> “As I’ve talked about before, this spatial arrangement had a useful side effect: commuting distance was a part of the cost you had to pay to live the good lif

> “As I’ve talked about before, this spatial arrangement had a useful side effect: commuting distance was a part of the cost you had to pay to live the good life. But now, we’re going through this big inversion where downtown is cool again, and we’re losing the self-corrective mechanism we used to have.“ This seems fundamentally wrong to me in a way I find hard to square with someone as familiar with the subject matter as this author. Many theories of valuation of real estate start with basic assumptions about people bidding with offers to pay (to buy / rent living space, buy groceries, etc.) according to their beliefs on how well they can use that land / space. If everyone is rational (clearly not, but not very important here) it means the person who can extract the most value from the land and has enough capital to outbid competitors will get the chance to use the land. This has been true in dense downtown areas where workers compete by working more hours for a long time, such as in downtown Manhattan where bankers and high powered attorneys would live even during the supposed suburban period the author refers to. To these workers, the time cost of commuting was not worth the extra space or “the good life” as the author calls it (which paints a very confusingly biased presentation). Instead, the marginal value of proximity to work more was valued higher. Now, hardly due to “downtown being cool again,” white collar work is swinging in a direction where it’s not just bankers and attorneys who see the deal of reduced commute time in order to work more as a good thing, rather it’s tech workers, marketers, knowledge workers of all types. Everyone feels pressured to work more and be seen visibly working more, for status signalling. Employers are less loyal to workers than ever, so you need to live close to many other possible employers, to switch to ass-in-chair long hours signalling at the new place once the current place lays you off. You have to pay $3000/month rent, huge grocery bills, receive poor retirement benefits all predicated on blind faith in equity markets, to be in this frantic hedonic treadmill cycle just to barely keep a job and have even the tiniest chances at social mobility. It seems quite obvious that service workers, low status jobs like teaching, blue collar work would immediately get pressed hard to push out and eat the costs of longer commutes. Their “good life” is having structured hours (don’t get me wrong, they are woefully underpaid and have poor negotiation power) instead of being compelled to do constant social signalling of more and more hours. This all just seems like a consequence of labor collapsing in on itself in a slapdash scramble to grab enough money to possibly retire comfortably while capital just keeps taking increasingly larger shares of generated wealth.