I am not as optimistic that a shift where the service workers follow the knowledge workers to non-metro places is going to work out well. Because the type of knowledge workers who most want to move out of the metros, are the ones who are most likely to be anti-urbanist, and thus to reinforce NIMBY politics in the places they move to. Which means nobody's going to build housing for those service workers to move into. So expect to see more insanity like Aspen trying to ban residential construction: https://coloradosun.com/2021/12/09/aspen-emergency-ordinance-permits-residential-construction-strs/
This _may_ be good news for the urban cores, because between shedding a little bit of population, and particularly having it be the worst NIMBYs, we'll be able to up-zone and build enough to house our service workforce.
"Which means nobody's going to build housing for those service workers to move into."
Service workers live all over suburbia in the SF Bay Area, suburbia that was once all rural. We've been doing it for 70 years. I'm 47 and have lived here for 46 of those years. I watched it happen all around me.
"..that a shift where the service workers follow the knowledge workers to non-metro places is going to work out well."
This is how the entire Bay Area has grown and expanded, from the end of WW2 (1945) up to about ~2005 ish, which is about 60+ of the 77 years since (outside of the early urban areas—SF, Oakland/Berkeley, and downtown SJ). It has already worked out well. It only stopped in the past 10-15 years after a bunch of knowledge workers decided they NEEDED to live in dense urban areas and employers decided they and those workers could afford it, despite that they were splurging, and stopped the trend of companies moving out where: there was space, taxes were lower, and there were fewer competitors, and decided to do the exact opposite, leaving their knowledge workers with the bills.
You might want to work on your history. Basically every city in San Mateo County (one of those formerly-rural, suburban-ish counties) stopped building enough housing to keep up with job growth WAY more than a decade ago. That's not something that just started during the trend towards tech companies trying to locate inside SF, it's been true since the Xerox PARC days.
And all of this only worked out well if you think it's fine that we have teachers fleeing our school districts because the pay can't keep up with the cost of living, that nobody's kids can afford to stay here, and that the cost of absolutely everything (including even building new housing) is inflated by the need to pay wages that can either cover the rent on something here, or the cost of commuting from hours away.
And just for the record, I remember when the Cherry Orchard Shopping Center and Apartments in Sunnyvale were the Olsons' cherry orchards. I wish we'd done a lot more building UP, and a lot less OUT, paving over places like that.
Your thesis was that "service workers following knowledge workers to non-metro areas would not work out well". I took that to imply that some opposite—service workers following knowledge workers into the urban metro areas—was supposed to be superior.
That was what has been occurring for the past 10-20 years with the software tech boom. How well has *that* been working out?
I put the inflection point around ~2005, because, although traffic started to get bad around the late Dotcom era (late '90s), after the job market collapse and the mass exodus of workers from the region out to the rest of the country (the estimates were 250k for the Indian tech worker subpopulation alone), it rapidly fell back down again to previous levels for several years.
The cherry orchards there were only paved over in '99. I went to hs in Cupertino from '91-'93, and drove through the area all through the '90s and early 2000s. I know the area and shopping center in question too.
"I wish we'd done a lot more building UP, and a lot less OUT, paving over places like that."
People plan for the futures they foresee and can anticipate, not the futures they don't. Hindsight is 20/20, but you're sitting here in 2022 and judging urban planners/developers of the past for:
- not anticipating the demographic trends of the past 23, 30, or 50 years
- and not spending their significantly more limited resources on some unknown outcome.
Around.. '99, same year, the city government of my hometown Milpitas planned and committed a massively fancy architecturally designed new city hall building to replace the old one. Why not? It was the Dotcom. The economy was doing amazingly. Nearly everyone all across the board was doing amazingly, not only entrepreneurs but workers, from high tech to low service. I believe the city budget had huge surpluses with no end seemingly in site. So it was approved and begun.
