I think the aftermath of coronavirus is really going to be larger that most people are anticipating when it comes to work and migration patterns:
1. In the past 25 years there has been a huge re-migration back to cores of major cities. I think that is going to stop.
2. Suburbs and exurbs I think will become way more popular. The normal limiting factor on those locations is the commute, but I think so many more companies will be used to remote work after this (even if they don't necessarily prefer it) that you'll see a lot more "come into the office once or twice a week" type things that make living in the exurbs a lot more bearable.
3. I don't foresee migration away from the major metros. People will still go where the jobs are, and if anything I see the pandemic making strong companies stronger and smaller, weaker companies weaker. Definitely would not be willing to put a lot of money down on this 3rd point, though, could see a trend toward 2nd/3rd tier cities.
I think your third point is mostly strong. I see most companies going to partial remote but staying in their current locations. For growth to 2nd/3rd tier cities to dominate we’d need to see stronger job growth there than in major metros, or for near universal remote work. Also with this huge recession most people will be more hesitant to move without a secured job. I think your assertion is correct.
#2: Suburbs/exurbs are completely unsustainable. I'd predict that after this is over, local food sources will figure prominently on people's minds. We might see a return to smaller satellite cities if zoning changes to a saner mixed zoning approach. (You don't want big box stores. You do want smaller stores embedded in the local community. I'm not sure there's the political will to go there, because small stores can't afford making lots of campaign donations)
#3 depends highly on how long we'll be distancing. At some point, habits will be formed, and cities will be less appealing. Combine that with likely increased WFH, and way too high rent in cities, and migration might be tempting. I'd hope the satellite cities are smart enough to densify accordingly (because urban sprawl is unsustainable, but again, many interests aligned against that).
Independent point #4 - the importance of communities you're actually part of is currently driven home. I think the desire to be close to family/friends/social groups might increase. (There's the counter argument of our new habits of video socializing, but it's fundamentally less appealing than knowing people who have your back are living close to you)
A lot of these patterns hinges ultimately on how willing companies will be to continue WFH. There's also the interesting question what happens with lots of useless office space if we do move to large-scale WFH on a persistent basis.
In general, I'd expect lots of higher-order effects ricocheting through society for a long time to come :)
Rental cost merely reflect the supply and demand. A significant drop in demand should put pressure on rental costs. However, I'm skeptic that such a drop will come from "the desire to be close to family/friends/social groups". People moved against that before and I don't see that changing. I also don't see any time soon people getting less interested in the opportunity that comes with city life.
We've currently got an extended period of time ahead, where we'll have to learn to do without a lot of the cultural opportunities that come with city life.
A lot will depend on how much and how rapidly lockdown can be eased. If we spend 18-24 months without many of the benefits/opportunities of city life, or at least with those opportunities significantly diminished, culture will rapidly shift to different models - and those are likely more location independent.
And yes, of course rent is a supply/demand question, but the current experience is "the rent is too damn high", and that puts a certain amount of pressure on city living. Take away enough upsides, and it's not worth it any more.
Rent might drop as a result, but it will be a lagging indicator of cities becoming unpopular.
At the same time, closeness to social groups is being valued higher, because we're currently learning that a lonely/isolated life is not a good life. And, like any traumatic event, we're also learning that a supportive community matters, a lot.
You seem to assume that current forces and values hold, despite a global traumatic event. I think that we're in for a complete change of the landscape. The future will tell.
It's a meme that just won't die even when we are currently seeing the major downsides of very high population densities. I moved from SF to a suburb in another state (with a balanced budget requirement) and have 3x the space for ⅓ the price. I am still closer in commute time to the major job centers than most of my SF coworkers were.
That sounds like an allusion to a Yogi Berraism, but I don't think it really is.
When I lived downtown within a 10 minute walk of work, it was pretty nice, but most of the space was not apartments; it was commercial. Offices, restaurants, etc. In fact, my apartment was a converted hotel - the sort of place I couldn't hope to afford in NYC or DC.
So, isn't it kind of normal for central urban areas to be too dense and high rent for (normal) people to live in?
