AFAIK most companies's WFH policy is currently limited within US. Cross border remote worker need much stricter approval with possibly compensation adjustment & tax implications.
Somewhat related to this are the remote work opportunities that have opened up to those living in rural communities.
I have friends who live in Northern Ontario that now have remote work jobs in Toronto (programming, graphic design, IT) they wouldn't have been able to apply for beforehand because of where they live.
Yeah I’m passively searching for jobs, and being 1.5 hours from Boston without wanting to commute, I have found way more opportunities now because company’s are way more open to full remote or partial remote cuz I’m only an hour away.
At the same time the housing market in my area is going bonkers because city people are moving here to work remote too. So it’s a toss up all around
The housing market within that distance to Boston has been bonkers for years. My parents live in a small town about that distance away. An 8 acre lot on their street is listed for $150k.
Wait, you're saying that the market is bonkers because it's so cheap, right? Or is it 150k for an empty lot with no house? Because from my perspective in nearly middle of nowhere Oregon, a house on 8 acres for $150k is crazy cheap.
Does anyone know a lot of personally who have personally done this?
One of my friends is travelling+working across western states, but he's the only person I know. Another friend tried going to Truckee (Tahoe) and eventually ended up back with his parents after a couple of months.
So far, I would guess this is happening but to a much lesser extent that what most think. It'll definitely be a trending in that direction though.
I live in Salt Lake city for the winter and work remotely so I can snowboard, but I was doing this prior to the pandemic. I also have a friend who lives in Austin, Texas normally, whos planning on moving to Colorado for the winter to snowboard as well. Those are just anecdotes, so who knows how prevalent this trend is.
I would love to do this, but lodging near slopes tends to be quite expensive - do you stay a bit further away, or have you had success sharing a house with a group of people doing the same thing?
Salt Lake city is quite affordable and im ~45 minutes to Brighton, Park city, Solitude, Snowbird, etc, excluding traffic. But pretend i didn't say that, traffic in the canyons already sucks, and more people will only make it worse.
Montreal? For Snowboarding? No offense, but snowboarding conditions in the western United States and western Canada is so much better than Montreal. For example Mont Treblant only gets 164 inches of snow on an average year[1], while Snowbird, Alta, Brighton and Solitude in Utah average 500 inches a year.
I would like to do this, but my big (and therefore slow moving) company didn't release any guidance on when we were coming back to the office, so I just renewed my lease for a full year.
That being said, when we're scheduled to go back (next June), I plan on trying to work completely remotely, and then attempt to travel in a much more extensive way.
Right here with you. I don’t even know when I’m supposed to go back into the office, but I definitely thought about taking out an AirBnB for a couple months in somewhere like Provo.
I took half work Airbnb’s throughout the pandemic. Worked great for me.
The only problem is finding good internet. All they’ll tell you is if that have wifi or not even consistently working wifi. I learned quickly You gotta research this part deeply yourself.
The WiFi thing is definitely an issue. I've found good results on AirBnB by filtering for business reviews. I figure that business travellers are going to hold a quality WiFi connection in higher regard than someone who's just travlling for fun.
We just bought an RV and plan on living out of it and chasing powder across Colorado. Always been a dream, I figured now’s the time to do it. Curious how crowded the slopes will be though.
I can't speak to skiing, but many rock climbing areas have been feeling the strain from large crowds this year. It's a bit of a perfect storm, though: a combination of the reality of COVID and remote working plus the explosion of urban climbing gyms over the past few years exposing more and more people to the sport.
I've been using my work flexibility to avoid the popular crags and boulderfields on the weekends, but on the rare weekends I have been out, the popular crags at the New River Gorge have been absolutely packed.
Have you done this before. The I70 resorts, Summit County, Eagle County, and even the Roaring fork valley make it really difficult to park overnight. Even in summer where dispersed camping is available, it's not a no brainer affair. You might have luck out in the far west like Silverton, Telluride or Durango.
The problem is that supply at such places is quite limited (why would there be excess build up if there was no demand?), so it takes just small increase of demand to dry up supply and drive up prices.
I know few people who are unsuccessfully try to buy "non-metro" houses: either prices are to high, or deals closed in just couple hours of property being listed.
The people you know are likely constraining their search to only the kinds of places white collar urbanites find "nice".
There is no shortage of non-dilapidated double wides and 1500ft^2 houses in rural areas.
What there is a shortage of is recently constructed nicely optioned turnkey 1500-3500ft^2 houses. Basically if you're looking for the kind of house you find in an inner suburb with good schools in BFE it'll either be hard to find or expensive.
So far I've seen friends move to Tahoe, Sacramento, San Diego and (temporarily) to Colorado from the Bay Area. Mostly when given the green light to go remote permanently but in at least one case they bought a house with no promise of long-term remote work.
My aunt and uncle live near Binghamton, NY and their new neighbors are high income people (a Googler + Attorney) who plan to stay for a year or two. Fixing up the house and putting a pool in is still less than what their Manhattan apartment cost.
Yea I moved to Colorado from Texas two weeks ago. Was planning to move to Central America pre-covid, though - so my move wasn't covid-related or initiated though definitely impacted.
I changed jobs in August, and the new job is in a high rent city, where I'll pay $75/night for a 1br apartment (i.e. $2300/mo). We're all remote until at least January, so I decided to not rent and instead work while traveling -- you can live in hotels and AirBnBs quite comfortably in many places on a $75/night budget.
This summer I bought a house in Tahoe (Carnelian Bay) and am now going through some mostly DIY renovations, with a little local contractor help here and there.
We also still have a place in San Francisco, but we're spending 70-80% of our time in Tahoe.
We spent the whole month of June here, and when we booked our place to stay, Placer county was not allowing short term rentals, so we booked for a full month to get over the threshold. While we were here, restaurants and other things opened back up.
About mid-June we started looking at houses. We made one offer for asking price, and got it accepted, right at the end of June. Overall I think we were fairly lucky. There were some stories of places going for substantially over asking price, which is rare for the area. But the largest impact was that housing supply is low, and houses moved really quickly.
It's typical for houses in this area to sit on the market for 3-6 months and sell for right around or slightly under asking price. This summer we saw a house go up on Zillow, on Wednesday, and we hemmed and hawed about it until Friday, then told our agent we wanted to tour it. The house was already off the market by that time. We saw plenty of places hit there market, and go into contract within 2-5 days.
We looked at several that we're real fixers. Like an 1100 square foot A-Frame that had a terrifying set of disclosures, probably needed at least a down to the studs renovation. All the electrical replaced, plumbing replaced, etc. Everything was DIY, not to code, etc. It sold in a handful of days for at least $500K, and certainly needed another $150K in work.
The place we did end up getting, we only got to see because our agent knew the seller and the selling agent. We got to tour it before it hit the multiple listing service and we had an offer in before it actually went on the market. It did hit the MLS for a few hours, but the buyer ended up wanting an easy sale, so accepted or asking price offer.
This kind of quick sale is typical for the Bay Area, but not at all for Tahoe.
I'm not keeping as close an eye on the market now, but overall asking prices are up, and people are still buying quickly. Also all the local contractors are very busy.
The other issue (and we're part of this problem) is that a lot of former rental houses are being put on the market, so locals are having quite a hard time finding a place to rent, and having to end up in places like Reno, which is roughly a 45-60 minute drive away. SFGate has an article about this exact issue here: https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Bay-Area-transplant...
The other anecdote is that up until a couple of weeks ago it was still quite busy in town. People working at the local grocery store were commenting that it's the busiest shoulder season they've ever seen. Typically this time of year, this place is nearly a ghost town.
Both me and my partner have been working remotely since the start of March and expect to continue at least well into next year. Perhaps permanently.
> The other issue (and we're part of this problem) is that a lot of former rental houses are being put on the market, so locals are having quite a hard time finding a place to rent, and having to end up in places like Reno, which is roughly a 45-60 minute drive away.
This has been happening for years, at least around South Lake Tahoe, due to rentals being put up on AirBnB. I've talked to numerous locals over the years while on ski trips and they've all said the same thing: if they're renting it's usually in Nevada and they drive to town every day. During big storms a lot of folks can't even make it to work at all.
This is basically happening all over the world in tourist spots. For example, there's a town called Dingle in Ireland which is super beautiful and beloved by (mostly American) tourists.
Anyone who doesn't already own a house there and works in any of the businesses is unable to rent, and they normally commute from one of the larger towns, 40-60 mins away (over pretty bad roads, up and down mountains). It's gotten so bad that businesses are considering putting on buses for their staff.
And if you want to hear a 45 minute rant, mention AirBnB to anyone who lives in Santa Cruz and doesn't own property :)
I don't know people who have done this but I know people that are impacted by people that have (e.g. small towns along the Hudson river being inundated by people fleeing NYC).
Cool. My city has been adapting to the massive influx of tech workers for the past 10 years. Enjoy your increased rents and rent seekers. Might want to beef up your local social services networks as well.
Social mobility without money looks like the dustbowl, or Californian migrant farm workers.
Social mobility with money looks like second homes becoming first, with huge investments and then questions around socialised cost of roads, infrastructure in general.
If you do the local taxes right, it evens out, but the price of land and housing rises for the non-mobile locals and it makes for some awesome "you're not from around here" issues.
The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.
Have you ever been to the Midwest? They aren’t running out of land. Las Vegas could expand into the desert for an extremely long time. There won’t be the same struggles that you have in coastal cities or exotic expat hot spots.
Where is there even marginally arable land and not food production? Well, I mean, except when there is suburban sprawl sitting on it, instead, which seems to be what you are proposing, rather ironically?
l> We should be smarter about what foods we "produce". No more meat subsidies, or better yet no more meat at all.
I'm with you on subsidies, but it's worth noting that historically, cattle, sheep, etc. were often raised and grazed on land that wasn't (and mostly still isn't) suitable for growing crops, usually because of some combination of elevation, slope[0], soil, or lack of rainfall. Animals are mobile, so you can move them around on a larger area with relatively sparse vegetation that humans don't consider palatable[1], or even migrate them seasonally on an even larger territory.
So, within some limits, animal husbandry in areas otherwise marginal for agriculture can convert poor ground cover to high quality protein (and other animal products). As long as overgrazing is avoided, this seems to me to be a decent and sustainable arrangement.
[0] Terraces can deal with slopes to an extent and slows erosion, but don't always conveniently lend themselves to large scale mechanized agriculture. Solutions to the other challenges also don't work everywhere.
[1] It's worth noting that the domesticated animal least picky about what plants they'll eat is the goat, many varieties of which, when not moved frequently enough, can completely denude an area by eating plants and bushes down to the ground, climb trees to eat all the leaves they can reach and even stripping the bark, which kills the tree. Which makes goatherding a likely driver of desertification in already stressed ecosystems.
growing food in fertile areas and then exporting it to places that need more food seems like a better use of resources than using it for the English gardens of suburban zoom tech workers
yes indeed which is why markets have allocated resources in such a way that the regions that are very fertile make a lot of food and then sell it to places that aren't, rather than filling them with more terrible low density housing of which the US has already too much
We could do a lot to make water usage more sustainable.