Partway through construction, 9/11 occurred. Then the bubble burst. Mass layoffs occurred. Not only tech companies but all the smaller industries that depended on them got hit, . Whatever tax revenue they were relying on to finish the new city hall dried up and became deficits. Not only did the city themselves need to cut expenses everywhere and cancel projects, they scrambled to find funds to complete the new city hall because.. they couldn't just halt it. Suddenly it all seemed like a colossal waste and extravagance. More truckloads of Aeron chairs going to the scrap collectors. CISCO seemed like one of the biggest offenders, with multiple office buildings that had been constructed but remained empty—you could see from windows on one side clear through to the other side, "empty fish tank buildings" as I called them. And these things sat around for, in my recollection, 5-8+ years, constantly reminding everyone there was no limit to how much was spent on things nobody could use.
Always been more job growth than housing? In San Mateo County? I'm old enough to remember when who knows how many thousands of us here in the Bay Area left the area, the industry, or both, and it wasn't even 20 years ago, and a huge chunk of those jobs were in San Mateo Co. Yes, new housing construction there will be slower than just about any other Bay Area county since it's the exurb-iest, except possibly for Marin. Residential construction has occurred with the least friction in the East Bay and south of SJ (Morgan Hill and towards Gilroy), so SM is kind of a cherry-picked example.
If by "job growth" you include *negative* growth, well yes, *change* in jobs occurs faster than change in housing. The latter obviously has more inertia (except in the degenerate case of "jobs in residential construction") and always will.
Your whole last paragraph depends on the assumption that there is still “space” to build out into, that taxes will always be lower in that space, and that said arrangement is remotely self-sustaining (and not in truth something resembling a Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme - Google it!).
Under what circumstances would taxes ever be lower in urban San Francisco than in suburban Morgan Hill or rural Gilroy?
Salaries and compensations for city workers, from elected offices to the lowest workers, would always be higher (higher costs of living), more infrastructure to pay for, more complex projects, more complex planning, higher real estate values/sqft thus higher property taxes.
I drove out of the local metro region a few weekends ago. There was lots of much less developed, open space, yes, much occupied by farmland, but also much occupied by mostly dried weeds.
In practice, Urbanism and NIMBYism go hand-in-hand. Urbanists sit and drink their lattes and waddle around their pedestrianized theme parks, while the best mom-and-pop eateries are in strip malls. There's plenty of room to spread out in exurbia without arousing NIMBY opposition. If anything, Aspen's problem is urbanism in miniature.
That's a very interesting definition of urbanism you have there, and not consistent with how anyone I know who would describe themself as urbanist would think about it.
The YIMBY / Urbanist types I know aspire to build enough housing that the folks who work in the cafés, as well as teachers, cops, etc, can all live in the same neighborhoods with them, rather than commuting in from hours away. I live in a very ethnically and economically diverse neighborhood myself, but it's not going to stay that way for long if we don't build a lot more new housing at all points on the price scale, because there are too many young engineers who want to move to town for jobs at our local tech giants, who will rent and eventually buy _whatever_ housing stock exists.
As Noah has sometimes put it, we need a bunch of yuppie fishbowls to catch those people, so that they don't snap up the older stock. We also need to build a bunch more smaller units that, even if they're not _immediately_ affordable, can be rented by younger HENRY types, and then in a decade can age into being "naturally affordable" for a larger cohort of younger renters who are more working-class.
I also kind of want a law that links office development to housing development, to explicitly address the jobs/housing imbalance issue. Like, if your J/H is out of whack, then you _can't_ permit new office space that would match approximately X jobs, unless you can point to X*1.5 housing units that are also getting built nearby.
You're assuming that, all other things being equal, people (at any income level) would prefer to live at higher densities. That ain't necessarily so. Those service workers might prefer to have their own bungalow in their own neighborhood -- even if Jane Jacobs wouldn't approve.
Seriously. Like, if we get rid of R-1 zoning, there will still be plenty of single family homes. Nobody is going to force anyone to replace a SFH that they like with something else.
But _some_ people will build something slightly denser, like duplexing their house so an adult kid can use one side as a starter home. Personally I'm looking at adding an ADU (which I can do, w/o going through some insane NIMBY-red-taped planning process, thanks to the CA legislature) to eventually house my aging parents.