Conversely, I'm living within city limits now, but practically it's indistinguishable from (and adjoining) "suburbs" so saying people need to live in this sort of place instead seems meaningless to me.
Unlike restaurants, which the original quote referred to, people sometimes live in places they don't like because of extenuating circumstances. Just because a whole bunch of people are living in densely-packed neighborhoods doesn't mean they all want to live in them.
Long-term NYC resident here (I haven't hit my decade yet, so I'll avoid calling myself a New Yorker to dodge any ire).
I've heard rumblings from a lot of people about moving out, mostly from people who haven't really set down roots here - which makes sense. The appeal of New York is largely all the stuff to do, and without being able to do stuff you're just stuck in a very small space that you pay a lot of money for.
Most of the people I hear this from expect social-distancing type measures to continue for quite some time, so especially those with small children/etc. are really thinking about whether they can do this for another year.
Interestingly I haven't really met anyone considering leaving the city because of the virus itself (i.e. because of concern due to population density), only those really feeling the lifestyle restrictions. They're responsible and social distancing, etc. so the thought of continuing that lifestyle without significantly more living space is getting to them.
>Interestingly I haven't really met anyone considering leaving the city because of the virus itself (i.e. because of concern due to population density), only those really feeling the lifestyle restrictions.
Are you really even meeting people at all though considering pretty much everyone in NYC is home in isolation.
I left when Day Care closed and am not sure how I feel about ever returning while social distancing is still common sense. Because Day Care is essentially exposing yourself to the germs carried by twenty other children, their families, the caregivers, and their families.
Yeah, quite a few people with small children I know have left to be close to parents/in-laws (somewhat I assume to get some help with the additional childcare burden), and I'm curious to see if they come back.
A lot of the discussion revolves around mortality rates, and in particular about NYC as the US epicenter.
Most people I talk to who are thinking about leaving the city aren't concerned about their own risk as a result of being in a dense urban center, rather the lifestyle adjustments are the most difficult thing for them.
Granted that's almost entirely because most people I talk to are relatively healthy young adults who are being responsible and avoiding contact as much as possible, so they're not concerned as much about their own mortality or being a possible vector for others.
I mean, they kinda are concerned about the risk of mortality, aren't they? That's the only reason they're not going about their lives as normal. If you removed the risk of mortality, surely their lifestyles would return to normal, and they would have no reason to leave?
> I mean, they kinda are concerned about the risk of mortality, aren't they?
Not their own mortality, which is a pretty major distinction. They're social distancing largely so they don't spread it to other, more susceptible, people unwittingly.
Yeah, the double-wammy of 9/11/01 and the post-tech-bubble recession drove people out of NYC for a while. Vacancies went up and re prices went down. But it didn't last forever, obviously. It is hard to say if this will be different--we're going to be living with this for some time at some level, and it's still hard to say how much for how long.
As a native New Yorker there's so much about this that bugs me.
One, talk is cheap.
Two, what happened in NYC was not destined to be, and it's an easy lie leaders and those who look down on New Yorkers love to spread. Lots of big dense cities have handled this crisis well, just like some rural areas have not. Epidemics have been devastating throughout human history.
Three, to the people who live here and see this as inevitable and would rather flee than work together and fix the issue and protect our communities - good riddance.
I'm considering relocating from Seattle purely based on the fact that we can make WFH commonplace. Why pay insane rents to physically be in a location I can work remotely?
Because Seattle's a pretty great city to live in? You can still easily find rent below $1500/month for a 1 bedroom on Capitol Hill, it isn't too insane.
Editing to add Seattle has world-class rock climbing, mountaineering, and hiking under an hour's drive from downtown, and if you aren't doing that you're probably missing out on half the joy of living here.
> "Because Seattle's a pretty great city to live in?"
I feel like thats a minority opinion. The weather is terrible, the food is terrible, service at restaurants (or pretty much service in general) is terrible. A huge portion of the city shuts down at night. Where NYC is a city that doesn't sleep, Seattle sleeps. There are drug needles in the streets, and I routinely see homeless people defecating on sidewalks. I even saw a bus stop turned into a homeless person's 'house'.
