[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...