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Solution: push remote work as a housing crisis solution. Remote work allows the people to place themselves in better, affordable places, while helping companie

Solution: push remote work as a housing crisis solution. Remote work allows the people to place themselves in better, affordable places, while helping companies get the best from all over, rather than bound to a physical location. This works unless the companies/investors are doing a dual strategy of having real estate that they collect on while having their companies located in them that they are investing in. So a big part of the investment never leaves the building. I suspect a large part of Silicon Valley has a scheme like this, investors are usually real estate investors as well, they like people concentrated in areas and supply/demand to benefit them. The other bigger wage absorber right now is healthcare tied to a job. When healthcare goes up, wages are diverted into healthcare and healthcare and housing have teamed up to sap all wage growth in actual dollars in pockets of consumers,. 'Real compensation' or 'total compensation' doesn't go into cashflow/liquid assets at the individual level and means nothing to consumer spending power which needs to go to housing and life.

roenxi 7y ago
Remote work comes up against the harsh phenomena studied in economic geography. Even for knowledge work, there is a supply chain (in that case education, funding, knowledge sharing and adsorption of a certain type of culture). Once there is a supply chain, an industrial hub with a concentrated supply chain will outperform a disparate network of workers. At that point, market forces will optimise to use the industrial hub for everything. Workers who live in the industrial hub will have an advantage over those that do not.
- drawkbox 7y ago
  That definitely plays a role. However, large companies have remote offices in different cities that rely on virtual communication to one another. This just moves the remote/virtual aspect further down the system to the individuals/teams. This push would also make supply chain work more virtual, the long tail of industry. It could work if they give massive tax breaks for remote workers, when it is a financial benefit and reward for pushing virtual workplaces, it will take hold. Remote work pushes also have immense impact on carbon production / climate change and making sure local communities thrive from higher salaries in more remote locations. This would allow for infrastructure to also be better more widely dispersed. There will always be hubs, but even large companies eventually get many hubs themselves and require virtual communication and remote capabilities. Company cities have been around forever, but remote working / virtual communication needs to be a priority and can help fix or improve many problems, not just housing costs. The mobile device generation will most likely bring about these remote working changes more widely.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    > The mobile device generation will most likely bring about these remote working changes more widely. That is a bold prediction. My money is on the precise opposite. The more talented and successful the employee is, in the main, the closer they are going to be to the heart of a geographically located industrial hub. Reduced communication costs will make it easier to identify the hubs and increase the competition to move there until the cost of moving is similar to the benefit of being in the hub. If mobile devices and better communication suddenly causes an on-average decentralisation of wealth generation that would be (1) welcome and (2) shockingly unusual. > This would allow for infrastructure to also be better more widely dispersed. Probably going to burn a lot more resources spreading the infrastructure out than is saved by letting everything centralised. There'd be wins cutting down on the daily commute, but would also be costs to decentralising. Similar benefits might be more easily found by designing dense cities to be easy to navigate by bike and foot; which would also let workers keep the advantages of centralisation. Lots of room for improvement there, no doubt.
throwaway2048 7y ago
Remote work is a band-aid that throws its arms up and says we can't possibly hope to address these issues. Its a loser mentality and it sucks. The only thing that its going to ensure is the same forces take over basically every livable city, why don't we stand up and fight them?
dredmorbius 7y ago
The reason that industry hubs form and exist is because not all work can be remote, and there are economies of scale and efficiencies in grouping related and essential services and capabilities in one place. This is most pronounced, ironically, in the least material sectors: cinema, television, music, publishing, banking, and software are all activities in which the end result can literally be wired arond the world in an instant, but each has very strong primary locus hubs: Hollywood, New York, Nashville, and Silicon Valley, in these cases. Yes, there are regional centres: regulation, language, and culture can create the necessity for localised services, so that film also has national traditions (Bollywood, China, Japan, small local productions in the UK and continental Europe, and a few smaller hubs), banking (London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Shanghai), etc. But to the extant a single hub can dominate, it often does. It's the support sectors especially which create anchors. For film, casting departments, carpenters, electricians, caterers, props, lighting, riggers, and a whole host of services and suppliers are best met within central hubs. Software operates similarly -- VC, training, presentations, networking services, and the like, tend to focus on major cities such as San Francisco-San Jose, Seattle, New York, and a number of also-rans. Trying to get highly-qualified services outside those areas is difficult at best. And even if you do manage to allow software and design folks to work remotely, it's the other staff, often far less-well paid, who still have to show up at the office. And who pay the eye-bleeding rents. Remote work isn't the solution. Rents, as a claim to all consumer surplus, can be ameliorated through a land value tax. That's the solution which is badly needed.