Most places in the US get at least ten inches of precipitation annually. Very few get less than that.
With that much rainfall, a lot of homes can be self supporting with catchment systems, grey water reuse, etc.
Edit: Anyone interested in some best practices should look at what Fresno County is doing. They get an average of 11 inches of rain annually and they were basically desert before a canal system was built in the late 1800s.
In some years, their ground levels have risen because of their water policies and practices. In contrast, much of the rest of California and the Midwest are experiencing subsidence as water tables permanently and steadily fall.
They self-admittedly have a unique set of resources.
Natural Resources
Fresno County is unique among California counties in the range of natural resources (forests, riverways, and wildlife habitats) that encompass its vast terrain.... Two major rivers, the Kings and San Joaquin, flow through this rich landscape, providing the County with its most prized resource, water.[0]
Presumably towns could easily afford to buy those water rights from farmers if needed. Many farmers use inefficient flood irrigation because water rights are so cheap it's not worth them investing in drip irrigation.
Yes. People can pay more for water than cows or corn. If water supply is a problem raise prices. Keep on raising them until it isn’t a problem. If some farmers go out of business that’s capitalism. No one owes farmers a livelihood any more than they owe factory workers one. Selling natural resources at below market prices is just a subsidy to the favored industry at the expense of everyone else.
So LV particularly recycles their water. The dryness is awful and it’s why I moved. But anything that can be reclaimed and reused is. The only waste is the stuff people pour into the yards and thus let evaporate instead of staying in the system. It’s also got the Hoover Dam and Colorado river piped straight to it. (Unfortunately much of that water is sent out to California, but that’s another problem.)
Yes, water’s a huge issue in the southwest. It’s also managed differently in different places. But from what I saw in LV, I think it can be a solved problem. It is not a constraint.
Edit-But let’s assume water is a constraint. Then why don’t we add to the needed infrastructure projects a project to pump water in from the coast? I’m sure there’s a feasible and affordable way to do it since we already have the highway systems. Just run some pipes alongside it - powered by solar? Doesn’t need to be running 24/7.
Las Vegas is the desert Southwest, not the Midwest. Water concerns are real, as is the sheer emptiness. I know some people think Ohio is empty (probably the same ones who think Nevada is Midwestern) but rural Nevada is nuclear test range empty. It's an entirely different order of being.
Ask anyone there who isn't making their money directly off of California money how the influx of California money is working out for them and they won't paint a rosy picture.
> The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.
Fake news. It pours foreign currency into a local economy that was already 80% based on tourism and which has a depreciating currency. Does selling tourists plastic trinkets and taking them on boat trips cost young local children plastic toys or prevent their fishermen dad from having his own longboat? Ofcourse not. Pre-COVID, money was being shoved as fast as it could possibly be shoved into a tiny island where people have tight-knit yet large family structures. All the locals on Bali are richer and better educated than they otherwise would be.
I think the worst thing about it may be that it's basically a classic case of the Resource Curse, except instead of oil they have beautiful beaches/etc.
> All the locals on Bali are richer and better educated than they otherwise would be.
Not necessarily. In the early days, perhaps, when businesses were run by locals and the type of tourist who would go, would use local services.
Now as a place develops, outside money / developers / owners move in, providing higher quality accommodation, fine dining and the once local business owners are employed as cleaners for a pittance.
It is a pattern repeated since the 60s and 70s with the hippy trail when large amounts of people started to visit these places. Once pristine paradise locations are now over developed concrete monstrosities catering to the higher end - out pricing the travellers who first went to the place and the profits all exported to other places
It's a fnord I wish would disappear completely. It makes me embarrassed as a speaker of the English language, just by proxy! Is this what it means to be getting old...
Seems like a writeup of some digital nomad living there right now, desiring to feel good about helping local economy. Not saying it isn't completely the case but you have some serious pink glasses on.
The money from tourism goes to elite few locals who own most of it, and it eventually slightly trickles down the rest of folks living there, the income disparity is on a level we simply don't see in the west. You won't see those folks since they still live in their tiny hut far from busy tourist centres of the south.
The idea of good western tourist money lifting equally everybody out of poverty is seriously naive, in any undeveloped country. Plus OP mentioned additional load on underfunded medical services.
>If you do the local taxes right, it evens out, but the price of land and housing rises for the non-mobile locals and it makes for some awesome "you're not from around here" issues.
>The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.
You're being far too nice by choosing the example of a digital nomad living in Bali.
A much closer to home and harder to ignore example is what SV money has done to places like Denver, Boulder and is doing to Boise.
I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.
And before any east-coasters or Mid-westerners start laughing, NYC money is doing a very good job destroying upstate, PA and VT. Masshole money is crapping all over NH and ME. Chicago is slowly eating more and more of Wisconsin and Michigan. This is a relatively universal problem at least in the US.
> I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.
Can you go into more details? I feel like this is a dangerous kind of statement because it is hard to draw a line for people to say what shouldn't and should be.
Here is why the statement feels dangerous, it doesn't make arguments directly related to the group and can easily be expanded to: "But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when [people of color, poor people, lacking education, etc] move in. It shouldn't be that way."
Perspective is always valuable even applied to what would be the unpopular opinions.
>Here is why the statement feels dangerous, it doesn't make arguments directly related to the group and can easily be expanded to: "But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when [people of color, poor people, lacking education, etc] move in. It shouldn't be that way."
When poor people move in they don't have the resources to tell everyone else what to do and they don't tend to pick fights with whoever is there first. When rich people move in they get the government to cater to them and local laws change, often to the point where what was previously normal behavior (burning brush, discharging guns within city limits) is no longer even legal. They often pick fights with the local businesses ("I don't like how that second generation pig farm I knowingly bought property adjacent to smells" or they complain about the environmental impact of some third generation junkyard not because it's not folowing the law but because they find it unsighl). Furthermore they co-opt locals with their money. People who genuinely hate all the other changes they bring bury their heads in the sand because the newcomers are spending more money at their business (or whatever) until it finally negatively affects them personally.
I would much, much, much rather have poor people move in than the white collar crowd because the former has bigger problems than me and the people around me Doing It Wrong(TM).
The sense of entitlement in statements like 'there first', 'previously normal behavior', 'co-opt locals', and 'bury their heads in the sand because the newcomers are spending' is palpable. Sorry that you assumed everything was always going to stay the way you happened to like it just because people didn't have other options, but not sorry.
There's a very wide gulf between "stay the way you happened to like" and "change in ways that pretty much nobody likes but nobody has any power to do anything about"
> The sense of entitlement in statements like 'there first', 'previously normal behavior', 'co-opt locals', and 'bury their heads in the sand because the newcomers are spending' is palpable. Sorry that you assumed everything was always going to stay the way you happened to like it just because people didn't have other options, but not sorry.
Entitlement is people with money thinking they can and should be able to change existing communities to their liking, just because they have money.
It's weird, but there seems to be a common blind spot about certain kinds of wealth-enabled antisocial behavior.
It doesn't have to be a sense of entitlement. Many human societies around the world and through time give more priority to the idea that people build homes and community across time. The fact that we allow free movement into cities, towns and villages doesn't have to mean that "newcomers get an equal say" (although it certainly could). Why shouldn't a multi-generational community be able to say "we like it the way it is, and don't want random/arbitrary migration here to change that" ?
I can't think of any way to give people more say based on how long they've been invested in a place that couldn't also be trivially used for voter suppression.
I guess you could do preferential tax policy but that almost requires high taxes as a prerequisite which is a non-starter in a lot of places.
> I can't think of any way to give people more say based on how long they've been invested in a place that couldn't also be trivially used for voter suppression.
I don't think something like that necessarily needs to be some kind of constitutional mechanism. It could be a social norm, kinda like the ones that discourage people from casually insulting others and which punish them if they do.
Though I suppose if you're looking for a constitutional mechanism, clearly defined but longish residency requirements for voting probably wouldn't fall under the category of "voter suppression" (which I take to mean policies designed to indirectly disenfranchise certain kinds of voters for partisan political advantage).
> clearly defined but longish residency requirements for voting probably wouldn't fall under the category of "voter suppression" (which I take to mean policies designed to indirectly disenfranchise certain kinds of voters for partisan political advantage).
Until The Great Migration happens (or something like it), and suddenly the long residency requirements look precisely like racism ... unless, of course, you've had the in place for 300 years already.
I think that voting is among the least significant of the acts of "new arrivals", particularly if they have money.
> A much closer to home and harder to ignore example is what SV money has done to places like Denver, Boulder and is doing to Boise.
> I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.
Definitely agree. I live in Salt Lake City, and we're seeing the same thing here. A large part of it is failing to adapt to the local culture. I don't think it is just a growth thing, since Utah's population has been growing rapidly for a while due to the high Mormon population and it's only been recently, when the composition of new residents has changed that problems have started to surface.
Oops, meant to add a footnote but then forgot. I don't have anything too specific. I will just add that Utah's culture, and how it functions as a state is shaped by being founded by Mormons and until recently having a very high percentage of Mormons in the total population. Mormonism is a high commitment religion in terms of the behaviors it expects members to follow and that led to a homogenous, high-trust society. As people move here from other places, typically coastal ones with progressive attitudes, they try to bring those values here and find that their policies don't work well in the political/cultural climate here.
As just one example, I'll take homelessness. Utah did so well with solving its homelessness crises until recently that you would find articles in Bloomberg, NYT, etc., asking "will Utah be the first state to solve homelessness?", stuff like that. The reason Utah was so good at dealing with homelessness was a strong coupling between the Mormon church providing social services, the police departments being lenient with the homeless, and the local governments helping to redirect the homeless to the church (social) services. When a new mayor was elected and a new person became police chief this balance was shaken up and the whole system came apart, so now our homelessness problem is about as bad as everywhere else.
For what it's worth, I'm not from Utah originally, I'm not religious at all, feel no desire to be so, and was never Mormon, though I have gone to a couple of their church services as a guest. So these are just my observations and I'm trying to be as fair as possible in giving them.
>The reason Utah was so good at dealing with homelessness was a strong coupling between the Mormon church providing social services, the police departments being lenient with the homeless, and the local governments helping to redirect the homeless to the church (social) services.
> When a new mayor was elected and a new person became police chief this balance was shaken up and the whole system came apart, so now our homelessness problem is about as bad as everywhere else.
You listed 3 reasons, 2 of which has to do with the church, the third reason changed with new mayor, so now it all fell apart?
What happeneded to the mormon social services? Were they not successful without the local government redirecting people to the church services (which should be illegal?, separation of church and state)
It fell apart because it required cooperation between the church, police, and the local government. Any one of those is potentially disruptive. And two changed. The social services still exist as far as I know but aren't as well utilized.
I don't think it is illegal for the government to redirect people to faith based charities, any more than it would be illegal to redirect them to secular charities, however, I am not a lawyer.
can you elaborate just a bit more? in your original post you made it seem like the church, police, and local government had some kind of stable cooperative dynamic on an institutional level. but then you say it fell apart in the aftermath of a single election without much explanation. are the new mayor and police chief taking things in a radically different direction, or was it just a temporary alignment between the leaders as individuals?