Don't believe the hype. NIMBYs notwithstanding, if people truly wanted density (living crammed-together, sharing walls), planners wouldn't have to fight so hard to limit "sprawl." ;-)
Planners do not limit sprawl. It’s everywhere. The whole NIMBY/YIMBY thing covers a tiny frontier within an exceptional set of cities. It’s not even about limiting sprawl, it’s about whether not-sprawl gets any place to exist.
Currently paying $5000/mo for not-sprawl. Please tell me more about how all the people bidding such insane rates while the subdivisions and strip malls are dirt cheap would really rather have those. What’s stopping them?
Consider: if you like driving & the kinds environments you drive through so much, who cares about remote work? Remote work is exciting for suburbanites because it means they no longer have to venture out into suburbia.
Except it's not even legal to build bungalow courts in most places now -- that's one of the "missing middle" forms that urbanists want to bring back, along with small-plexes and rowhouses. The classic bungalow court sticks several small units on a single lot, with a shared access to the street. It _does not_ fit into standard R-1 zoning.
By "bungalows," I wasn't thinking of bungalow courts -- more of the small-ish houses in towns like El Cerrito or San Leandro -- or some of the cities in the Central Valley (or for that matter, in mid-sized cities in Texas or the Midwest).
Even in Texas, minimum lot sizes, setbacks, and so on, have regulated little bungalows out of existence. (Or at least new ones. You can still find 50-year-old ones, but those are gradually decaying.)
I started a virtual company in 2005 and over the years it has become more difficult to hire people who live in other states (specifically NY, IL, and CA) and their tax laws and regulations. My company is small and just trying to figure out all the jurisdictional issues in hiring one person takes time and money. Some county districts impose more regulations than the states do, as well. I want to hire the best and brightest from anywhere but at some point it's just not worth the hassle. I hired one gal as a contractor from another state. She did one project on her own time that was only worth $500. The project ended. She sued me for unemployment and won! The fine was only $8 so it wasn't worth my time hiring a lawyer over, but it could have been much worse. As more people go remotely, there's got to be a simpler way to hire employees from different states for small business.
I agree, Laura. We've looked at hiring people out of state, and the legalities and payroll hassles are too much for a small company. That said, a solution will be found in time to make this easier.
Rather than hire a person as an employee, why not take on contract (gig) workers? As long as they are independent contractors you don't face jurisdictional issues and benefits problems.
One thing that never seems to be mentioned in these discussions is that it is likely to lead to downward pressure on wages for remote workers.
Yes, it is very nice if one can move from a high-priced city to a lower-priced city and keep the same income - which then goes three times further (as an example). But it also holds that an employer can then hire (and integrate into the workforce) someone from that low-priced city for one-third the salary - which means in turn that there is no good reason to pay you three times as much.
Indeed, it would seem likely that the longer-term result will be a new version of international outsourcing: "insourcing" employees from Poland, or India, or some other low-wage location (and all that this implies for high-wage jobs in the USA).
Offshoring tech labor was aggressively tried throughout the 90s at various tech firms. Many of them failed, largely IMO because they didn't invest enough in foreign talent and management, including training them in business specific needs. They also optimized for the lowest labor cost rather than finding the appropriate balance between cost and value delivered. The foreign teams were set up to fail because execs wanted to show a quick improvement in financials.
Many big tech companies today already have some physical presence in lower wage nations and do benefit from the lower labor costs. [1] Yet, there is significant overhead to running these offices and additional costs for coordination. Further, there is a limited quantity of talent in low-wage nations and many of the most ambitious and capable workers aim to immigrate to a high-wage nation. These firms could already have chosen to accelerate growth of their campuses in foreign markets if they saw a significant opportunity for labor cost savings.
Remote work may certainly improve the economics of employing foreign labor, but I fear some firms may fail at this because they will again prioritize lower cost and quick ROI too heavily. Remote work has unique costs and challenges, and overseas WFH will have additional ones (e.g., timezone and language differences). Firms will need to make significant investments in remote work processes — particularly onboarding and ongoing mentorship — if their endeavors are to succeed.
