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Remote work turns America into Suburban nation
- throwaway22032 3y agoThe single largest advantage of remote work is being able to live in a lower cost of living area with more land. Even if you're in the office 2 days that opens up a commutable area that's far far larger than before.
- sokoloff 3y agoFor me, that advantage is third or perhaps lower on the list, behind "saving time almost every day" (#1 for me) and "having much more control over my office environment [that I spend 35-50 hours per week in]" (a fairly close second).
- chasd00 3y agoI’ve been wfh for about 10 years now. The biggest advantage to me is no work clothes and no dry cleaning. No driving is up there too.
- flappyeagle 3y agoWhat kind of jobs have you had where the clothes need to be dry cleaned? I’ve worn jeans or chinos to work my whole career and I worked in banking.
- chasd00 3y agoWell it has been 10 years :) but typical office style like pressed khakis, button down shirt, and uncomfortable shoes.
- throwaway22032 3y agoI think a lot of people don't realise that you can wash most shirts. I wear dress shirts all of the time and I've never dry cleaned one. I kind of enjoy ironing though, it's a nice ritual to present my best self to the world.
- jen20 3y agoThat’s not the advantage for me: even when living in the middle of the largest cities around - once across the street from the office - I preferred remote work since it is designed for those who deliver value rather than those who cosplay value generation via socialization and micromanagement.
- mattgreenrocks 3y agoThe ability to decouple wages from CoL is seen as a huge existential threat to existing power structures. If workers began to believe they have choices, then the old model of management simply doesn't work as well.
- bluefirebrand 3y agoThis is just an added perk as far as I'm concerned.
- fullshark 3y agoThe Suburbs are great, and what does it mean if the cities are only sustained by forcing individuals/parents to come into them 5 times a week for their livelihoods? Why aren't workers eager to live in densely packed urban environments if presented this alternative, that has been traditionally disparaged by so many?
- chasd00 3y agoI live in dfw, about 3miles SW of downtown Dallas so not a suburb. I have to admit, suburbs have a lot to offer. The northern dfw suburbs are more walkable than downtown Dallas for your daily needs. It’s not hard to find an apartment or house in Plano, Frisco, McKinney or other northern suburbs with direct access to a network of biking trails and walking paths to get to the day to day places you need to go. Maybe I’m just old but they’re quite nice places to live. I would consider moving except for some family things that keep me in oakcliff.
- digdugdirk 3y agoI would advise against using cities in Texas as your baseline of comparison when people mention "cities". Texas grew up well after the automobile was a thing, and didn't have the same external pressures that pushed urban growth towards density around specific areas (harbours, rivers, etc.). Also, the sprawl and government structure is such that "suburbs" are both larger, and better able to plan/direct and fund their own growth. (And yes, these incentives also further promote the idea of growth/expansion vs density and reinvestment into an existing geographic core) Texas truly is its own thing.
- usefulcat 3y agoI’ve lived in the suburbs of Dallas (far north Dallas, to be more precise). Walkable is not a word I would have used to describe it. Even ‘nearby’ things are far by walking standards. For example, there was a grocery store literally down the street from my first apartment, but it was still about a twenty minute walk each way, and the next closest store was a lot farther. One thing I do recall is being astonished at just how far you could drive and still be in the suburbs.
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- arbuge 3y agoI'm having a bit of a hard time understanding the choice of lead stock photo in this article.
- analog31 3y agoI think the term of art is "hallucination."
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoDespite working from home in a fantastic job, I'm having a bit of a hard time believing that we're not in The Bad Place right now.
- dahart 3y ago“One of the starkest depictions may have been in The Good Place, where a suburban development was (spoiler alert) revealed to be designed by an actual demon experimenting with a new circle of hell.”
- didgeoridoo 3y agoThe neighborhood environment in The Good Place is basically a StrongTowns dream; totally walkable, moderately dense, mixed-use, not a car in sight. Not actually a great example for this article.
- dahart 3y agoI don’t think the set design was supposed to resemble suburbs; I think the quoted line was just an independent joke. But I’d agree in the sense that using The Good Place as a hook for this article is a little bit of a stretch. Maybe the writer just wanted something fun & catchy for what would be otherwise boring.
- bombcar 3y agoSuburbs that people don’t leave are just small towns.