The only thing I see that Seattle has going for it is low taxes.
* World-class rock climbing, mountaineering, and hiking less than an hour's drive from downtown
* I moved here from Canada, the weather really isn't that bad; it's been a beautiful spring here while all my Canadian friends are still dealing with snow
* Seattle has a huge number of sakura and so the city has beautiful pink cherry blossom clouds everywhere for the entire month of April
* The entire environment is so incredibly lush & green; it's called the Emerald City for a reason!
* The food is quite good, actually
It's funny that the thing you think Seattle has going for it - low taxes - directly contributes to the issue of homelessness and half of your complaints.
The uniquely differentiating thing in Seattle is the geography (as you say). If you don't care about having nearby skiing and mountaineering (and more but you get the idea), you can do better elsewhere.
Yes, the rise in rent has been quite dramatic recently - and our social services have been utterly ill-prepared to handle the fallout, because of low taxes.
I'm a native New Yorker with all the chauvinism that comes with it, but I didn't find Seattle that bad! The weather is no worse than New York's brutal humidity in the summer. The food isn't that bad. Sure the Asian food is thoroughly mediocre compared to New York's, but that's mostly cause New York has great Asian food. The seafood is wonderful too. Service wasn't that bad either—I suspect that's very subjective. Sure, Seattle does shut down at night but how many cities realistically have an all night culture? Even New York's "city that never sleeps" is super exaggerated. There's only a handful of places that stay open past 2-3 am (Gammeeok, Veselka, Coppelia, Great NY Noodletown, Wonjo if you want a few). The homeless does seem to be a problem, albeit I'd say the homeless in Seattle are a little less grungy (heh) then New York's.
God yes, I left there for my hometown a year ago and it's so much better. I have sunlight again, I live in a 3-bedroom house in the middle of town that I pay 2/3 of what I paid for a decaying 2br in the U, there's all kinds of colorful wildlife around, there's a thriving arts scene because people who are not making big IT money can actually afford to live there. And homelessness is much more under control, Seattle was insane on that front.
I miss legal weed, but I sure don't miss much of anything else in Seattle.
I lived in Chicago and paid $1500/mo for a 1500 sq/ft loft in River North, AC, dishwasher, in-unit laundry. The rents here are insane compared to other places.
This was 7 years ago. It was also on the top floor of a building with no elevator, so there were contributing factors to the $/foot. Everywhere I lived in Chicago got much more "bang for the buck" than Seattle though. Better summers and winters (I enjoy snow), and much better food as well. The difference in the homeless situation was shocking as well. The only thing Seattle has going for it, imo, is the nearby nature, but I honestly haven't taken advantage of it to warrant the cost of living increases on everything else.
You can still get $1500/mo for a 2br on the north side. Just be on the brown line instead of the blue line.
The trendy neighborhoods can be just as expensive as SF SOMA, but there's so much inventory, so the non-trendy but nice neighborhoods are much, much cheaper.
$1500/month is absolutely insane for one bedroom lol
My apartment is $850 and that gets me 2 bedrooms, 1200sqft. In a definitely not as large city mind you, but $1500 is insanely expensive for one bedroom.
You can maybe get a micro studio in cap hill for $1500/mo, but any 1 Bed / 1 Bath at that price point probably hasn't been renovated since 1974. You need to spend 50% more to get something "decent", and your walking commute to actual jobs is going to approach 30 minutes for the lower priced stuff.
Let go of your desire to have something built within the past five years and your horizons broaden considerably. There are plenty of beautiful buildings just a few blocks off the Pike/Pine corridor that are perfectly comfortable & livable. A quick look at craigslist confirms this, although prices are higher now that weather is nice - you can usually save $200/month by renewing your lease in January or February.
In those old buildings without a concierge your packages will get stolen and you'll be living in a high crime area. I've lived in old places before and it's terrible. At minimum, you deal with poor infrastructure (no in unit laundry or dish washer) and bugs. Prices are actually low due to COVID. I've lived nearby to Pike and Pine and know the area well.
I'm happy to maximize my TC and not worry about the extra $10k a year to live in a nice, modern building.
