Well that’s offset by the fact you no longer have to get a small one bedroom near a large city downtown.
Without the commute suburbs or smaller cities offer much bigger and better spaces for less. Why pay $4.5k for that one bedroom in SOMA when you can get a 4 bedroom home in Sacramento for the same price.
I can't help but feel that this is going backwards. Cities are effective engines for value generation. Being in a city is valuable due to network effects, density, and overall efficiency that suburbs lack. Increased urbanization has gone hand-in-hand with increased prosperity for centuries. People don't pay $4.5k for a one bedroom in SOMA (just) to be close to the office.
It's too early too say if the historic value of cities will be replaced by the internet, IMO. YC makes each batch move to SV for a reason.
SV isn't a city; it's mostly suburban sprawl. In most metro areas, you can get to reasonable property prices while still being in the gravitational well of a city even if you wouldn't want to commute into the downtown every day day.
What if I live somewhere for other reasons? Anyway, it doesn’t really matter how expensive or big my home is, switching to work-from-home means I have less of that home available to me.
Without the commute suburbs or smaller cities offer much bigger and better spaces for less. Why pay $4.5k for that one bedroom in SOMA when you can get a 4 bedroom home in Sacramento for the same price.