roenxi 7y ago

Remote work comes up against the harsh phenomena studied in economic geography. Even for knowledge work, there is a supply chain (in that case education, funding, knowledge sharing and adsorption of a certain type of culture). Once there is a supply chain, an industrial hub with a concentrated supply chain will outperform a disparate network of workers. At that point, market forces will optimise to use the industrial hub for everything. Workers who live in the industrial hub will have an advantage over those that do not.

drawkbox 7y ago
That definitely plays a role. However, large companies have remote offices in different cities that rely on virtual communication to one another. This just moves the remote/virtual aspect further down the system to the individuals/teams. This push would also make supply chain work more virtual, the long tail of industry. It could work if they give massive tax breaks for remote workers, when it is a financial benefit and reward for pushing virtual workplaces, it will take hold. Remote work pushes also have immense impact on carbon production / climate change and making sure local communities thrive from higher salaries in more remote locations. This would allow for infrastructure to also be better more widely dispersed. There will always be hubs, but even large companies eventually get many hubs themselves and require virtual communication and remote capabilities. Company cities have been around forever, but remote working / virtual communication needs to be a priority and can help fix or improve many problems, not just housing costs. The mobile device generation will most likely bring about these remote working changes more widely.
- roenxi 7y ago
  > The mobile device generation will most likely bring about these remote working changes more widely. That is a bold prediction. My money is on the precise opposite. The more talented and successful the employee is, in the main, the closer they are going to be to the heart of a geographically located industrial hub. Reduced communication costs will make it easier to identify the hubs and increase the competition to move there until the cost of moving is similar to the benefit of being in the hub. If mobile devices and better communication suddenly causes an on-average decentralisation of wealth generation that would be (1) welcome and (2) shockingly unusual. > This would allow for infrastructure to also be better more widely dispersed. Probably going to burn a lot more resources spreading the infrastructure out than is saved by letting everything centralised. There'd be wins cutting down on the daily commute, but would also be costs to decentralising. Similar benefits might be more easily found by designing dense cities to be easy to navigate by bike and foot; which would also let workers keep the advantages of centralisation. Lots of room for improvement there, no doubt.

throwaway2048 7y ago

Remote work is a band-aid that throws its arms up and says we can't possibly hope to address these issues. Its a loser mentality and it sucks. The only thing that its going to ensure is the same forces take over basically every livable city, why don't we stand up and fight them?

dredmorbius 7y ago

The reason that industry hubs form and exist is because not all work can be remote, and there are economies of scale and efficiencies in grouping related and essential services and capabilities in one place. This is most pronounced, ironically, in the least material sectors: cinema, television, music, publishing, banking, and software are all activities in which the end result can literally be wired arond the world in an instant, but each has very strong primary locus hubs: Hollywood, New York, Nashville, and Silicon Valley, in these cases. Yes, there are regional centres: regulation, language, and culture can create the necessity for localised services, so that film also has national traditions (Bollywood, China, Japan, small local productions in the UK and continental Europe, and a few smaller hubs), banking (London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Shanghai), etc. But to the extant a single hub can dominate, it often does. It's the support sectors especially which create anchors. For film, casting departments, carpenters, electricians, caterers, props, lighting, riggers, and a whole host of services and suppliers are best met within central hubs. Software operates similarly -- VC, training, presentations, networking services, and the like, tend to focus on major cities such as San Francisco-San Jose, Seattle, New York, and a number of also-rans. Trying to get highly-qualified services outside those areas is difficult at best. And even if you do manage to allow software and design folks to work remotely, it's the other staff, often far less-well paid, who still have to show up at the office. And who pay the eye-bleeding rents. Remote work isn't the solution. Rents, as a claim to all consumer surplus, can be ameliorated through a land value tax. That's the solution which is badly needed.