[Varqu]

The right to work 100% from home is what really makes sense, because only then people can pick their place of living freely.

This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities.

[dxbydt]

Not just the housing situation. The biggest contribution, by far, to mitigate the climate change crisis, would be to let your employees work remote. Commuting adds a ton of waste to the environment, no matter how energy efficient you get. Even if you go 100% ev, particulates are never going away,directly/indirectly killing 100k+ people annually in the US alone. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/elect...

[dlisboa]

That's probably more of an issue in the US. Not that commuting doesn't pollute, but in other countries a great part of the daily commute is done by public transportation or much more carbon efficient personal transportation (scooters, bicycles, etc).

[aequitas]

You’ve probably never heard of the poster child of livable cities, the Netherlands, where almost everyone still owns a car and drives to work every day. Traffic jams are now growing even worse then pre COVID[0]. Lack of proper (investment in) public transport is still a major issue for everyone living or working outside of the big cities. And due to the density of our country it has a major impact on nature here.

[0] https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2023/juli/filez...

[smcleod]

It’s a problem in Australia as well, our public transport is pretty poor and roads congested.

[supertrope]

A lot of Anglosphere countries have followed the lead of the United States with spending trillions on automobile infrastructure and suburbs. Eisenhower modeled highways on the German autobahn.

[shric]

Indeed, after 25 years of work (15 in Australia, 5 in Singapore, 5 in Malaysia) I've never driven to work except during work trips to the US where I had to rent a car.

At various times it's been train, bus, cycling, walking.

[RestlessMind]

Not sure what countries you have been to. But a lot of non-US countries rely heavily on your own vehicle. India is the best example, where public transportation is even worse than the US.

[BlargMcLarg]

Outside of cities, the car reigns supreme in practically every developed country. Including the ones people love to bring forward as 'counterexamples' to car culture.

[andrepd]

If only there was a way to move lots of people very efficiently... Perhaps some sort of vehicle on rails... :)

[esafak]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

[supertrope]

You mean sit in the same metal box as a hobo? /s

[majormajor]

In smaller towns utilization for things like restaurants, mechanics, etc is usually much lower in big cities. The amount of time spent waiting because shit was full was a big shock to me when I moved to a very large city.

So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.)

But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options.

In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).

[astrange]

> Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand.

It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition.

Of course, there's also a selection effect; more interesting things to spend money on causes people to spend more money. (That's why people who earn more per hour tend to work more, not less.)

[majormajor]

> It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition.

Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world: the dense cities are more in demand and more expensive than the middle of nowhere.

If nobody can build "enough housing" in their cities, to make their cities as cheap as their rural land, I think that tells us something. We can' simply take demand entirely out of the picture, since adding more supply is both (a) a lagging process and (b) a process that itself helps promote more demand by necessitating more service business, more jobs at those businesses, etc. I.e., if you make the land more attractive to everyone, everyone who wants to use that land for their business or residence has more competition for securing a spot on it.

[jrumbut]

> Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world

This is a great observation, if a problem is occurring all over the place maybe the solution isn't simple.

The cool stuff in these cities is highly centralized and just building more housing a little further out doesn't spread it automatically.

If you build a high rise apartment tower in Yonkers it might not sell. Move much loser to Manhattan and you run into all the problems of building in an area that's already pretty dense.

[astrange]

It doesn't happen everywhere in the world. It mostly happens in Anglo countries because we're bad at land use law.

Tokyo is the main example that isn't in this situation.

[klipt]

Are cities still more expensive than rural areas if you adjust for income of the inhabitants?

Maybe cities are just more productive economically, so people earn more, so they can pay more.

I think where having more housing helps though is making your city more diverse. If you have fancy housing for doctors and grungy housing for artists, your city will have a better art scene than if you only have fancy housing.

[majormajor]

IMO this is actually part of the problem. How do you serve both the residents doing well, taking advantage of the opportunities, and the ones at the bottom of the totem pole? Very few places have active plans to address that, and some of the methods that do exist (like rent control) tend to be unpopular.

If you're in a city that's doing well, you have a lot of residents with money to spend. Enough to incentivize a lot of development aimed at those residents. But that jut further chokes out anything that would only serve those with incomes in the lowest percentiles.

Building housing helps, certainly, but there's a differnence between "building housing that keeps the growth engine running" and "building housing that keeps the bottom-tier population served and keeps people from being pushed into homelessness" (especially when redevelopment is financially most practical in cheaper parts of town which can cause more displacement of more economically precarious people - replacing that grungy housing, for instance), and I don't think market-based approaches will ever be enough since the financial incentives to serve the bottom of the market naturally are much smaller than to serve the middle or the top. And I think this is demonstrated by how the densest first-world-cities across the world often have affordability issues.

[klipt]

The sad truth is you can't build grungy housing. At least no sane developer wants to.

Grungy housing was new fancy housing - decades ago.

I guess if the government is willing to build Soviet style grey blocks then you can have new but modest, relatively cheap housing.

