If there's a silver lining to this pandemic, it will be an end to the 20+ year trend of "you have to be in one of 10 cities to have a real career." This is ter

If there's a silver lining to this pandemic, it will be an end to the 20+ year trend of "you have to be in one of 10 cities to have a real career." This is terrible for the majority of the country. It leads to brain drain and IMHO is a major force in political hyper-polarization. It's also terrible for those 10 cities, as it leads to real estate hyperinflation in those areas that makes housing unaffordable. People who aren't "white collar" can barely afford to live at all, and even people who make comfortable six figure salaries must strain to get into housing and it negatively impacts their ability to build wealth. In short it leads to: no jobs, unaffordable housing, pick one. The reversal of this trend would be a win/win for everyone. I've also seen the negative aspects of "new urbanism." To those who don't see it yet, I'll leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent In short: urbanism tends to enrich present day property owners and can worsen wealth distribution. If people can't own property they are at the mercy of the law of rent and are shut out of the primary mechanism for middle class wealth accumulation. As far as the environment goes, 20 years ago we did not have affordable high performing good range EVs on the market. Now we do. The suburbs could be fully electrified, and suburban roofs are good enough to supply a minimum of 50% of the power required (and often more) for a typical suburban home. Land use is IMHO only a concern in very dense countries and regions. The USA could experience a quadrupling of the size of its suburbs and still only a small percentage of land would be used for this. The vast majority of land (and water etc.) use is farming, and urban/suburban settlement patterns have no effect at all on how much farm land is needed. If anything urbanism may slightly increase farm land requirements as it encourages people to eat at restaurants rather than cook food at home. The restaurant system is incredibly wasteful of food, while eating at home tends to encourage less food waste.