Another non-Mormon, non-religious immigrant to Utah chiming in here:
"which should be illegal" - is exactly an example of the coastal attitudes that are disrupting a very well ordered, high trust society. Consider that this state basically solved the homeless problem by violating a sacred principle which, fully expressed in coastal cities, neither seems to actually help the homeless nor the residents around them. It's possible that the firewall between civic and religious institutions isn't a universal evil.
Or more likely, it highlights a failing of the civic institutions' responsibilities to properly address the problem themselves, rather than relying on an external service provider, whatever the source. That is to say, in this day and age, a high-trust society should be unnecessary; these are basic services that state and local government need to be addressing, rather than budgeting only for the police department.
> "which should be illegal" - is exactly an example of the coastal attitudes that are disrupting a very well ordered, high trust society. Consider that this state basically solved the homeless problem by violating a sacred principle which, fully expressed in coastal cities, neither seems to actually help the homeless nor the residents around them. It's possible that the firewall between civic and religious institutions isn't a universal evil.
"Separation of Church and State" being a sacred principle is quite ironic.
I think one of the biggest political problems in the US right now is the fixation on dogma for its own sake. It's happening all over the political spectrum and predictably leads to the dysfunction of polarization (where factional dogmas conflict) or dysfunction of purity (where there's little dogmatic conflict, because the dogmas are always incomplete). We're probably overdue for an era of pragmatic compromise.
It should be illegal for the government to inform people of available services, even if some of them are provided by a church? No, separation of church and state is about each having their own, unique power structure and operating as independent organizations. Independent organizations should be perfectly capable of discussing services given by other organizations, especially if they don't offer any equivalents.
Now if they were busing them over and unloading them directly in the waiting hands of the church, without consent, then that sounds less like independent organizations.
So many car washes being built in Colorado now- why wash something that is going to be 50% hail dings in 2 years? But Californians love their cars, and Texans love their trucks...
> I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.
Hey, I live in Golden! What's being done in Denver/Boulder is happening in Golden.
It's not SV money ruining these cities - it's local restrictive zoning laws that limit the construction of new property, while driving up the price of new construction and existing construction.
Denver, Boulder, and Golden ALL have implemented severe growth caps:
From Attempt to emulate Boulder 1% growth limit across Front Range stirs controversy (Denver Post) [0]:
> Since Boulder in 1976 instituted a 2% limit on dwelling unit increases in city limits, the idea has proliferated. The city revised it down to 1% in 1995, the same year Hayes said he pushed a growth limit of the same rate into effect in Golden. This summer, Lakewood voters approved an almost identical municipal law local officials are in the process of implementing.
SV money isn't ruining cities. Their own city councils and legislators are catastrophically mis-managing their cities.
There is plenty of space for everyone who wants to live somewhere, if you let price signals coordinate a desire for various locations with an ability to pay to consume more or less land area.
I'm starting to build momentum for a fix in Golden, CO, but it sure feels like a long slog.
Wait, do I read it right? The US cities legally limit the amount of houses that can be built in a year? Like, "this year, the total amount of construction must be no more than 2000 houses"? Seriously?
It's worse than that. US towns can have a patchwork of complex zoning rules where the answer to almost any development is "no", and when you do make it past the planning department, the neighbors are often able to block it. So there's no quota, instead you are trapped in months or years of uncertain red tape.
San Francisco is perhaps the worst, but these problems are widespread.
And San Francisco also legally limits the square footage of office space that can be built. Prop M passed in 1986 by the voters. Thank Sue Hestor for this.
Only the rich ones. You wanna build stuff in Buffalo or Detroit and they'll happily take your money in exchange for permits. (well, maybe not Detroit depending on what you want to build, they had a problem with too much housing not long ago but you get my point).
You do indeed read it almost exactly right. I would propose slight modifications, though. Maybe re-word it into:
> City councils legally prohibit landowners from adding dwelling units to their own property.
Remember - all this "pent up" demand for housing is a result of homeowners being denied permission to modify their own property.
Historically, all cities evolved from fields because landowners incrementally upgraded their own property, when the price of rents justified additional improvements.
In the 1920s, city councils gave themselves permission to prevent property modifications "for planning purposes", and the US Supreme Court never struck it down.
The early goals of zoning were explicitly laid out by the mayor of Atlanta in 1922[0], with gems like:
Zoning will keep the apartments out of the private house sections. The coming of the apartment drives out the private home.
And:
The residence districts are further subdivided into three race districts:
R1 or white residence district.
R2 or colored residence district.
R3 or undetermined race district.
The above race zoning is essential in the in interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race. Care has been taken to prevent discrimination and to provide adequate space for the expansion of the housing areas of each race without encroaching on the areas now occupied by the other.
Nearly every US city still has R1, R2, and R3 zoning, though of course no one includes the racial element anymore.
I live and own a home in Denver but have been trying to move to Golden for 2 years now to have more room for my family and access to green space. I have bid on more than a dozen houses all over asking, 50%, waiving all kinds of inspection fixes and I have lost every time to all cash offers from out of state. While my experience may not be indicative of the market as a whole it certainly speaks to some sort of migration happening and "Golden" being on the list of these out of state people.
Good question. Prevent digital nomads opting out of anything (typically they do,except purchase tax which is almost impossible to avoid), require them to fund health cover, increase the cost of the visa? As a resident in the NL I had a day of compliance registration to get a local bank account and be a legal tenant more than 1 month and cover the PREMIS health payment. My landlord was pissed off we registered the tenancy because he was not paying rental income taxes. This is the kind of thing which in the west with higher tax compliance we come to understand how many westerners in Bali aside from traders and bar owners do you think paperwork up?
Towns can easily control for these things using taxes, zoning, and traffic rules, but they often don’t have the political will to do so. We’ve been here before with Silicon Valley, and thirty or forty years later it’s still a major problem .
Quite. They don’t want people to move there but you can’t legally forbid immigration of fellow citizens so you just try and make it as difficult and expensive as possible.
It's not just a matter of political will. Small communities lack a great many things. They tend to have trouble hiring good people for planning and development jobs. A lot of existing development resources are really aimed at larger communities, so they may be unable to readily find good resources that fit their needs. Etc.
It's really a lot more complicated than mere political will.
On the whole, this is really good, we just need to make sure to adapt our civic elements properly.
This could be a massively beneficial thing if we play our cards right.
That said there is another, huge thing that's happening in real time, good for some, not so much for others: local talent (i.e. US, Can, EU) will now be competing with the 'rest of the world' in a major way for more mainstream jobs.
This means the bifurcation of the wealth of globalism could be even more exacerbated.
We saw millions of manufacturing jobs leave the US for other parts.
The 'big winners' were capital holders, senior managers, execs - their wealth increased dramatically.
The other 'winners' were anyone that could maintain a decent job in the aftermath - they saw massively lower prices in commodity goods, and an unbelievable expansion in diversity of consumer products
The 'losers' were those in the working class, who never quite recovered.
Well - 'white collar workers' (and probably this means 'you') are going to be under that kind of 'threat' as well.
The kinds of jobs that are going to the Philippines, Vietnam, India etc. is going to go way up the value chain.
It means further concentration and increase in surpluses with those who 'have power'.
It means probably even more expansion in buying power for those who can keep decent jobs.
But the numbers of those who are going to 'get left behind' may increase substantially.
This is like 'NAFTA+globalisation' on steroids.
I've just hired a firm to do some tech work in E. Europe, and a team to do generic design work in Asia and the prices are ridiculously low and the quality is good. It's not a place to do advanced work (it can be, but you have to dig for that) - and although it means 'more work can be done' and an expansion in some ways, I can only feel for the pressure on wages locally for tech-related work.
Folks, if they can remote you in Utah, they can also remote someone else in Kiev, and this is a very material thing to consider.
This is going to be hugely impactful for trade negotiations in the future because what we have now will be a 'race to the bottom' for labour laws, working conditions, etc. and large corporations will be very happy to 'not think about' how much of that cost is simply be externalized, off the balance sheet. 'McCorp' does not care that there is no financial oversight, shifty accounting principles, meagre commercial law, limited human rights in 'Country XYZ' - all they will see is the direct issues: labour input costs, and then maybe the 'quality of outcomes' but even that is sometimes secondary.
Agreed. I think it is kind of fractal. Even in low cost locations in Asia and all work is moving down further lower cost cities in same time zones.
I can see happening in India where 90's and 00's an IT job was sure shot way to earn upper middle class life. Now a large number of them who entered 10-15 years back are looking at mid career layoffs and next job will be most likely downgrade. Another large chunk of employees are going to be pushed toward contract jobs instead of full time as companies target for 100% utilization of staff.
Sure, it is easier, and the management may well be willing to pay some premium for that. The question is, how large is a reasonable premium for it? 10%? 30%? Certainly not paying three times the amount.
Depending on the salary, people might be willing to work second or third shift type of roles. Time zones only matter insofar as people are unwilling to work to the employer’s schedule
It definitely depends. For most of the tech stuff people do, the kind of people you want to get are going to be unwilling to have a job that requires them to have no social life where they live.
If you want to make distributed work, then you need to be OK with asynchronicity rather than demanding synchronous work.
And to be fair, because of tax and timezones, it's more likely that this stuff will be sent to Europe rather than SE Asia, and you definitely won't get long-term people to work 1pm to 9pm to overlap with the US West coast.
I can already see this in the Balkans. Countries which have stronger ties with the US (eg Romania, Kosovo) can easily see developer salaries be 5-20x local average salary. This has contributed to real estate prices getting out of whack for certain areas in the main cities.
I wonder what this means for the Midwest. I'm near Ann Arbor, and despite the pandemic, it seems that the rate of people moving here hasn't picked up. In fact, the housing market seems to be letting up a bit.
Small communities frequently have this silly idea that "It would be wonderful if a bunch of people with money moved here! It would help alleviate local poverty!"
That's not how that actually works and small communities need to start preparing for more of this. This is likely only the beginning of a long trend that will reshape the US and if it isn't addressed proactively by locals, small communities will suffer because of it.
Remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
People with money who move in are probably not there to play sugar daddy to your town and kiss all its boo-boos and make everything all better.
I have an opposite experience, people who live in small towns usually seem to be actively opposed to development, and don't want any new people coming to their town. They just want to enjoy the low property taxes.
That's universal boomer NIMBY. Even in the NYC suburbs outside NYC , which are in no way small towns. Anything short of multimillion dollar housing for rich fucks is opposed.
Boomers. Their entire retirement portfolios depend on keeping property jacked up for the foreseeable, to later sell to a magical entity with money.
I've been on the road 6 months now working remote. It's pretty great, especially going with a friend or two. The main concern was internet - here's what I found:
1 month Southern colorado - terrible internet
Denver, SLC, Seattle, Baja - all no problems
The key thing that's helped is directly connecting with ethernet.
I was tempted to move to Southern CO for the end of summer/fall but its hard to do short-term, gotta be a little self-sufficient due to the isolation factor. Can I ask where you were in Baja? I'm thinking about going there in the summertime.