[z3t4]

Theoretically it should be cheaper to live in a dense area as more people can share utilities like water, electricity, food stores etc. First there is a worth in the house itself depending on the standard, then there are artificial market rates that is the biggest worth in big cities as people do seem to want to live there, mostly because of job opportunities.

[teki_one]

I think it has the opposite effect on housing.

Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.

Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.

[dougmwne]

This really feels like a bad take to me. Cities are out of room and can only grow by increasing the commutes even more. Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win. And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.

[JohnFen]

> Cities are out of room

I don't think cities are actually out of room. Maybe they are, but it's not obvious to me that this is the case.

> Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win.

Not for the people who live in smaller towns because they prefer living in smaller towns.

> And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.

Not all small towns are poor. And regardless, a lot of people with money coming into a town very often causes prices for everything (especially housing) to increase, pricing poor people out of the area. And if you're poor, you probably can't afford to move elsewhere.

Not saying that these problems are inevitable, but there are certainly lots of examples of them happening. What I am saying is that this is a very complicated thing with no clear outcome for any particular place.

[marssaxman]

> Cities are out of room and can only grow by increasing the commutes even more.

...or more effectively, by abandoning the flawed concept of single-family zoning, thereby allowing market forces to increase housing supply where it is needed.

[majormajor]

You still end up with a ton of commuting needs. And you get an induced demand loop with development still: lots of jobs popped up in this area around the transit stops! Now more housing is built so people can live closer to it! Now even more commercial and retail is needed and gets built! Which makes even more people want to work/live there. And not all of those people are gonna want to both work and live there (consider the trivial case, even, of a couple with one job per person, with the jobs in different parts of town), so you've also increased your commuting demand, which means fuller trains, longer waits...

I've had coworkers who lived and worked in Beijing without cars - they still had 40+ minute each direction commutes. And that's a city that was extremely aggressive in expanding its transit. It's just a basic queuing/graph problem, though.

[marssaxman]

These all sound like good problems to have, relative to the current car-commuting sprawl mess, with its attendant CO2 and land use impacts.

[majormajor]

But hard problems to convince people to want who are used to air conditioned private pods instead of hot cattlecars with groping and harrasment, if we're just picking the least attractive elements of each method. "An hour, but on your feet crammed like sardines with everyone else" will get even less appealing to someone used to the car-based life if self-driving cars ever take off.

If people only make cases for transit by straw-manning the worst part of cars and ignoring the worst part of mass transit it's gonna take a long time to convince enough people to spend the billions needed to make it happen, since most people aren't stupid and they know that there are cons of public transit too, not just unalloyed pros.

[buran77]

I'm sure there are pluses and minuses for both options but what works in one place won't necessarily work the same in another. It can be a boon for the areas people are migrating to but you can easily get gentrification instead.

Different parts of US, Australia, or Europe will respond differently even when subjected to the same policy. So I don't think any one answer is correct as a general rule.

[greiskul]

When looked at a macro scale, any region, even a small town, has to import stuff into it's economy, and has to get dollars from out of the region to pay for the imports. This can come from exporting things, be it raw resources or manufacturing, tourism, or exporting services (which is how I would describe a huge part of the SF and NY economy).

Remote work allows people that work in exporting services to live anywhere. They bring cash into the economy, and any town with a good sense of economics should be trying to bring those people in. Might they temporarily raise prices in the town they move to? Yeah, but they moving out of a big city also lowers prices in that big city, what about the folks that were outpriced there, and now might have some breathing room?

[JohnFen]

So what do you do about all of the people who are now poor because the cost of living increased, and who can't afford to move elsewhere?

[indymike]

> Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.

Wow. This is the opposite of the US where most small towns have depressed real estate values and negative growth rates. What is Australia doing differently?

[strken]

We're not doing anything differently. Regional and rural property prices are dropping relative to state capitals now.

During COVID some people left the biggest cities to live somewhere without lockdowns. This was a fairly small number in absolute terms but it pushed prices up in specific desirable local market and really stretched services. That's slowly reversing now.

[totallywrong]

> But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too

This is happening everywhere. My hometown in Europe is by the sea and has nice weather. Since remote work, housing has become ridiculous, both in price and availability. Locals can hardly afford it anymore. But I do think this whole situation will balance out eventually, we're really just at the beginning of a new global trend.

[andrepd]

Hmm, I have a feeling you're a compatriot.

[dionidium]

Yeah, what seems to actually happen is that 1) most small cities lose people; 2) otherwise attractive small towns with weak job markets get way more expensive; 3) lots of people gather in the largest cities, anyway, because it turns out that when people can live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best cities.

[sampo]

You'd think smaller towns could just let people build some more houses. Adding more people to e.g. Manhattan is tricky because land is scarce. But a small town should have some adjacent land available, that could be allocated for building more homes.

[gray_-_wolf]

Houses are not really the issue, but supporting infrastructure is. Things like plumbing, schools, places to shop at, ....

