are soon going to be treated as laborers are traditionally treated if we don't take steps to secure a dignified living.

[lsc]

>Working is taking up more and more of our days. Gone is the 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours leisure. It's going back to "as many hours as you can physically go without sleep" once again. No benefits, no retirement, no healthcare, no affordable higher education, no affordable family housing aside from company closet tenements with communal utilities, next to a corporate campus but far from a town center. Out in the suburbs with one company store. That will come back in our complacence. Fewer opportunities than our fathers.

I thought we were talking about the big silicon valley companies that are talking about building housing here? at those places, a guy without a college education can pull down more in two days than your fast food worker makes in a month. And these jobs come with better food, a sweet gym, and a bunch of other perks.

I mean, I'm all for unions for the oppressed, but when you start saying that the facebook engineers are being oppressed... well, you kinda lose some credibility.

[vertexFarm]

I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about more workers in other industries who are affected by this as the trend continues. I'm not a facebook engineer or somebody in the googleplex, but one of my major clients just switched over to a coworking space and is constantly shaving benefits and putting people into contractor positions which are more vulnerable. Nearly all of my colleagues in the same industry at different companies are going through the same.

If we let it slide for members of the middle class then it will eventually lead to an ever greater portion of the population unable to earn a dignified quality of life for their work.

Engineers, web developers, etc. are paid very well now, sure, but as more and more people enter that industry and those skills become more commonplace, do you really think things will remain that way? As more of the industry is able to be automated, do you think as many people will be able to stay in the middle class?

And when people in the middle class start accepting things like company housing, contractor jobs over salaried employment with benefits, longer working hours, etc. what do you think that will do for the lower classes of society? I think we're starting to see that now with pseudo-jobs like Favor and Uber, which have even less security than the service industry has traditionally had.

It's not just about facebook engineers or whatever, it's about society as a whole. The problems faced by society are largely the same, different only in degree; we shouldn't separate them up and devolve into infighting because these yuppies or whatever can afford something like the quality of life an average worker a couple generations ago could have, and that's considered fabulously well-off now. If industry starts treating middle-class people badly, they're treating lower-class people worse for the same reason. The whole scale slides.

A strong middle class with strong labor rights helps all of society. We can't do this crab bucket thing where we say it's foolish to defend people with some amount of privilege because there's people over there who are worse off--what is the ultimate end of that strategy, a search for the most downtrodden person on earth and delay all progress until we work our way up the list?

[lsc]

> We can't do this crab bucket thing where we say it's foolish to defend people with some amount of privilege because there's people over there who are worse off--what is the ultimate end of that strategy, a search for the most downtrodden person on earth and delay all progress until we work our way up the list?

How about we start with someone who is below the 50th percentile?

[CryptoPunk]

>>We take that entirely for granted now, like it can't come back and get us. It can.

There's no evidence at all that industrial revolution era working conditions can return.

The dominant force shaping working conditions was and is labour productivity.

Before industrialization, low labour productivity meant short brutish lives.

The 12 hour work days of the industrial revolution were a relative improvement, because they provided a more reliable source of sustenance than the substitence farming of previous eras.

As productivity increased, the number of hours of works, especially very dangerous and streneous work, declined, as the risks of such work started to outweigh the risks of foregoing the additional income of taking on that work.

This decline had next to nothing to do with any concerted social effort.

[vertexFarm]

Do you know where the 8-hour work day came from? Because it definitely wasn't an increase in productivity.

Just because our productivity has risen doesn't mean industries wouldn't demand even more production from an increase in hours. Publicly traded companies in fact must continuously grow and increase productivity endlessly so as to increase shareholder value. It's almost a tropism. It's not somebody's conscious conspiracy or mustache-twirling evil plan, it's just the nature of these societal mechanisms we're living with.

And people lived brutal lives for many more reasons besides low labor productivity. I feel like that's a correlation fallacy on your part or something.

I'm a TA in advertising who specializes in motion graphics, rigging, and 3d rendering. My work has shifted from permanent employees to contractors over the last few years, along with the loss of protections that implies. Predictably, working hours have expanded vastly. It's very stressful work and I have virtually no security. This is happening to steadily more people in more industries, including ones that were thought to be too highly educated to be vulnerable. It's a trend that will continue if nobody does anything about it.

You say there's no evidence those conditions can return, but that's a weird negative proof situation. What kind of evidence am I supposed to provide for that, a crystal ball? Trends are already moving in that direction. The decay of the middle class is already happening. Even with all our increases in productivity, people on average just can't afford the benefits that previous generations had, and are less likely to be upwardly socially mobile. And it's only getting worse.

That, combined with the fact that society often defaults to immense wealth divides in multiple cultures all throughout history--transforming the vast majority of people into paupers and serfs--should be proof enough. The secure, prosperous lives we enjoy in the developed world are not the default state. The privileges we take for granted are the result of blood and toil from labor and civil rights movements over the centuries.

[CryptoPunk]

>>Do you know where the 8-hour work day came from? Because it definitely wasn't an increase in productivity.

The mandated 8 hour work week came as a result of concerted political effort, but the reductions in work hours were happening anyway, due to independend economic forces.

Just to give one example, Henry Ford instituted a 5-day work week in 1922. He instituted an 8 hour work day in 1926:

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-wor...

Moves like this had competitive implications, which forced other employers to do the same.

Today employers are exploring 4 hour work days. None of this is driven by top-down mandates imposed through legislation.

>>Just because our productivity has risen doesn't mean industries wouldn't demand even more production from an increase in hours.

This comment belies a basic misunderstanding of the leverage held by employers.

First of all, their profitability declines if their employees are less productive per hour of labor as a result of longer work days. That's saying nothing of the health implications of longer work days, and the higher rates of worker turn-over.

Second, employers are competing with each other for a limited pool of workers. They have to offer attractive terms to recruit quality employees.

They are not in a position to demand anything they want.

We would be in a sorry state if the only force that improves labor conditions and compensation is top-down mandates that regiment the range of acceptable employment contracts.

Fortunately it is not the only force. In fact, such laws are worse than useless, in removing options from the market that would otherwise be in everyone's best interests to exist.

>>And people lived brutal lives for many more reasons besides low labor productivity.

It was almost solely down to low labor productivty, as a consequence of the economy having very little physical capital.

The United States economy in the mid 19th century had per capita GDP comparable to some of the poorest countries in the world today.

The story of development is one of private investment generating capital, which boosts output, which enables higher volumes of investment. It's a long-term process that can transform a society from a state of extreme primitivity, to one of great opulence over the course of a few generations.

>>I'm a TA in advertising who specializes in motion graphics, rigging, and 3d rendering. My work has shifted from permanent employees to contractors over the last few years, along with the loss of protections that implies. Predictably, working hours have expanded vastly. It's very stressful work and I have virtually no security.

That's a consequence of an increase in the supply of people with your skillset relative to demand. Restricting work hours and mandating long-term employment in your field would greatly reduce the demand for the services you provide, because it would cost employers more to procure said services.

The second order consequence of this would be less of these services being consumed by society, meaning the price paid by consumers increasing, and fewer people being able to make a living from providing these services.