Ensenada. Beautiful out in the hills but very sleepy. Colorado beats it by a mile. Security wise it's been okay for a month but the undercurrent of fear about it online and among people I've met here is not great, as is having a lower level of trust in rule of law and police here in general.
Very interesting. I've been thinking for a while about what a /large/ Arcosanti-esque desert oasis planned megacity would look like. This is probably the first question that I run into in my mind. On the plus side, the location means that you've got among the most promising conditions for harnessing solar power in the states.
Good solar conditions in a desert are probably offset by the heating and cooling costs required for wild temperature swings in such an environment.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen anyone normalize the energy production potential of an area based on the energy needs that are localized for that area.
Would have liked to seen the article list more of the specific towns. Just searched around and found this article [0], but only a few western towns were mentioned and most of the places listed are quite expensive.
The "supplemental material" link on that page provides a technical appendix which lists their criteria for determining these communities.[0] They list the subset of communities where they actually interviewed a representative. It includes such unknown places as South Lake Tahoe, Aspen, Telluride, Park City, and Jackson.
They can't mention any specific towns because doing so would easily falsify their narrative. There's no evidence that moving from a major city to a smaller city of this type has accelerated due to COVID, and there's plenty of objective evidence that the rate of change of address in the US has actually slowed slightly due to COVID. The paper this article mentions deals entirely with issues prior to 2020. The article itself is merely the latest symptom of a memetic disease among journalists.
I find this interesting as someone who has been talking to real estate agents and property managers for several weeks now, albeit in a likely biased urban area. What I am hearing and seeing is an immense difficulty of leasing agents and private lessors finding tenants (far more move outs and record vacancy), which is leading to a persistent decline in lease rates and increase of ancillary financial benefits (e.g., free parking) … in the urban areas, while the farther away and cheaper less urban areas are seeing a slight uptick. I am also hearing real estate agents describe how people are taking up the opportunity of the low mortgage rates, but also that the distribution seems to be away from cities or urban populations.
If you start looking, you will find places like high end apartment complexes with many amenities that are close to public transportation offering deals and discounts with inventory that would have never existed in the past. You will also start noticing that the lease lengths are also clearly formed to align with some kind of forecasting or predictions being made in hopes that the next moving season will normalize thing; well beyond what is normally expected.
I'm definitely seeing a lot of anecdotes of people letting leases in eastern SF high rises expire, and moving to other accommodations nearby. I think this is a product of the fact that those SF buildings and those SF neighborhoods were always fundamentally undesirable and those people were only kept in place because they needed access to their jobs and our terrible transportation system was failing them. But these anecdotes involve people moving to Berkeley, not Moab.
For the Bay Area specifically there are also tens of thousands of apartments being completed right now, including about 10k in SF and several 1000s in downtown Oakland. This will naturally reduce rents.
The Bay Area has consistently increases the amount of commercial space much faster than residential space. This has prevented new development from actually lowering rental prices for decades. Thus looking only at the amount of new apartments on it’s own is a completely meaningless statistic.
Indeed, but marginal production will still tend to lower prices.
The thing is that Bay Area real estate price pressure is supported by the arrival of people from abroad, and this process has come to an abrupt halt. Prices will go down. This does not provide evidence of an accelerating process of people moving to Moab, Utah.
As a recent South Bay emigrant, I'm sympathetic to your point of view, but the current listings make it hard for me to completely buy it. Rents for low end 1 bedroom apartments in Mountain View seem to be down about 20% from a year ago. The apartment I left is still vacant a month on despite being listed much lower than what I was paying. I don't think a mere tens of thousands of new units accounts for a drop in rents that seems to be nearly unprecedented in both magnitude and geographic scope.
It's not just the new units, it's also that the overseas arrival process has halted while the domestic departure process is ongoing. But this is not evidence of an accelerating migration from large to small cities.
>there's plenty of objective evidence that the rate of change of address in the US has actually slowed
Is there evidence that migration in and out of cities/states has slowed, or just that rate of address change has slowed. Both can be true at the same time. You can have fewer people switching apartments in city, while also having more move out of state or county.
I've come to the opinion that there is no solution to the high cost of real estate problem in "HCOL cities." No amount of YIMBYism will make real estate affordable if all good upwardly mobile jobs must be crammed into about five giant cities. There is not enough space. Cities with higher density are still not cheap anyway, and when people have kids/families they really start wanting a lot more space.
The solution is to actually use this Internet thing we have built and make place far less relevant. The only blessing so far from COVID is that it has forced this issue and overcome probably a generation of institutional inertia, helping people escape the unaffordable housing trap a lot sooner than they otherwise could.
The US has no housing problem if you broaden your hunt to the entire country. There are tons of really nice small to medium sized towns, and if you like having access to something more urban there are also numerous medium sized cities with functioning downtowns and affordable housing in decent neighborhoods.
These companies might be able to continue operations running on fumes, but I'm not sure how new teams can be formed and new staff onboarded with zero human contact or office interaction.
What would make more sense is simply to move the office to the Midwest, and interact with other branches or businesses remotely.
This would seem to give the best of both worlds - cheaper cost of living, and physical interaction.
> I'm not sure how new teams can be formed and new staff onboarded with zero human contact or office interaction.
Presumably, they'd do it the same way fully-remote companies have always done it. Either you onboard people remotely, or you travel to meet up in person for onboarding. You don't need an office to do that.
>> I'm not sure how new teams can be formed and new staff onboarded with zero human contact or office interaction
> It isn't a problem. Takes a little longer to build trust with people, that's about it.
It is a problem, because there's more to being on a team than getting a laptop and doing assigned work. Losing workplace human contact may be find for some people, but for me the loss has been palpable. The change is necessary given the circumstances, but that doesn't mean it's fine.
People like to downplay this by saying you can be entirely remote with no problems. Probably true if what you're doing is CRUD app stuff that most people on the team have a good idea of how to do, but I'm skeptical that it works for other types of project/product.
I work with hardware and being able to have someone physically look at a schematic with me or explain something to me in person greatly shortens the amount of time it takes me to understand them.
Edit: I also think we don't know the long term effects being remote has on innovation. It seems like people congregate in cities because the rewards to being near people are greater than the costs. Is technology really so good now that it can offset all the years of evolution we've gone through to make us into the social animals we are?
For anything abstract I would argue that the people who are able to onboard and form teams and ideas remotely are inherently the best for the job and likely produce a disproportionate percentage of any teams output. In my experience when you remove middle management (as it happens when you go remote), you want to only hire those people adapted to remote and self-directed work.
I would argue that location based and remote teams are fundamentally different companies. Similar to how tech first and tech-second companies are fundamentally different. I can't think of a single tech-second company that was able to move into the tech-first world. Some local companies might be able to morph themselves into remote companies, but as we see today, they will both lose a lot of staff, and even change their product eventually.
I work with hardware that either I do it at our facility.
Or I risk making a few hundred people homeless if the hardware goes up at flames at home because it'll take a good day to put out the...volatile fuel source :D
The ultimate WFH experience.
I also deeply miss access to the occasional second set of hands to hold the probes while I drive the scope.
I'm lucky in that I have an office that's open so I can still have access to the fancy microscopes etc (as well as to more able sets of soldering hands/equipment), but being largely remote has definitely made distributing prototypes across the team for development and QA much more difficult (not to mention if mods to those prototypes are necessary).
I'm a software engineer on a hardware project. Yes, there are definitely a few people who absolutely have to be in the lab for hardware dev, but there's a shockingly long tail of people who would have been in the lab some of the time but didn't really need to be.
I generally preferred working in the office pre-pandemic, but it wasn't strictly necessary. I also hated living in the bay area. I finally got all the i's dotted and t's crossed and I'm now living somewhere I vastly prefer (far fewer people and a whole lot cheaper). I've only been here 3 weeks and it's already hard to imagine going back.
I changed jobs to join a remote team. Equipment was shipped to my home. I've never met any of my team in person and won't until COVID limitations are resolved and the home office goes back to bringing everybody in for team building. My wife was WFH before COVID and has been onboarding people too. It's new to a lot of people, but companies are working through the issues and adding people with zero human contact all the time.
I've worked remotely now for years, across multiple teams. This reads to me like someone saying "we'll never go faster than sound" because you can't imagine it.
Just because you can't see how it could work doesn't mean it can't. I know from experience it can. That doesn't mean that it will work in every situation for every person, but there is literally nothing in the world that fits those requirements. Some things work for some people, and not for others. EVERYTHING in life is like that.
Many threads seem to point out problems with remote workers moving to lower cost locations. A word I haven't seen is "gentrification." Is remote worker geographic distribution not a form of gentrification?
Rich newcomers are very much to the detriment of anyone not making their money off the moneyed newcomers. The bar owner buries his head in the sand because business is good. The bar's plumber doesn't like it but keeps his mouth shut because he can charge the bar owner more. The farmer, the mechanic, and everyone else not close enough to the money to get a good trickle down loses out big time because now they can't afford the plumber and they can't afford to go to the bar to drink their problems away.
This whole thread is just people complaining about the demand curves moving, and the supply curve lagging, because it takes time in real life for people to see and react to the moving demand curves.
There is a little bit of pain, initially, but if they step back and compare life in an economically prospering place (rich people coming in) versus an economically declining place (rich people and opportunities to earn money leaving), they would realize they are actually lucky.
One might say well those aren’t the only two options, and I would say, yes they are. The world moves faster and faster there is no “stasis” anymore. You’re on the up or down, volatility is higher, and you need to stay on the right side of it.
I should know better than to reply to you but sometimes I can't help myself.
>people complaining about the demand curves moving
>There is a little bit of pain, initially
Demand curves move in decades!
Nobody wants life to suck for a couple decades because a bunch of people showed up and turned the local economy upside down. That's a huge fraction of a lifetime. If you're unlucky your kids might even be born at the start of it.
>economically declining place
You call it declining and I call it stable and sustainable.
The world will always need soybeans, dairy products, corn and timber. The machinery to produce these things will always need to be fixed. Yes the people employed in that capacity will decline over time. With current birth rates and options for geographic mobility I don't think this is a real problem. It just means more kids will grow up to move to the cities than stick around.
>You’re on the up or down, volatility is higher, and you need to stay on the right side of it.
This seems like a world view minted where the primary industry is a volatile money fire. Not everywhere is like this, yet.
I think there's a good case to dampen/smoothen supply/demand shocks in general, but I think this goes deeper, as in the belief that the equilibrium is worse after the shock then before it.
Gentrification is often discussed as a phenomenon fairly specific to poor urban areas. A lot of the frequently mentioned problems of gentrification (displacing people and altering neighborhood character) don't really apply if a well-to-do techie buys (or builds) a house in, say, an enormous new Dallas suburb. The US has tons of land for wealthy people to build nice homes on without displacing anybody.
I was caught by corona in the official middle of nowhere 3rd world country.
DHL from Shenzhen to here took almost a month.
I am very, very glad I can work remotely, and rack not so bad salary in a very cheap country to live. Yet, moving anything physical takes an extraordinary amount of time, and shuts down any productivity.