Yes, offshoring was tried in various ways in the last 30 years, and yes, it was often unsuccessful. A few years back I worked on a project to re-insource teams that had been outsourced to a foreign company, and I know a number of people who have dealt with the difficulties of this sort of offshoring/outsourcing - coordination, training, mentorship, etc.
The point is that, if a business has decided to move to a remote work model, then everything changes, because the business "will need to make significant investments in remote work processes" in any case. Once these processes are in place, it will make very little difference whether a remote worker is located in Truckee, Shenzhen, or Lagos, because the processes will be the same for all of them. Yes, "[r]emote work has unique costs and challenges", but if a business has decided to embrace remote work, then the company has decided to address those challenges for all workers, which levels the playing field for workers that are much more remote in a way that was not previously the case.
As for the "limited quantity of talent in low-wage nations", I can only wonder whether this reflects ignorance, arrogance, or both. I suppose there is technically some limit, but I suspect that the amount of "talent" in South America, Africa, India, or China easily exceeds that of Europe or North America.
Aside from a handful of companies like Airbnb, it seems as though even the resource-plentiful Big Tech firms require their remote worker emigres to take a pay cut. When reading your comment I think back to a friend who went through a tech boot camp in West Virginia only to find that the local tech jobs rarely passed the $20/hour threshold. Ironically, she migrated to another state to get the higher wages and still afford a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
Exactly. "Same pay scale no matter where you live" actually translates to "If you want to live somewhere where wages are higher, that's on you, not us."
I think recent urban crime spikes are another good reason for the exodus from cities. We moved out to a Chicago suburb and there have been many young couples with kids who have done the same. Protecting your young precious assets is top priority, and the added benefit of remote work seals the deal. We have all the amenities of the city here, which are easier to access and within walking distance. Never looking back.
I retired to downtown Portland about 5 years ago. I enjoyed the high density, public transit and mostly not having to drive and find a park space. Besides in Portland I could actually afford a place downtown. But I decamped for the burbs about a year ago -- the combined disorder of rising crime, homeless encampments, and protest related vandalism and arson near my home convinced me that my urban adventure had come to an end. I now live in a townhouse about a half mile from the light rail line -- its sort of a compromise. At some time I and anyone who is lucky enough to have a long life will need to stop driving and will need to consider how suburban life will look to someone who is unable to drive.
I think something like electric bikes or scooters might be good compromise, especially if you could have some dedicated lanes. I am lucky enough to work 1-2 miles from home in the burbs so ride a scooter in and its very fun. Feels much safer riding it on side streets in burbs also rather than busier city streets.
I pretty much agree -- I just wish they would ban right turn on red -- its very dangerous for both cyclists and pedestrians. All too often cars just slow down rather than stopping and only look left before making their turn into pedestrians in the cross walk.
Both of you are unfortunately talking about a small fraction of American suburbia where things are in walking distance and you can have some of the benefits of a city with diverse housing types and stores. We should make these legal to build again.
Your children are far more likely to die in a car than a shooting. Urban kids are actually less likely to die than suburbanites because cars are so dangerous. They are the number one cause of death for people under 18.
I am far more interested in the number of patents pre-2019 vs today.
Glaeser and Cutler believe that workers in knowledge industries are less creative and therefore less productive over time, more than making up for the slight gains we got initially. Companies like Google, Apple and Facebook are requiring people back in the office three days a week, in spite of the impact on morale and retention. You can guarantee those companies didn’t make this decision without evidence.
Anecdotally, new employees and especially those new to the workforce suffer from the informal mentoring new people get in the office. It is impossible to acquire company culture via a screen.
Some workers are just as productive and perhaps more so when they are 100% remote. But not most in most high skill jobs. We will settle on some kind of hybrid configuration for most creative office jobs.
I think the creativity and new staff issues will prove to be minor as people get more and more used to chatting via video call and the technology improves.