- jen20 3y agoThis is highly location-dependent. In the north east it might be the case (I’m thinking of the commuter belt for New York City, towns in NJ, CT or Long Island which are towns in their own right), but suburbs in Texas (for example) are a hellscape of strip malls, often without any kind of sidewalk or amenity besides 17 different churches and a Sonic.
- rainytuesday 3y agoSuburbs have uniquely hostile road geometry for pedestrians, that's why they get a bad rap, but it's also a security feature.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mcdonje 3y agoNot at all. A small town has a town center, a residential area clustered around it, and nature or farmland surrounding that. Suburbs sometimes have a town center but often it's much more amorphous with different strip malls and such. Everything is spread out. There is no place where you're at the heart of the town, in the center of activity. And even if there is such a place, it's probably driving distance, just like everything else. You need a car because everything is spread out because all the areas of activity are surrounded by parking lots.
- stfp 3y agoMaybe remote work means that suburbanites will stop preventing cities from being nice places to live? (because of regional politics, suburban drivers have a say in things like how much highways and parking a city ends up having to maintain)
- gok 3y agoTo me, remote work makes cities a more attractive place live than the suburbs. A family doesn’t need 2 or 3 cars anymore. You can live and work in a walkable neighborhood and get most of your errands done during the week, avoiding times of congestion. Work from a cafe or park instead of a basement or garage.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoYou may be right. I found when working from home that leaving to run errands suddenly became a burden. Pre-covid I could stop at the store on the way home from work to grab a thing. With those opportunity trips gone, every trip has to be deliberate.
- hoot 3y agoYou don’t need 2-3 cars living rurally either. My wife and I dropped down to 1 vehicle a year ago with her being a stay at home mom and myself working remote.
- kuhzaam 3y agoGrowing up in the suburbs with two parents working, and myself and my brother both playing sports on different teams, we would've had a hard time getting by with less than 4 cars.
- xnx 3y agoRideshare doesn't eliminate the need for private vehicles, but reduces the need for the Nth vehicle.
- scarface74 3y agoUnless you have kids. The school systems are generally better in the burbs.
- htag 3y agoUnless you have money/connections. Most cities have private schools with excellent rankings.
- mcdonje 3y agoOnce they start renovating office buildings into housing everyone will flock to the cities. Most people don't want to live in suburbs. Even many of the people who think they do would be happier in a small town surrounded by farmland or nature.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago[dead]
- steve76 3y ago[dead]
- xnx 3y agoDecentralization of office work will have effects that ripple out for decades to come. There's nothing inherently superior to urban, suburban, or rural living. Everything is a tradeoff. We'd all be better off if more costs of infrastructure were more directly connected to those utilizing them.
- nojvek 3y agoLiving in a big city would be great, except its ridiculously expensive. Real estate prices are considerably different pre-covid and post-covid. An entire generation of young people are growing up who will never be able to afford a house/apartment in a major city.
- kkfx 3y agoAllow me an european point-of-view (most EU and USA people would disagree): I read in comments various positions, but actually all of you are talking about the "Riviera model" witch means a densely but not to dense area populated by homes instead of multi-families/high rise buildings. That's IMO is the best form of city in the actual level of tech and social evolutionary stage: cities with big buildings are simply too dense to evolve, buildings get old but can't be really replaced because it's too costly and it's too complicated relocating many families, makes different owners of parts of them to rebuilt etc => dense cities can't evolve, they are too dense. Far less dense areas do not have the density benefits for culture, economics, generic human social life. The middle ground is the Riviera, where some works "in the office" but at a short commuting range, in small buildings spread between homes, some works remotely. Today that's good enough for local services too exists, good enough for remote workers, good for EVs since almost all have personal garages, place for p.v. in the vast areas of the world where it's meaningful, sustainable for logistics (retail and so on), it's new in most places so we can start over aging but not-much-replaceable infra, for tomorrow drone delivery it's possible, flying cars as well if we really reach this step soon enough in decades terms. There is only a but IMO: those who profit from many other humans dislike such model: it's centered on a distributed economy where all can earn a bit without excesses so poor's live far better, rich earn far less and a strong middle class rule by mere numbers and effective decision power and awareness. And that's IMO why so many "high in the pyramid" want RTO and many "low in the pyramid" fear the future of dense cities as new kind of labor camps/ghettos.