That's the supply chain reality of most non-port cities/countries in the world. It's also normal to pay 1.5-3x the original ticker price for what you ship in based on tariffs, fees, shipping, etc. The trick is to pick your location based on a Ben diagram of requirements. Personally I buy almost everything locally direct from producers. Many artisans are so cheap that it's even worth custom ordering certain products. For high tech or industrial goods you could be out of luck though.
In the article it references a Gallup poll and says, "Nearly two-thirds of employees who have been working remotely would like to continue to do so"
So the Majority of people want to continue to work remote, I would put out there that the only people that want to go back into the office are are busy bodies and control freaks. (Lookin' at you Satya)
IMHO Working from home solves the problem of, "Stop the chitty chatty and get back to work", and it partially solves the problem of "Hey man, stop riding me like a rented mule".
So spending less time polluting the planet travelling in shiny metal boxes to go to giant concrete boxes to sit in tiny metal and fabric cubes is a bad thing?
I'm going next level on remote. Got a sail boat and I'm going full water world. I'll say hi to Kevin Costner for ya.
I've only really scratched the surface of what it would take to move onto a boat full time, but my impression is that the vast majority of boat dwellers have a permanent slip in a harbor where they spend the majority of their time. Given that, depending on location Starlink might be practical sooner. (Although as a land dweller who owns some rural property I'd like to make better use of, I'm getting a little tired of living on Elon time.)
Quite a presumptuous statement. I'm not a busy body nor a control freak. I would always prefer to work in the office. It is a preference, stop presenting it as right/wrong.
Here is why I prefer an office. It gives me a hard separation between work and home. It forces me to be on a schedule (which I prefer). I have a short 20 minute commute so it is a time to listen to podcasts I otherwise wouldn't make time for. I like the camaraderie of a team, wfh feels lonely to me. I enjoy grabbing lunch with co-workers and then we often play a game before going back to work. These things work for me and enrich my life.
A lot of people prefer that, but solving that doesn’t require “an office” (i.e. a place far away from at least some people, causing at least some long commutes), but rather just that your job give you a stipend for renting a hot-desk at a work-sharing space that’s near to you. (Basically equivalent to them paying to have an extra room built into your house that you only go into to work, but for urbanites where that’s impractical.)
> camaraderie of a team
I don’t know about you, but my work Slack has about a similar level of camaraderie to any Discord group-chat I share with my friends.
> we often play a game before going back to work
Online games exist!
(Though arranging this is kind of finicky; it requires that everyone already have a particular online-game client installed and signed up. There’s no “pick up and play” kind of group gaming available here.
IMHO there’s a niche to be filled in collaboration software for one that seamlessly supports sharing entertainment — playing games together, watching TV/movies together, etc. — embedded within the workspace view itself.)
> grabbing lunch with co-workers
I mean, you could just keep talking to your coworkers while eating lunch, if you like. Make a #breakroom or #lunch channel.
You could even make it a video call, if you want to induce the same physical pain in people with social anxiety at the idea that people are watching their eating habits. :P
Certainly, none of these things are low-friction at first, or particularly low-friction even in the steady-state today. But they’re things where the friction could be greatly lowered. If tons of people are going to stay remote, that’s going to provide a good market for companies to create new products for.
(I’m betting on VR groupware, myself. Some spiritual descendant to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project, for an age where that actually is something most people might want. Literal “virtual offices”, with an unlimited number of unboundedly-large virtual spaces in which to position whatever shared or private app-window views you like. Especially if consideration is made for it to also gracefully degrade into a less-immersive analogous view — e.g. a 2D infinite-zoom layout of all the open app-windows — for people accessing it on screens.)
> the only people that want to go back into the office are are busy bodies and control freaks
Or, y’know, people whose whole job consists of “chitty chat”, such that remote is making them less efficient at doing what you pay them to do. The type of people that, when given the choice between individual offices and a private group workspace room shared with their team, choose the shared workspace, because their work actually occurs entirely on the shared table while talking to their colleagues, not at their own desks.
Basically, think: people who brainstorm all day; people whose productive output is either ideas or decisions.
Academic researchers are like this—90% of their work is figuring out what to try or how to try it, and this process is accelerated by bouncing ideas off of others; and, in the end, actually attempting something often requires many hands to set up the required apparatus.
Marketers are like this, in pretty much the same way: ideas percolate, reach consensus, and then applying the chosen ideas requires horizontally-scaled grunt-work.
Executives are like this. What is an executive but someone who sits in meetings all day? Managers may interface with people actually doing work, but executives only interface with other executives. They may as well all be co-located, so they can continue to bump into each-other and argue/negotiate in smaller groups “after work”—like a legislative body when it’s in session.
With high-speed satellite internet via Starlink on the horizon, the prospect of cruising full-time while maintaining a remote job is becoming more and more realistic. Good luck on your ventures!
Counterexample: I have been WFH since March. I live in a small condo and having to turn my also small dinner table into a cluttered office (USB mic cable, laptop power cable, notepad, external mouse) just makes me feel like I am never really not at work. Even when sitting by the TV, the 'work' is but a mere 6 feet away.
Ironically, my productivity has also been getting measurably worse.
I've realized that I need IRL interaction with my co-workers that's outside of scheduled Zoom calls. I like running into them in the break room and making small talk while making a coffee. I am in a large organization, and having that interaction also gets me talking to people who aren't my direct co-workers.
>I would put out there that the only people that want to go back into the office are are busy bodies and control freaks. (Lookin' at you Satya)
Pretty offensive to those of us that literally can't sustain ourselves mentally in isolated environments.
That or we are ADD like rabbits so we either start drugging ourselves heavily to "take part in work from home culture" or well, welp.
Perhaps I find myself in the minority, but I really enjoy living in a city with somewhat sane zoning. As a US-citizen who doesn't want to live abroad, my choices are limited if I want to live outside of a de-facto suburb. I want to walk most places, utilize public transit, have access to stores and coffee shops without a drive, and naturally live close to friends. My partner and I don't need too much space, and I'd rather go to a dog park and chat with people than play with my dog in a backyard alone.
The Le Corbusier spirit of zoning has wrought so much damage in the US. I dread the idea of having to jump in a car for 15 minutes to shop for groceries in a strip mall. Most suburbs really destroy natural community (and I suppose that was the point of Le Corbusier's ideas around planning: like the gigantic squares in Brasilia) too.
(I realize my comment here is all over the place, sorry!)
I live in a suburb where I can walk most places, utilize public transit, have access to stores and coffee shops without a drive, and live close to friends and work (4 mi). They do exist! (Although, they are admittedly few and far between.)
I mean, it's a five minute walk to the bus stop, but it's also just a 15 minute walk to every type of store/gym/restaurant I need. So, while I personally don't use the public transport, it's there if I ever need it.
I’ve noticed there are a lot of these kinds of suburbs by some large cities in the West. For example: most of the towns in the SF peninsula, Bellevue/Renton, many suburbs of LA and parts of OC. Whereas when many people think of suburbs in the rest of the country, it’s like one or two large highway exits surrounded by chain restaurants and big-box store shopping complexes leading to cookie cutter planned communities.
> I really enjoy living in a city with somewhat sane zoning
Which city is that? I'm not aware of any US cities with sane zoning.
To me that means no minimum square footage, minimal set back rules, no garage restrictions, no height restrictions, no restrictions on multi-units and ADUs, and limited or no restrictions on mixed use.
Wow, so nice to see "sane zoning" mean mixed use and allowing for density and lots of life. I completely agree with you, and have difficulty finding the type of city that fits.
Le Corbusier! I love encountering people that know who he is, and why he's so important.
Do you know Robert Moses? I feel like those two people have pretty much ruined America, and almost no one has heard of them.
I just purchased a house in Golden, CO, where I have all of the things you're talking about - walkable, coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores in tolerably close distance.
I'm trying to get Golden to legalize a style of building that would make all of these good things more plentiful and more affordable.
I am writing about two competing "visions" for a block of what is currently a surface parking lot in downtown Golden.
One option is not pleasant, the other option is delightful, and illegal.
Funny, I just started reading Cato's "The Power Broker" a couple weeks ago. Before that point, I had absolutely no idea who Robert Moses was. I picked that book at random, but as "happy little accidents" go, it melded with my current exploration of themes related to urban planning marvelously. I particularly love reading Jane Jacobs's thoughts on the subject, who learned by observation, not through logical analysis.
A lot of my interest in this area comes from a life-long appreciation of (non-pejorative) anarchist philosophical thought. It's a lot harder to build organization from the bottom-up, but top-down organization loses so much implicit knowledge and context that it seems reasonable to investigate the former approach.
I'll check out your newsletter, it seems so interesting, thank you for linking. :)
That book is one of the best books I have ever read.
criminally undervalued for people trying to understand why the world is the way that it is.
I talk extensively about Robert Moses in my newsletter, but as you might imagine it's hard to summarize a 1400 page book in a handful of emails, so I haven't quite figured out exactly how well the looping Robert Moses's story into the greater narrative I'm trying to convey.
I would love your thoughts on the newsletter as you read through it!
I just started rereading Jane jacobs's "the death and life of great American cities"
I'm sure at some point I'll be looping it into the newsletter as well.
I'm with you on the non pejorative anarchist philosophical thought.
Not necessarily anything to do with anarchy, but more about the value generation of spontaneous, self-organized, responsive, iterative, goal-seeking behavior at an individual level.
Have you heard of "The problem of political authority: the right course and the duty to obey" or "seeing like a state: why schemes to improve the human condition fail"
as if you're reading list isn't already long enough, these might be worthwhile additions.
Thanks! It combines so many of my interests into a coherent goal.
It's more interesting to me than video games (though at times it can be vastly more frustrating than even the worst video game!)
I expect this is a project I will be working on for a very long time. It's actually rather comforting to feel like I have something that could span decades, and remain satisfying, relevant, and renumerative.
It's not Le Corbusier. Zoning in the USA started in the late 1800s, an effort to regulate light and air in cities, and turned by the early 1900s into an effort to keep certain industries and ethnicities out of "good" neighborhoods.
As your links point out, much as it was about "light and air" it was also about keeping out poor people and undesired races.
The first zoning laws in SF were used to selectively drive out Chinese people.
Just want to make sure that this often hidden part of zoning is above the fold.
It's also largely why racial segregation and housing wealth has not changed at all over the past 50 years. The laws are used to prevent integrations if communities, ensure that infrastructure like schools are unevenly distributed, and enforce our current racial divisions.
The infrastructure required to "reuse [water] almost indefinitely" is a major investment for any municipality. Major investments are generally seen as constraints.
I live near Santa Fe, and the mid-to-long term forecast for water supply is pretty dire. Humans have lived in the area for a long time, and it's not likely to become completely dry. But will there be enough to support e.g. a doubling of the county population? This seems unlikely, even with the sorts of changes in use and infrastructure that you mention.
Definitely seeing this happen in my small remote ski town (Revelstoke BC). The demand for housing has sky rocketed for this winter as so many people want to work remote from here and enjoy the skiing. Local blue collar workers hate the skiiers because they are getting priced out of everything and their cost of living & property taxes keep going up.