"The YIMBY / Urbanist types I know aspire to build enough housing that the folks who work in the cafés, as well as teachers, cops, etc, can all live in the same neighborhoods with them, rather than commuting in from hours away."
The trouble is that it doesn't work that way at all in most large metro areas, or nearby locations. I live about 20 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, and in spite of a major increase in housing stock in the form of cheap $hit apartments has only INCREASED the cost of living.
YIMBYs like to scream and shout and act oh...soooooo.....virtuous...and condemn those of us who are saying "STOP! THIS ISN'T WORKING!" If you want to make a difference you have to get in there and unearth all the issues that are contributing to the problem. You also need to understand that many of those shiny websites like "Strong Towns" that YIMBYs LOVE to quote and link to, are pretty much captive to big development. I've never seen ANY suggestion from any of these sites that isn't designed to make developers a freaking fortune.
Here's the problem: The developers are not trying to build enough housing to make things affordable. Why on earth should they? The other problem is that rental rates are no longer driven by market need or demand. These developers would rather have a half-empty building than lower their rents. Why? Because the value of the property is geared to current rental rates. The fact that half the units are vacant doesn't matter.
Other issues involve corrupted town Councils as well as planning and building departments. Any corrupt mayor or council will be happy to approve new height limits and setback rules if their palms are greased generously. This is irregardless of whether the city has the INFRASTRUCTURE for such concentrated development.
What happens when a water main breaks and the drainage system has to be dug up and replaced? The residents get to pay for it!
What happens when a developer gets the "freedom" to clear cut at the top of a hill because it's "easier" for them without regard to the water table? The residents downstream end up with flooded basements and have to PAY THROUGH THE NOSE to make their homes inhabitable.
What happens when the developer offers a pile-o-money to get out from under the "affordable housing" requirement? Bye-bye ANYTHING affordable.
Then, my favorite..is the Swiss cheese effect. These landowners are literally "flipping" properties after they've leveled the previously (perfectly sound) housing. This often displaces people who were in some of the few affordable rentals. Then they build a huge hole in the ground and decided the project is not profitable enough. It will make them far more money to sell the "hole in the ground" to another developer at the souped up price due to zoning changes. They will sometimes apply for MORE air rights and MORE density - holding the city council hostage because they know if they don't grant them what they want, they are going to have YEARS of a hole in the ground earning no revenue. Our downtown has been looking more like a moonscape than a downtown as a result. If they sell to someone else, they have to submit THEIR plans and start the process over again. This can literally go on for over a decade while these guys flip properties and change density ordinances.
So pulllleeeeaaaasse. Don't tell me it's simply a matter of building more crappy housing. There are a million reasons why this isn't working as advertised. Most of it comes down to simple greed and the fact that there are more ways to make money off of real estate than selling it and renting it.
I absolutely understand why people dislike the developers we have; but the dominance of that kind of developer was _caused by_ our dysfunctional land use policies.
If you think YIMBYs are purely aligned with the interest of developers, well, you're not paying much attention to what YIMBYs are getting up to. Possibly the single biggest news story about the YIMBY movement, thus far, involved one of the founding figures, Sonja Trauss, suing a developer to demand that he build the original project he'd submitted, which was a larger number of smaller / more-affordable units, rather than compromising down to fewer bigger / more-expensive units, because making that compromise with the city would've let him pocket profits sooner.
YIMBY Law also has quite prominently fought and won several cases making sure developers in California abide by our "no net loss / right of return" rules from SB 330, which say that if you demolish a building that had covenant-affordable units to build something new, you must _at minimum_ replace those units (and if you're using any kind of density bonus rules, you can't count the replaced units, you need to add _more_ covenant-affordable units), and you must ensure that the people who were in the old units get the chance to occupy the new units.
