Certainly people will continue to enjoy living in specific cities and near to things. I don't dispute that. I dispute that real estate will rise in real terms n

Certainly people will continue to enjoy living in specific cities and near to things. I don't dispute that. I dispute that real estate will rise in real terms nationally. Now that the constraint of working in a specific location is gone, yes, people will migrate to areas for desirability of living, not because they're forced to for work. However, price is an aspect of desirability. It's very hard to imagine how the Bay Area could maintain residential real estate pricing if all big tech went full remote. People like SF, but not enough to pay such a spread over arguably equivalently nice places that are much cheaper. So yes, HCOL -> LCOL drives LCOL to be more expensive. Also the reason cities existed in the past was because people needed to gather together to work/exchange goods. With remote work/internet that goes away, aside from education/leisure. You seem to be implying Amsterdam exists because people like it, and not because it was a job center. I can assure you there were very few people hundreds of years ago picking cities primarily for leisure. The need to densify/build vertically lessens when there's no concentration of a downtown for work.