I have a small (~25ish person) software company based here and it's going to be a challenge to recruit this winter (we're hiring for senior devs) simply because it will be impossible for anyone to find housing here until the end of the ski season!
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadI'm thrilled that remote-friendly is starting to become mainstream. I wish it had happened under other circumstances, though.
I have friends who live in Northern Ontario that now have remote work jobs in Toronto (programming, graphic design, IT) they wouldn't have been able to apply for beforehand because of where they live.
At the same time the housing market in my area is going bonkers because city people are moving here to work remote too. So it’s a toss up all around
One of my friends is travelling+working across western states, but he's the only person I know. Another friend tried going to Truckee (Tahoe) and eventually ended up back with his parents after a couple of months.
So far, I would guess this is happening but to a much lesser extent that what most think. It'll definitely be a trending in that direction though.
[1]: https://officialmonttremblant.com/the-mountain/snow-guns/
[2]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/lists/skiing/10...
That being said, when we're scheduled to go back (next June), I plan on trying to work completely remotely, and then attempt to travel in a much more extensive way.
The only problem is finding good internet. All they’ll tell you is if that have wifi or not even consistently working wifi. I learned quickly You gotta research this part deeply yourself.
I've been using my work flexibility to avoid the popular crags and boulderfields on the weekends, but on the rare weekends I have been out, the popular crags at the New River Gorge have been absolutely packed.
I know few people who are unsuccessfully try to buy "non-metro" houses: either prices are to high, or deals closed in just couple hours of property being listed.
There is no shortage of non-dilapidated double wides and 1500ft^2 houses in rural areas.
What there is a shortage of is recently constructed nicely optioned turnkey 1500-3500ft^2 houses. Basically if you're looking for the kind of house you find in an inner suburb with good schools in BFE it'll either be hard to find or expensive.
Rural areas often don't have that. DSL is usually asymmetric, and doesn't have anywhere near the required upload bandwidth.
My aunt and uncle live near Binghamton, NY and their new neighbors are high income people (a Googler + Attorney) who plan to stay for a year or two. Fixing up the house and putting a pool in is still less than what their Manhattan apartment cost.
We also still have a place in San Francisco, but we're spending 70-80% of our time in Tahoe.
We spent the whole month of June here, and when we booked our place to stay, Placer county was not allowing short term rentals, so we booked for a full month to get over the threshold. While we were here, restaurants and other things opened back up.
About mid-June we started looking at houses. We made one offer for asking price, and got it accepted, right at the end of June. Overall I think we were fairly lucky. There were some stories of places going for substantially over asking price, which is rare for the area. But the largest impact was that housing supply is low, and houses moved really quickly.
It's typical for houses in this area to sit on the market for 3-6 months and sell for right around or slightly under asking price. This summer we saw a house go up on Zillow, on Wednesday, and we hemmed and hawed about it until Friday, then told our agent we wanted to tour it. The house was already off the market by that time. We saw plenty of places hit there market, and go into contract within 2-5 days.
We looked at several that we're real fixers. Like an 1100 square foot A-Frame that had a terrifying set of disclosures, probably needed at least a down to the studs renovation. All the electrical replaced, plumbing replaced, etc. Everything was DIY, not to code, etc. It sold in a handful of days for at least $500K, and certainly needed another $150K in work.
The place we did end up getting, we only got to see because our agent knew the seller and the selling agent. We got to tour it before it hit the multiple listing service and we had an offer in before it actually went on the market. It did hit the MLS for a few hours, but the buyer ended up wanting an easy sale, so accepted or asking price offer.
This kind of quick sale is typical for the Bay Area, but not at all for Tahoe.
I'm not keeping as close an eye on the market now, but overall asking prices are up, and people are still buying quickly. Also all the local contractors are very busy.
The other issue (and we're part of this problem) is that a lot of former rental houses are being put on the market, so locals are having quite a hard time finding a place to rent, and having to end up in places like Reno, which is roughly a 45-60 minute drive away. SFGate has an article about this exact issue here: https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Bay-Area-transplant...
The other anecdote is that up until a couple of weeks ago it was still quite busy in town. People working at the local grocery store were commenting that it's the busiest shoulder season they've ever seen. Typically this time of year, this place is nearly a ghost town.
Both me and my partner have been working remotely since the start of March and expect to continue at least well into next year. Perhaps permanently.
This has been happening for years, at least around South Lake Tahoe, due to rentals being put up on AirBnB. I've talked to numerous locals over the years while on ski trips and they've all said the same thing: if they're renting it's usually in Nevada and they drive to town every day. During big storms a lot of folks can't even make it to work at all.
Anyone who doesn't already own a house there and works in any of the businesses is unable to rent, and they normally commute from one of the larger towns, 40-60 mins away (over pretty bad roads, up and down mountains). It's gotten so bad that businesses are considering putting on buses for their staff.
And if you want to hear a 45 minute rant, mention AirBnB to anyone who lives in Santa Cruz and doesn't own property :)
Social mobility with money looks like second homes becoming first, with huge investments and then questions around socialised cost of roads, infrastructure in general.
If you do the local taxes right, it evens out, but the price of land and housing rises for the non-mobile locals and it makes for some awesome "you're not from around here" issues.
The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.
I'm with you on subsidies, but it's worth noting that historically, cattle, sheep, etc. were often raised and grazed on land that wasn't (and mostly still isn't) suitable for growing crops, usually because of some combination of elevation, slope[0], soil, or lack of rainfall. Animals are mobile, so you can move them around on a larger area with relatively sparse vegetation that humans don't consider palatable[1], or even migrate them seasonally on an even larger territory.
So, within some limits, animal husbandry in areas otherwise marginal for agriculture can convert poor ground cover to high quality protein (and other animal products). As long as overgrazing is avoided, this seems to me to be a decent and sustainable arrangement.
[0] Terraces can deal with slopes to an extent and slows erosion, but don't always conveniently lend themselves to large scale mechanized agriculture. Solutions to the other challenges also don't work everywhere.
[1] It's worth noting that the domesticated animal least picky about what plants they'll eat is the goat, many varieties of which, when not moved frequently enough, can completely denude an area by eating plants and bushes down to the ground, climb trees to eat all the leaves they can reach and even stripping the bark, which kills the tree. Which makes goatherding a likely driver of desertification in already stressed ecosystems.
And no, the soil is being depleted of all minerals and life. It’s better to spread farming out.
Most places in the US get at least ten inches of precipitation annually. Very few get less than that.
With that much rainfall, a lot of homes can be self supporting with catchment systems, grey water reuse, etc.
Edit: Anyone interested in some best practices should look at what Fresno County is doing. They get an average of 11 inches of rain annually and they were basically desert before a canal system was built in the late 1800s.
In some years, their ground levels have risen because of their water policies and practices. In contrast, much of the rest of California and the Midwest are experiencing subsidence as water tables permanently and steadily fall.
Natural Resources Fresno County is unique among California counties in the range of natural resources (forests, riverways, and wildlife habitats) that encompass its vast terrain.... Two major rivers, the Kings and San Joaquin, flow through this rich landscape, providing the County with its most prized resource, water.[0]
[0] -https://www.co.fresno.ca.us/departments/public-works-plannin...
Yes, water’s a huge issue in the southwest. It’s also managed differently in different places. But from what I saw in LV, I think it can be a solved problem. It is not a constraint.
Edit-But let’s assume water is a constraint. Then why don’t we add to the needed infrastructure projects a project to pump water in from the coast? I’m sure there’s a feasible and affordable way to do it since we already have the highway systems. Just run some pipes alongside it - powered by solar? Doesn’t need to be running 24/7.
Ask anyone there who isn't making their money directly off of California money how the influx of California money is working out for them and they won't paint a rosy picture.
Fake news. It pours foreign currency into a local economy that was already 80% based on tourism and which has a depreciating currency. Does selling tourists plastic trinkets and taking them on boat trips cost young local children plastic toys or prevent their fishermen dad from having his own longboat? Ofcourse not. Pre-COVID, money was being shoved as fast as it could possibly be shoved into a tiny island where people have tight-knit yet large family structures. All the locals on Bali are richer and better educated than they otherwise would be.
I think the worst thing about it may be that it's basically a classic case of the Resource Curse, except instead of oil they have beautiful beaches/etc.
Lastly, there isn't really a shortage of land. The island is 5,780 km². I've driven between all 4 coasts and 90% of the time you are seeing nothing but empty nature. https://mapfight.appspot.com/us.ct-vs-bali/connecticut-us-ba...
Not necessarily. In the early days, perhaps, when businesses were run by locals and the type of tourist who would go, would use local services.
Now as a place develops, outside money / developers / owners move in, providing higher quality accommodation, fine dining and the once local business owners are employed as cleaners for a pittance.
It is a pattern repeated since the 60s and 70s with the hippy trail when large amounts of people started to visit these places. Once pristine paradise locations are now over developed concrete monstrosities catering to the higher end - out pricing the travellers who first went to the place and the profits all exported to other places
so their business didn't succeed. It's not the tourist's responsibility. Nor are the competition wrong to out-compete them.
What?
The money from tourism goes to elite few locals who own most of it, and it eventually slightly trickles down the rest of folks living there, the income disparity is on a level we simply don't see in the west. You won't see those folks since they still live in their tiny hut far from busy tourist centres of the south.
The idea of good western tourist money lifting equally everybody out of poverty is seriously naive, in any undeveloped country. Plus OP mentioned additional load on underfunded medical services.
>The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.
You're being far too nice by choosing the example of a digital nomad living in Bali.
A much closer to home and harder to ignore example is what SV money has done to places like Denver, Boulder and is doing to Boise.
I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.
And before any east-coasters or Mid-westerners start laughing, NYC money is doing a very good job destroying upstate, PA and VT. Masshole money is crapping all over NH and ME. Chicago is slowly eating more and more of Wisconsin and Michigan. This is a relatively universal problem at least in the US.
Can you go into more details? I feel like this is a dangerous kind of statement because it is hard to draw a line for people to say what shouldn't and should be.
Here is why the statement feels dangerous, it doesn't make arguments directly related to the group and can easily be expanded to: "But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when [people of color, poor people, lacking education, etc] move in. It shouldn't be that way."
Perspective is always valuable even applied to what would be the unpopular opinions.
When poor people move in they don't have the resources to tell everyone else what to do and they don't tend to pick fights with whoever is there first. When rich people move in they get the government to cater to them and local laws change, often to the point where what was previously normal behavior (burning brush, discharging guns within city limits) is no longer even legal. They often pick fights with the local businesses ("I don't like how that second generation pig farm I knowingly bought property adjacent to smells" or they complain about the environmental impact of some third generation junkyard not because it's not folowing the law but because they find it unsighl). Furthermore they co-opt locals with their money. People who genuinely hate all the other changes they bring bury their heads in the sand because the newcomers are spending more money at their business (or whatever) until it finally negatively affects them personally.
I would much, much, much rather have poor people move in than the white collar crowd because the former has bigger problems than me and the people around me Doing It Wrong(TM).
Entitlement is people with money thinking they can and should be able to change existing communities to their liking, just because they have money.