New York, like SF, has not added housing as fast as it's added jobs over the last fifty years. In the SoHo/NoHo zoning review a few years back, they added barely any at all, because they just basically blanket decided everything was historic, and they didn't want anything to change. One of my all time favorite public comments was from an acquaintance who works with OpenNY, who was working in SoHo but taking the train from across the river every day, that people seemed to be defining "community", for the purpose of "community input", to mean only the people who could already afford to live there. They asked a bunch of people who had been lucky enough to move in decades ago, or who had inherited, if they thought more housing was needed, and since they already have housing they said no. If folks bothered to ask the many thousands of people who are commuting in to work in the high-paid jobs there and who pay taxes, spend money at the restaurants, and so on; not to mention all the commuters who _work_ in those restaurants, clean the streets, etc -- they might hear a different answer.
The bad part about having a job tied to an expensive metro area is that prices in the walkable core are stratospheric, so the merely affluent have to live in the car-dependent sprawl parts. Having the "freedom" now to live in places which are 100% sprawl feels pretty anti-climactic.
The places where I can have a pleasant walk from a condo to cafes and restaurants and shows are... New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Same as before. Whereas the set of places where you need to take the freeway to the grocery store already included the New York, Chicago, and San Francisco metro areas.
"A pleasant walk"? I live in a condo in Oakland Chinatown, but the produce is better at Berkeley Bowl, and there's more variety at 99 Ranch. My next car will be electric. What's so great about schlepping groceries when I can cue up the Beach Boys' "I Get around" and hit the road?
It's only "sprawl" when you're looking down on it. You can expect to pay a premium if you insist on living in a theme park.
I agree. I live in an extremely dense Asian city (denser than Paris; 2x the density of London or New York; 4x the density of San Francisco; etc) that in many respects could be considered "walkable". There is a wet market, a dozen cafes, a dozen or more places to eat, four convenience stores, a bottle shop, a half dozen barbers, nail salons, and more all within a 10 or 15 minute walk.
But having private transportation (in our case this is *not* a car) means you aren't limited to simply what is within walking distance. Instead of eating at a perfectly okay but not that great local noodle shop, we can quickly travel 3 or 4 kilometers to one that is vastly better.
It also means that niche products become a lot more viable. Opening, say, an Ethiopian restaurant is a much harder thing to do unless you are able to pull customers from a fairly broad geographic area.
When I travel through the smaller towns in this Asian country I am mostly struck by how homogeneous they are: because their local customer base can only really support 2 or 3 restaurants so it is always the same: one noodle place, one rice place, one grilled meat place.
There are dozens of sprawl communities to chose from in the East Bay. Why live in the only dense part (and undermine it!) when like 95% of housing units would better fit your preferences?
I was born in Brooklyn, but was thrilled when my family moved out to Long Island in 1959 (ten minutes' drive from the Walt Whitman Mall and 15 minutes from Jones Beach), and I thrived amid the space.
I bought the Downtown Oakland condo in 2009, under all sorts of extenuating circumstances, but those have changed. Also, though I'm three blocks from BART (which I'd take to SF for a daytime appointment), that's now rare (as I have little use for SF these days). I'm also a block from the freeway (with parking in the building), and I drive happily to other parts of the East Bay (and elsewhere in Oakland [e.g., Temescal]) -- or if I plan to be out late in SF -- setting my own route and schedule. It's safer than walking (especially in Oakland Chinatown).
My love of car culture resonates with Kerouac and Springsteen. Sorry if you consider me subversive; I'm accustomed to that.
I've yet to see a suburb (at least in the SFBA) that isn't walkable. We've parks and trails all around and most of our streets have sidewalks that are also walkable. Tons of people walk for recreation.
The basic mechanic that makes sprawl un-walkable is that housing subdivisions contain only houses. Destinations are in other pods, and to get to those other pods you need to use the arterials, which are nasty places to be if you’re not in a car. No one says you can’t go for a walk! But it is very hard to walk to anything besides a neighbor’s house, even when the distances involved are small. Even when a shopping center is 100 feet away there’s often a wall forcing you to go out to the main road.
Having light retail uses inside the subdivisions and pedestrian paths that connect pods while avoiding the main roads are two examples of urbanism in a suburban context.