Define "great". A lot of people don't give a fuck about blings aside from cushy job. So far blings are what make up for the sad reality of city living. But if cushy jobs are not restricted to few areas anymore... Why bother.
Most companies are not going to go fully distributed. Partial remote? Sure. Maybe a few full remote roles set aside for superstars? Sure. But mass distributed remote? Highly unlikely. This experiment hasn’t gone that well.
You can move to the country like me, but you'll give up:
* steady cellular signal
* internet competition
* cuisine diversity of restaurants
* tech meetups
But you gain:
* cheap land
* neighbors with skills beyond typing
* cheaper labor pool for assistance you might need (electrician, plumber, private pilot training, etc, etc)
...or at least provide a better constant? Due to WFH, free time, and general discontent I'm sure site traffic for any location is up. How does the increase in suburb searches compare to the (likely) increase in urban searches?
I saw a statistic that 0.25% of NYC’s population has already died from Coronavirus (15k/6m). It seems worse there due to the density, and similarly dense cities like London are in the same boat.
There are other densely populated areas in the US, namely LA Metropolitan Area, South Florida metropolitan Area and Boston metropolitan area. E.g. NYC area is 26,403 people per mile^2, and Boston metropolitan area is 13,841 people per mile^2. But NYC seems to be doing much worse than 2 times worse than Boston. Maybe it's because NYC population is older? E.g. in Boston 52% of deaths are from LTC facilities (yesterday's data), which seems to imply virus hasn't penetrated into community that much.
I don't think you should be expecting people per square mile to scale 1:1 with mortality rate anyhow. I would guess putting twice as many people within a square would result in the virus spreading an order of magnitude faster. Similar to how increasing infection radius in an SIR model increases spread by much more.
On the other hand, California has a much lower death rate despite having cities with a population density in the same magnitude as NYC, which seems to suggest some level of luck of the draw here in initial unrecorded spread before lockdowns came into place.
> California has a much lower death rate despite having cities with a population density in the same magnitude as NYC
New York is denser than any city in California.
"New York is far more crowded than any other major city in the United States. It has 28,000 residents per square mile, while San Francisco, the next most jammed city, has 17,000, according to data from the U.S. Census Bur"
If it's just density, why does SF have so few deaths (20), fewer than cities much less dense than SF? eg Seattle is much less dense but has 15x as many deaths as SF. There is clearly an element of chance/which sub-population was infected/timing of responses in play here.
I'm going to venture a guess that lifestyle is a huge factor in the difference. People are generally more active out west (better weather, more open spaces/ parks/ mountains, better beaches, etc.) and smoke far fewer cigarettes.
Important to point out that about 155k people die in NY every year. About 1% of Americans die each year, so there is a crucial distinction between dying with a disease, and dying of a disease.
Risk is not additive. The median age for covid deaths is well into the late 70s, which means that there is a high risk of death in the same period anyway would the person not have been infected with covid.
The overall mortality numbers will be up, but throwing that stat out there is hugely misleading.
This seems to misrepresent overall mortality with cause-specific mortality.
If I'm struck by a car with stage 4 cancer, the car accident killed me, regardless of my outlook. If that car accident happens to be highly contagious, well then the cause is even more important.
> Risk is not additive.
It isn't always, but it very often is and it is in this case.
> If I'm struck by a car with stage 4 cancer, the car accident killed me, regardless of my outlook.
this is not obviously true. the analogy is good, but you didn't go into enough detail.
if someone with terminal cancer is hit by a car, makes it to a hospital, and dies some weeks later, why did they die? both things likely played a role; how do you report this statistic?
i stopped worrying about the virus and started worrying about the economy and its politics weeks ago.
if someone dies in a traffic death while having stage four cancer then this would indeed not change year on year mortality (assuming the person dies of cancer).
This is an awful example though because the victim profile of car deaths is generally middle aged adults, who would not have died otherwise. If your average car driver was a stage four cancer patient traffic safety would indeed be less of an issue relatively speaking.
The risk profile of covid patients skews so heavily towards old age and existing preconditions that it is actually not trivial at all. It's immensely important to look at death rates in the context of general mortality, not a vacuum.