It's weird, but there seems to be a common blind spot about certain kinds of wealth-enabled antisocial behavior.
I guess you could do preferential tax policy but that almost requires high taxes as a prerequisite which is a non-starter in a lot of places.
I don't think something like that necessarily needs to be some kind of constitutional mechanism. It could be a social norm, kinda like the ones that discourage people from casually insulting others and which punish them if they do.
Though I suppose if you're looking for a constitutional mechanism, clearly defined but longish residency requirements for voting probably wouldn't fall under the category of "voter suppression" (which I take to mean policies designed to indirectly disenfranchise certain kinds of voters for partisan political advantage).
Until The Great Migration happens (or something like it), and suddenly the long residency requirements look precisely like racism ... unless, of course, you've had the in place for 300 years already.
I think that voting is among the least significant of the acts of "new arrivals", particularly if they have money.
> I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.
Definitely agree. I live in Salt Lake City, and we're seeing the same thing here. A large part of it is failing to adapt to the local culture. I don't think it is just a growth thing, since Utah's population has been growing rapidly for a while due to the high Mormon population and it's only been recently, when the composition of new residents has changed that problems have started to surface.
Did you mean to link an example of that with the [0]? I'm curious to read about that.
As just one example, I'll take homelessness. Utah did so well with solving its homelessness crises until recently that you would find articles in Bloomberg, NYT, etc., asking "will Utah be the first state to solve homelessness?", stuff like that. The reason Utah was so good at dealing with homelessness was a strong coupling between the Mormon church providing social services, the police departments being lenient with the homeless, and the local governments helping to redirect the homeless to the church (social) services. When a new mayor was elected and a new person became police chief this balance was shaken up and the whole system came apart, so now our homelessness problem is about as bad as everywhere else.
For what it's worth, I'm not from Utah originally, I'm not religious at all, feel no desire to be so, and was never Mormon, though I have gone to a couple of their church services as a guest. So these are just my observations and I'm trying to be as fair as possible in giving them.
> When a new mayor was elected and a new person became police chief this balance was shaken up and the whole system came apart, so now our homelessness problem is about as bad as everywhere else.
You listed 3 reasons, 2 of which has to do with the church, the third reason changed with new mayor, so now it all fell apart?
What happeneded to the mormon social services? Were they not successful without the local government redirecting people to the church services (which should be illegal?, separation of church and state)
I don't think it is illegal for the government to redirect people to faith based charities, any more than it would be illegal to redirect them to secular charities, however, I am not a lawyer.
"which should be illegal" - is exactly an example of the coastal attitudes that are disrupting a very well ordered, high trust society. Consider that this state basically solved the homeless problem by violating a sacred principle which, fully expressed in coastal cities, neither seems to actually help the homeless nor the residents around them. It's possible that the firewall between civic and religious institutions isn't a universal evil.
"Separation of Church and State" being a sacred principle is quite ironic.
I think one of the biggest political problems in the US right now is the fixation on dogma for its own sake. It's happening all over the political spectrum and predictably leads to the dysfunction of polarization (where factional dogmas conflict) or dysfunction of purity (where there's little dogmatic conflict, because the dogmas are always incomplete). We're probably overdue for an era of pragmatic compromise.
Now if they were busing them over and unloading them directly in the waiting hands of the church, without consent, then that sounds less like independent organizations.
Like what?
It's not SV money ruining these cities - it's local restrictive zoning laws that limit the construction of new property, while driving up the price of new construction and existing construction.
Denver, Boulder, and Golden ALL have implemented severe growth caps:
From Attempt to emulate Boulder 1% growth limit across Front Range stirs controversy (Denver Post) [0]:
> Since Boulder in 1976 instituted a 2% limit on dwelling unit increases in city limits, the idea has proliferated. The city revised it down to 1% in 1995, the same year Hayes said he pushed a growth limit of the same rate into effect in Golden. This summer, Lakewood voters approved an almost identical municipal law local officials are in the process of implementing.
SV money isn't ruining cities. Their own city councils and legislators are catastrophically mis-managing their cities.
There is plenty of space for everyone who wants to live somewhere, if you let price signals coordinate a desire for various locations with an ability to pay to consume more or less land area.
I'm starting to build momentum for a fix in Golden, CO, but it sure feels like a long slog.
[0]: https://www.denverpost.com/2019/11/16/boulder-1-percent-grow...
San Francisco is perhaps the worst, but these problems are widespread.
> City councils legally prohibit landowners from adding dwelling units to their own property.
Remember - all this "pent up" demand for housing is a result of homeowners being denied permission to modify their own property.
Historically, all cities evolved from fields because landowners incrementally upgraded their own property, when the price of rents justified additional improvements.
In the 1920s, city councils gave themselves permission to prevent property modifications "for planning purposes", and the US Supreme Court never struck it down.
The early goals of zoning were explicitly laid out by the mayor of Atlanta in 1922[0], with gems like:
And: Nearly every US city still has R1, R2, and R3 zoning, though of course no one includes the racial element anymore.I gave a high-level overview/rant on zoning, racism, and Denver here: https://twitter.com/josh_works/status/1294726871574179840
[0]: https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan
My next order of business is to help other non-out-of-state-developers start moving to Golden.
Along the way I want to make golden become a more affordable place to live, and also an even more desirable place to live.
(I know - it's a tall order.)
I've been connecting with folks who live (or want to live) in the area.
Feel free to send me a message (email, twitter, whatever) and I'll try to help you in this goal!
I'd much rather you move in than some rich out-of-state-er who's working on their second vacation home.
How do you do this?
It's really a lot more complicated than mere political will.
This could be a massively beneficial thing if we play our cards right.
That said there is another, huge thing that's happening in real time, good for some, not so much for others: local talent (i.e. US, Can, EU) will now be competing with the 'rest of the world' in a major way for more mainstream jobs.
This means the bifurcation of the wealth of globalism could be even more exacerbated.
We saw millions of manufacturing jobs leave the US for other parts.
The 'big winners' were capital holders, senior managers, execs - their wealth increased dramatically.
The other 'winners' were anyone that could maintain a decent job in the aftermath - they saw massively lower prices in commodity goods, and an unbelievable expansion in diversity of consumer products
The 'losers' were those in the working class, who never quite recovered.
Well - 'white collar workers' (and probably this means 'you') are going to be under that kind of 'threat' as well.
The kinds of jobs that are going to the Philippines, Vietnam, India etc. is going to go way up the value chain.
It means further concentration and increase in surpluses with those who 'have power'.
It means probably even more expansion in buying power for those who can keep decent jobs.
But the numbers of those who are going to 'get left behind' may increase substantially.
This is like 'NAFTA+globalisation' on steroids.
I've just hired a firm to do some tech work in E. Europe, and a team to do generic design work in Asia and the prices are ridiculously low and the quality is good. It's not a place to do advanced work (it can be, but you have to dig for that) - and although it means 'more work can be done' and an expansion in some ways, I can only feel for the pressure on wages locally for tech-related work.
Folks, if they can remote you in Utah, they can also remote someone else in Kiev, and this is a very material thing to consider.
This is going to be hugely impactful for trade negotiations in the future because what we have now will be a 'race to the bottom' for labour laws, working conditions, etc. and large corporations will be very happy to 'not think about' how much of that cost is simply be externalized, off the balance sheet. 'McCorp' does not care that there is no financial oversight, shifty accounting principles, meagre commercial law, limited human rights in 'Country XYZ' - all they will see is the direct issues: labour input costs, and then maybe the 'quality of outcomes' but even that is sometimes secondary.
... you cost X, but your peer, 10 time zones away costs 1/2 X.
... so who is at risk of getting 'eliminated and/or moved'?
Because if the '1/2 cost' team can do the job, it won't be them.
It's very basic math.
Again, it won't be everything, but many things.
I can see happening in India where 90's and 00's an IT job was sure shot way to earn upper middle class life. Now a large number of them who entered 10-15 years back are looking at mid career layoffs and next job will be most likely downgrade. Another large chunk of employees are going to be pushed toward contract jobs instead of full time as companies target for 100% utilization of staff.
If you want to make distributed work, then you need to be OK with asynchronicity rather than demanding synchronous work.
And to be fair, because of tax and timezones, it's more likely that this stuff will be sent to Europe rather than SE Asia, and you definitely won't get long-term people to work 1pm to 9pm to overlap with the US West coast.
That's not how that actually works and small communities need to start preparing for more of this. This is likely only the beginning of a long trend that will reshape the US and if it isn't addressed proactively by locals, small communities will suffer because of it.
Remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
People with money who move in are probably not there to play sugar daddy to your town and kiss all its boo-boos and make everything all better.
Boomers. Their entire retirement portfolios depend on keeping property jacked up for the foreseeable, to later sell to a magical entity with money.
1 month Southern colorado - terrible internet
Denver, SLC, Seattle, Baja - all no problems
The key thing that's helped is directly connecting with ethernet.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen anyone normalize the energy production potential of an area based on the energy needs that are localized for that area.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/irenelevine/2020/09/15/zoom-tow...
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/01944363.2020....
If you start looking, you will find places like high end apartment complexes with many amenities that are close to public transportation offering deals and discounts with inventory that would have never existed in the past. You will also start noticing that the lease lengths are also clearly formed to align with some kind of forecasting or predictions being made in hopes that the next moving season will normalize thing; well beyond what is normally expected.
For the Bay Area specifically there are also tens of thousands of apartments being completed right now, including about 10k in SF and several 1000s in downtown Oakland. This will naturally reduce rents.
The thing is that Bay Area real estate price pressure is supported by the arrival of people from abroad, and this process has come to an abrupt halt. Prices will go down. This does not provide evidence of an accelerating process of people moving to Moab, Utah.
Is there evidence that migration in and out of cities/states has slowed, or just that rate of address change has slowed. Both can be true at the same time. You can have fewer people switching apartments in city, while also having more move out of state or county.
The solution is to actually use this Internet thing we have built and make place far less relevant. The only blessing so far from COVID is that it has forced this issue and overcome probably a generation of institutional inertia, helping people escape the unaffordable housing trap a lot sooner than they otherwise could.
The US has no housing problem if you broaden your hunt to the entire country. There are tons of really nice small to medium sized towns, and if you like having access to something more urban there are also numerous medium sized cities with functioning downtowns and affordable housing in decent neighborhoods.
What would make more sense is simply to move the office to the Midwest, and interact with other branches or businesses remotely.
This would seem to give the best of both worlds - cheaper cost of living, and physical interaction.
Presumably, they'd do it the same way fully-remote companies have always done it. Either you onboard people remotely, or you travel to meet up in person for onboarding. You don't need an office to do that.
The company laptop shows up at your front door and you get on the phone with the hiring manager who tells you how to log in.
I started in April and I've never met any of the people I work with in person. On my team, only one of the people was ever in the actual office.
It isn't a problem. Takes a little longer to build trust with people, that's about it.
> It isn't a problem. Takes a little longer to build trust with people, that's about it.
It is a problem, because there's more to being on a team than getting a laptop and doing assigned work. Losing workplace human contact may be find for some people, but for me the loss has been palpable. The change is necessary given the circumstances, but that doesn't mean it's fine.