[sampo]

So? Just keep building the infrastructure at the same pace as you let people build themselves new homes.

USA Population growth rate is now at about the lowest it has ever been. All the previous generations had to also build houses and the supporting infrastructure. It's not rocket science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...

[randomdata]

> we could actually improve the housing situation across the country

The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes.

Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

If only there was a way that people could communicate, collaborate, and move money around without being next to each other.

If that ever gets developed, it will revolutionize the world.

[randomdata]

Well, we have the highway, but it turns out that trucking mills and lathes around to each worker's home is less efficient than bringing people to where the capital sits. I know a nuclear reactor powering a chip fab in everyone's garage is the dream, but...

[paulryanrogers]

What percentage of jobs require so much equipment it must be onsite?

[randomdata]

All jobs in the modern economy require capital to be on-site. Some capital is more realistically held at home than others, of course. What kind of threshold are we using to draw a dividing line? I know a number of people who really do have lathes and mills at home, so we need to be more specific here about where the line is drawn.

[RufusJacksons]

I have a lathe and a mill at home. Quit my job in the city 1.5 hours away during covid and now run a business from home / get to be a parent. It’s the best. I gave up $190k salary to barely make my mortgage, best decision I ever made!

[RestlessMind]

There are a lot of sectors where in-person presence is needed. See the list of "essential workforce", who were essentially allowed to avoid lockdowns: https://covid19.ca.gov/essential-workforce/

Also, some jobs were moved online during COVID (eg. teaching) but it is clearly demonstrated that they work better in person.

[astrange]

People like living in big cities because they're more interesting.

Conversely, companies will sometimes locate themselves in suburbs just to make it harder for employees to leave. IIRC that's why IBM is in Armonk.

[coldtea]

>People like living in big cities because they're more interesting.

Some people like living in big cities, usually because they're young and starry eyed about the "possibilities" of them being interesting. Quite often they grow out of this, and get to hate the big cities and their stress and uglyness....

[esafak]

Don't forget the social opportunities: it's easier to find a mate in a bigger pool.

[klardotsh]

Exactly this. I moved from Seattle to rural Whatcom County for a year, then out onto my sailboat for a year. It's been a great reset, but I'm now headed back to either a quiet neighborhood of the outskirts of Seattle proper, or maybe one of the suburbs/exurbs that still has a proper downtown and isn't just a bedroom community, and it's entirely for social reasons. Life in the boonies solo is hard, and the dating pool in your 20s is barely a drop, forget a puddle.

[andsoitis]

> This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities.

Less concentrated human habitation is not without cost…

[alaxsxaq]

Indeed, as are concentrated forms of human habitation, and, your point is?

[LeifCarrotson]

Subsequent to the agricultural revolution, big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.

Hedonistically, everyone wants to live on a big lot on a low-traffic road... with friends, family, and work/shopping/services a short distance away. If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.

The costs of concentrated habitation are less than the benefits - there's enough tax base and density to support roads and (emergency or mundane) services and businesses. The costs of distributed habitation are higher, and don't work if the entire nation switches to that kind of housing.

[coldtea]

>big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.

Environmentally and sustainably speaking, the "productivity" of big cities is zero.

Cut from the outside, a city like New York would die in a few months when food dissapears, with people eating one another. Cut from urban centers, rural towns and villages will continue to be able to drink and feed themselves just fine.

They only exist because the people living there are subsidized, for water, food, and other such essentials, from outside. Even factory production lives outside those cities.

That's how they started actually, when the rural production because so larger, as to be able to sustain not just itself, but also a parasitic, mediating and administrating, urbal class.

>If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.

There's nothing inevitable about this, it's just how US suburbs were designed, to be car-centered.

In decentralized suburbs with local walkable distance shops (walkable as a stronger condition as opposed to merely "a short distance away"), and with local jobs and more extended work from home, it doesn't matter if they "spread out", because you don't have to drive a "a big, polluting car fast through", as the need to go elsewhere is less frequent: work, socializing, shopping is nearby.

Add a good public transportation service, and you don't even need a car.

[esafak]

It's not parasitism, it's mutualism. If the country nurtures, the city pays the bills. I would not want to live in a country without both. Heck a country without cities probably would not last long except as a vassal.

[coldtea]

If you mean environmental cost, that's mainly when we only consider "less concentrate human habitation" as combined with existing patterns of consumption and waste.

[WeylandYutani]

In a city even a 20 mile daily commute with a train can be soul crushing.

I know someone who does Den Haag-Amsterdam every day but he's Japanese so he is trained in the art of salary man.

[dionidium]

> This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities.

When people are allowed to live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best, most expensive cities.

[digging]

Only if they can afford to, which means their jobs were already in those cities.

[JohnFen]

A lot do, yes. And a lot don't.

[Alupis]

> right to work 100% from home is what really makes sense

*for some particular jobs

That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace.

There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks.

So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation.

So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation.

Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.

[katbyte]

It’s also much better for the environment