It may very well be the case that covid 'crams' the deaths of people who would have died anyway into a short timeframe and there'll be singificantly lower flu mortality and so on later this year.
This gives 0.1%. The OP's numbers are based on 6M population & 15k deaths. I believe their trying to cite total deaths, not just covid-19 related. Their NYC region also seems to be more localized
Not all the deaths are tested for COVID. Those that aren't don't make it into the stats. [1]
Overall mortality, compared to the baseline, has skyrocketed in the past few weeks. For the March 4 - April 4 time period, it was double the usual rate. [2]
Non-New Yorkers love to speculate about the end of New York with a passion which fascinates me as someone who has lived here for two decades. I love it here. Not for everyone. If you dig your exurb keep at it and enjoy.
NYC always has a transient crowd and a permanent crowd. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of the people who would have moved to the burbs within 1-5 years are accelerating that timeline. For us permanent residents we can't imagine living anywhere else. All of this was said after 9/11. I don't find that my rent today is lower than it was in 2002.
Let me also add that people today are fleeing dense areas under the belief that they can escape Coronavirus. Newsflash - everyone is probably going to get this. Flatten the curve was never about escaping the virus altogether - it is about smoothing out the burden on the healthcare system.
Not just New Yorkers, and not just 'post' Coronavirus. I've seen a fairly large number of people that had moved within the EU to other countries move back to their original home country because they don't want to be cut off from their family.
The scale of the search interest is hard to understand because no numbers are provided, just percentages.
Searches are up 250%. Percent of what? 1000 searches? 1 million searches? I understand that this post is content marketing for the company, but I haven't heard of it before, so I don't know if they can simply toss out a YOY % and claim that it's a trend. Reading the article, it's also not clear that the queries were coming from users based in NYC.
I think looking at something like Google Trends might be more representative of interest, as you can filter the data by State, try different search terms and see the % change by day, week, year or 5 years.
This isn’t any surprise, we will see a swelling of growth in Westchester, Long Island, Southern Connecticut, and Northern New Jersey, especially if partial remote work stays normalised as well. I don’t see a massive exodus out of the metro area, but the suburban share will likely grow.
Growth in those areas is supply-constrained, though. There aren't a ton of available homes; construction lags demand; there isn't all that much undeveloped land left in those counties; and they'll all be resistant to denser zoning.
In recent weeks I've been getting different ads from usual, particularly ones for luxury NYC apartments, such as in Brooklyn, e.g. $4K/month. I'm roughly 3 hours away. People will tell you that the ad algorithm knows all, but I can't imagine why this makes sense.
I love WFH and work for a large company which shifted to WFH early and in which in theory remote work should be very doable.
My hope for this experience was that people would realize how productive WFH is and this would be great because it would normalize it and everyone would realize how well it works and... my perception of the reaction to it is unfortunately that most people at the company are wildly negative about it right now. Across the board. So much so that it's kind of shocked me. I had to stop talking about how much I liked it because it was upsetting people.
I wish people wouldn't judge the productivity of WFH from doing so under a duress during a pandemic but I'm actually really worried this whole experience is pushing people to be more convinced that WFH is unproductive than they were before the pandemic :(
Right now WFH has a negative public perception because kids are at home and nobody can leave their home. So there is a lot of frustration that I can understand. But once it is all over, imagine folks working remotely and able to move around the world with freedom and bring more creativity because of their newfound happiness.
1. In the past 25 years there has been a huge re-migration back to cores of major cities. I think that is going to stop.
2. Suburbs and exurbs I think will become way more popular. The normal limiting factor on those locations is the commute, but I think so many more companies will be used to remote work after this (even if they don't necessarily prefer it) that you'll see a lot more "come into the office once or twice a week" type things that make living in the exurbs a lot more bearable.
3. I don't foresee migration away from the major metros. People will still go where the jobs are, and if anything I see the pandemic making strong companies stronger and smaller, weaker companies weaker. Definitely would not be willing to put a lot of money down on this 3rd point, though, could see a trend toward 2nd/3rd tier cities.