In my experience when people say walkable they don't mean sidewalks and parks - they mean restaurants, movie theatres, bars, cafes, bookstores, retail, convenience stores are within walking distances of people's homes.
So when urbanists say 'walkable', what they really mean is "light recreational commercial use, for day-to-day activities, where they don't need to carry anything bulkier or heavier than would fit in their arms or a rolling tote cart"...
To me, 'walking' and 'bicycling' mean literally just those things. But for many of us who live out here in suburbia, daily commercial activity involves the pretty regular movement of a lot more stuff than we can carry around on our person or in a tote cart, but can fit handily in a vehicle. (Peer into the average vehicle in suburbia some time and see.) We're rarely using our cars for only personal transport with extremely limited cargo that fits in a backpack.
When a lot of us in suburbia perform commercial activities, it includes a lot of stuff beyond light single trips:
- larger department stores (Target/Walmart, Sears/Macy's, sporting goods)
- consumer electronics stores (Best Buy, whoever else's still around)
- furniture stores
Suburbia also contains a lot of commercial and industrial businesses that, for a variety of reasons, need and want space around them that dense, urban downtowns would make prohibitively expensive:
- home improvement/construction stores (Home Depot, Lowes)
- building supply yards (lumber yards, stone/gravel/marble/tile, other materials)
- all the factories, plants, warehouses, suppliers, and distributors/distribution centers that feed any and all of the above
Many of these require the capacity to ship stuff, both in on the supply side, and out on the sales side, as well as for end-consumer customers to move in and out, all without regularly block either each other or the surrounding roads.
It's certainly possible for individuals of certain demographics and lifestyles to never have to involve themselves with these and thus never need to visit such places. But I'd say there's a lot more of us who do either interact with these places, or do so indirectly with businesses/providers who are extremely adjacent to those.
Any further densification of a lot of these suburban areas would only create congestion that would rapidly degenerate into near constant crippling dysfunction, as already exists in the current densest urban areas of the Bay. Not every developed area can be downtown, and there are probably very practical reasons why it shouldn't be.
Greetings from Kalispell! Our pleasant town is a popular destination. Housing prices are through the roof. Property values and rents have risen very high. There are not enough homes to go around. We are building new houses, mostly apartments and rental cottages, as fast as we can. Hard to find workers, and if you can find them, they can't find a place to live. But it is exciting and I think we will get through these housing hiccups and benefit from all the newcomers. :)
It's fascinating reading the comments regarding this article. I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a single comment from anyone living in Texas, as I do. I live in Fort Worth, which will likely surpass 1M in population this year. We don't suffer the NIMBY issues here, and statewide I can't think of any city besides Austin that would have to deal with that issue. I work at a small architecture firm that was formerly located in Hurst, 7.5 miles from my home. The owners decided to shut the office down this year after we'd all been working from home since March 2020. We're all productive and satisfied with the arrangement. One of my coworkers has relocated to a lake house 75 miles away and loves it. For many professionals this is an optimal arrangement, and I believe it will continue and become more prevalent. The bosses are happy, they're set to sign a tenant for part of the office, which they own. Now other people will have to commute there; I'm content to spend less of my time on the road, I'm not getting any younger.
This post confirms what I've supposed about the remote work transition all along: the exodus's spillover effects have the potential to bring dynamism to more affordable regions that might have seen depressing economic trends during the aughts's offshoring boom up until the present.
Rather than prioritize the development of new remote worker villages, however, how much residential slack can remote worker emigres tap into within existing exurban and suburban locales? The deciding factor, in many instances, will be running water, the quality of Internet connections, and other available amenities.
Additionally, I'm curious why this blog seems to promote benefits vis-a-vis the creation of remote worker villages; whereas leftist publications like Current Affairs discussing the creation of new cities is "trolling?" Is the difference in the size and scope?
The difference could also be laissez-fare versus government-subsidized. Nomad worker communities already exist, albeit many are international as opposed to domestic. It would take fewer resources to build around organically formed remote worker villages than to try and build one from scratch.
American city mayors currently try to entice remote professionals to come by their districts with tax breaks, amenities, and the like. That’s the other approach.