This gets at some of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/opinion/work-from-home-lo....
I work with hardware and being able to have someone physically look at a schematic with me or explain something to me in person greatly shortens the amount of time it takes me to understand them.
Edit: I also think we don't know the long term effects being remote has on innovation. It seems like people congregate in cities because the rewards to being near people are greater than the costs. Is technology really so good now that it can offset all the years of evolution we've gone through to make us into the social animals we are?
For anything abstract I would argue that the people who are able to onboard and form teams and ideas remotely are inherently the best for the job and likely produce a disproportionate percentage of any teams output. In my experience when you remove middle management (as it happens when you go remote), you want to only hire those people adapted to remote and self-directed work.
I would argue that location based and remote teams are fundamentally different companies. Similar to how tech first and tech-second companies are fundamentally different. I can't think of a single tech-second company that was able to move into the tech-first world. Some local companies might be able to morph themselves into remote companies, but as we see today, they will both lose a lot of staff, and even change their product eventually.
I'm lucky in that I have an office that's open so I can still have access to the fancy microscopes etc (as well as to more able sets of soldering hands/equipment), but being largely remote has definitely made distributing prototypes across the team for development and QA much more difficult (not to mention if mods to those prototypes are necessary).
I generally preferred working in the office pre-pandemic, but it wasn't strictly necessary. I also hated living in the bay area. I finally got all the i's dotted and t's crossed and I'm now living somewhere I vastly prefer (far fewer people and a whole lot cheaper). I've only been here 3 weeks and it's already hard to imagine going back.
Just because you can't see how it could work doesn't mean it can't. I know from experience it can. That doesn't mean that it will work in every situation for every person, but there is literally nothing in the world that fits those requirements. Some things work for some people, and not for others. EVERYTHING in life is like that.
Remote working is no different.
There is a little bit of pain, initially, but if they step back and compare life in an economically prospering place (rich people coming in) versus an economically declining place (rich people and opportunities to earn money leaving), they would realize they are actually lucky.
One might say well those aren’t the only two options, and I would say, yes they are. The world moves faster and faster there is no “stasis” anymore. You’re on the up or down, volatility is higher, and you need to stay on the right side of it.
>people complaining about the demand curves moving
>There is a little bit of pain, initially
Demand curves move in decades!
Nobody wants life to suck for a couple decades because a bunch of people showed up and turned the local economy upside down. That's a huge fraction of a lifetime. If you're unlucky your kids might even be born at the start of it.
>economically declining place
You call it declining and I call it stable and sustainable.
The world will always need soybeans, dairy products, corn and timber. The machinery to produce these things will always need to be fixed. Yes the people employed in that capacity will decline over time. With current birth rates and options for geographic mobility I don't think this is a real problem. It just means more kids will grow up to move to the cities than stick around.
>You’re on the up or down, volatility is higher, and you need to stay on the right side of it.
This seems like a world view minted where the primary industry is a volatile money fire. Not everywhere is like this, yet.
DHL from Shenzhen to here took almost a month.
I am very, very glad I can work remotely, and rack not so bad salary in a very cheap country to live. Yet, moving anything physical takes an extraordinary amount of time, and shuts down any productivity.
Wellington, CO is discussing increasing the tap fee for building a new home to $67k, in a place where homes typically cost $380k.
So the Majority of people want to continue to work remote, I would put out there that the only people that want to go back into the office are are busy bodies and control freaks. (Lookin' at you Satya)
IMHO Working from home solves the problem of, "Stop the chitty chatty and get back to work", and it partially solves the problem of "Hey man, stop riding me like a rented mule".
So spending less time polluting the planet travelling in shiny metal boxes to go to giant concrete boxes to sit in tiny metal and fabric cubes is a bad thing?
I'm going next level on remote. Got a sail boat and I'm going full water world. I'll say hi to Kevin Costner for ya.
Here is why I prefer an office. It gives me a hard separation between work and home. It forces me to be on a schedule (which I prefer). I have a short 20 minute commute so it is a time to listen to podcasts I otherwise wouldn't make time for. I like the camaraderie of a team, wfh feels lonely to me. I enjoy grabbing lunch with co-workers and then we often play a game before going back to work. These things work for me and enrich my life.
A lot of people prefer that, but solving that doesn’t require “an office” (i.e. a place far away from at least some people, causing at least some long commutes), but rather just that your job give you a stipend for renting a hot-desk at a work-sharing space that’s near to you. (Basically equivalent to them paying to have an extra room built into your house that you only go into to work, but for urbanites where that’s impractical.)
> camaraderie of a team
I don’t know about you, but my work Slack has about a similar level of camaraderie to any Discord group-chat I share with my friends.
> we often play a game before going back to work
Online games exist!
(Though arranging this is kind of finicky; it requires that everyone already have a particular online-game client installed and signed up. There’s no “pick up and play” kind of group gaming available here.
IMHO there’s a niche to be filled in collaboration software for one that seamlessly supports sharing entertainment — playing games together, watching TV/movies together, etc. — embedded within the workspace view itself.)
> grabbing lunch with co-workers
I mean, you could just keep talking to your coworkers while eating lunch, if you like. Make a #breakroom or #lunch channel.
You could even make it a video call, if you want to induce the same physical pain in people with social anxiety at the idea that people are watching their eating habits. :P
Certainly, none of these things are low-friction at first, or particularly low-friction even in the steady-state today. But they’re things where the friction could be greatly lowered. If tons of people are going to stay remote, that’s going to provide a good market for companies to create new products for.
(I’m betting on VR groupware, myself. Some spiritual descendant to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project, for an age where that actually is something most people might want. Literal “virtual offices”, with an unlimited number of unboundedly-large virtual spaces in which to position whatever shared or private app-window views you like. Especially if consideration is made for it to also gracefully degrade into a less-immersive analogous view — e.g. a 2D infinite-zoom layout of all the open app-windows — for people accessing it on screens.)
Or, y’know, people whose whole job consists of “chitty chat”, such that remote is making them less efficient at doing what you pay them to do. The type of people that, when given the choice between individual offices and a private group workspace room shared with their team, choose the shared workspace, because their work actually occurs entirely on the shared table while talking to their colleagues, not at their own desks.
Basically, think: people who brainstorm all day; people whose productive output is either ideas or decisions.
Academic researchers are like this—90% of their work is figuring out what to try or how to try it, and this process is accelerated by bouncing ideas off of others; and, in the end, actually attempting something often requires many hands to set up the required apparatus.
Marketers are like this, in pretty much the same way: ideas percolate, reach consensus, and then applying the chosen ideas requires horizontally-scaled grunt-work.
Executives are like this. What is an executive but someone who sits in meetings all day? Managers may interface with people actually doing work, but executives only interface with other executives. They may as well all be co-located, so they can continue to bump into each-other and argue/negotiate in smaller groups “after work”—like a legislative body when it’s in session.
Ironically, my productivity has also been getting measurably worse.
I've realized that I need IRL interaction with my co-workers that's outside of scheduled Zoom calls. I like running into them in the break room and making small talk while making a coffee. I am in a large organization, and having that interaction also gets me talking to people who aren't my direct co-workers.
Pretty offensive to those of us that literally can't sustain ourselves mentally in isolated environments. That or we are ADD like rabbits so we either start drugging ourselves heavily to "take part in work from home culture" or well, welp.
The Le Corbusier spirit of zoning has wrought so much damage in the US. I dread the idea of having to jump in a car for 15 minutes to shop for groceries in a strip mall. Most suburbs really destroy natural community (and I suppose that was the point of Le Corbusier's ideas around planning: like the gigantic squares in Brasilia) too.
(I realize my comment here is all over the place, sorry!)
Which city is that? I'm not aware of any US cities with sane zoning.
To me that means no minimum square footage, minimal set back rules, no garage restrictions, no height restrictions, no restrictions on multi-units and ADUs, and limited or no restrictions on mixed use.
A move abroad seems likely in the next 10 years.
Do you know Robert Moses? I feel like those two people have pretty much ruined America, and almost no one has heard of them.
I just purchased a house in Golden, CO, where I have all of the things you're talking about - walkable, coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores in tolerably close distance.
I'm trying to get Golden to legalize a style of building that would make all of these good things more plentiful and more affordable.
I am writing about two competing "visions" for a block of what is currently a surface parking lot in downtown Golden.
One option is not pleasant, the other option is delightful, and illegal.
I bet it'll all be right up your alley:
https://josh.works/#what-this-newsletter-is-about
A lot of my interest in this area comes from a life-long appreciation of (non-pejorative) anarchist philosophical thought. It's a lot harder to build organization from the bottom-up, but top-down organization loses so much implicit knowledge and context that it seems reasonable to investigate the former approach.
I'll check out your newsletter, it seems so interesting, thank you for linking. :)
criminally undervalued for people trying to understand why the world is the way that it is.
I talk extensively about Robert Moses in my newsletter, but as you might imagine it's hard to summarize a 1400 page book in a handful of emails, so I haven't quite figured out exactly how well the looping Robert Moses's story into the greater narrative I'm trying to convey.
I would love your thoughts on the newsletter as you read through it!
I just started rereading Jane jacobs's "the death and life of great American cities"
I'm sure at some point I'll be looping it into the newsletter as well.
I'm with you on the non pejorative anarchist philosophical thought.
Not necessarily anything to do with anarchy, but more about the value generation of spontaneous, self-organized, responsive, iterative, goal-seeking behavior at an individual level.
Have you heard of "The problem of political authority: the right course and the duty to obey" or "seeing like a state: why schemes to improve the human condition fail"
as if you're reading list isn't already long enough, these might be worthwhile additions.
It's more interesting to me than video games (though at times it can be vastly more frustrating than even the worst video game!)
I expect this is a project I will be working on for a very long time. It's actually rather comforting to feel like I have something that could span decades, and remain satisfying, relevant, and renumerative.
Thanks for the kind words!
It's not Le Corbusier. Zoning in the USA started in the late 1800s, an effort to regulate light and air in cities, and turned by the early 1900s into an effort to keep certain industries and ethnicities out of "good" neighborhoods.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/28/a-history-of-z...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-19/the-birth...
https://fee.org/articles/the-racist-history-of-zoning-laws/
https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...
https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2016/02/american-zoning-as-...
The first zoning laws in SF were used to selectively drive out Chinese people.
Just want to make sure that this often hidden part of zoning is above the fold.
It's also largely why racial segregation and housing wealth has not changed at all over the past 50 years. The laws are used to prevent integrations if communities, ensure that infrastructure like schools are unevenly distributed, and enforce our current racial divisions.
I live near Santa Fe, and the mid-to-long term forecast for water supply is pretty dire. Humans have lived in the area for a long time, and it's not likely to become completely dry. But will there be enough to support e.g. a doubling of the county population? This seems unlikely, even with the sorts of changes in use and infrastructure that you mention.
I have a small (~25ish person) software company based here and it's going to be a challenge to recruit this winter (we're hiring for senior devs) simply because it will be impossible for anyone to find housing here until the end of the ski season!
Go buy a fucking hobbit hovel and stay there.