All of the above are significantly less resource-intensive than subsidizing new construction with the hopes “if you build it they will come.”
I am not as optimistic that a shift where the service workers follow the knowledge workers to non-metro places is going to work out well. Because the type of knowledge workers who most want to move out of the metros, are the ones who are most likely to be anti-urbanist, and thus to reinforce NIMBY politics in the places they move to. Which means nobody's going to build housing for those service workers to move into. So expect to see more insanity like Aspen trying to ban residential construction: https://coloradosun.com/2021/12/09/aspen-emergency-ordinance-permits-residential-construction-strs/
This _may_ be good news for the urban cores, because between shedding a little bit of population, and particularly having it be the worst NIMBYs, we'll be able to up-zone and build enough to house our service workforce.
"Which means nobody's going to build housing for those service workers to move into."
Service workers live all over suburbia in the SF Bay Area, suburbia that was once all rural. We've been doing it for 70 years. I'm 47 and have lived here for 46 of those years. I watched it happen all around me.
"..that a shift where the service workers follow the knowledge workers to non-metro places is going to work out well."
This is how the entire Bay Area has grown and expanded, from the end of WW2 (1945) up to about ~2005 ish, which is about 60+ of the 77 years since (outside of the early urban areas—SF, Oakland/Berkeley, and downtown SJ). It has already worked out well. It only stopped in the past 10-15 years after a bunch of knowledge workers decided they NEEDED to live in dense urban areas and employers decided they and those workers could afford it, despite that they were splurging, and stopped the trend of companies moving out where: there was space, taxes were lower, and there were fewer competitors, and decided to do the exact opposite, leaving their knowledge workers with the bills.
You might want to work on your history. Basically every city in San Mateo County (one of those formerly-rural, suburban-ish counties) stopped building enough housing to keep up with job growth WAY more than a decade ago. That's not something that just started during the trend towards tech companies trying to locate inside SF, it's been true since the Xerox PARC days.
And all of this only worked out well if you think it's fine that we have teachers fleeing our school districts because the pay can't keep up with the cost of living, that nobody's kids can afford to stay here, and that the cost of absolutely everything (including even building new housing) is inflated by the need to pay wages that can either cover the rent on something here, or the cost of commuting from hours away.
And just for the record, I remember when the Cherry Orchard Shopping Center and Apartments in Sunnyvale were the Olsons' cherry orchards. I wish we'd done a lot more building UP, and a lot less OUT, paving over places like that.
Your thesis was that "service workers following knowledge workers to non-metro areas would not work out well". I took that to imply that some opposite—service workers following knowledge workers into the urban metro areas—was supposed to be superior.
That was what has been occurring for the past 10-20 years with the software tech boom. How well has *that* been working out?
I put the inflection point around ~2005, because, although traffic started to get bad around the late Dotcom era (late '90s), after the job market collapse and the mass exodus of workers from the region out to the rest of the country (the estimates were 250k for the Indian tech worker subpopulation alone), it rapidly fell back down again to previous levels for several years.
The cherry orchards there were only paved over in '99. I went to hs in Cupertino from '91-'93, and drove through the area all through the '90s and early 2000s. I know the area and shopping center in question too.
"I wish we'd done a lot more building UP, and a lot less OUT, paving over places like that."
People plan for the futures they foresee and can anticipate, not the futures they don't. Hindsight is 20/20, but you're sitting here in 2022 and judging urban planners/developers of the past for:
- not anticipating the demographic trends of the past 23, 30, or 50 years
- and not spending their significantly more limited resources on some unknown outcome.
Around.. '99, same year, the city government of my hometown Milpitas planned and committed a massively fancy architecturally designed new city hall building to replace the old one. Why not? It was the Dotcom. The economy was doing amazingly. Nearly everyone all across the board was doing amazingly, not only entrepreneurs but workers, from high tech to low service. I believe the city budget had huge surpluses with no end seemingly in site. So it was approved and begun.
Partway through construction, 9/11 occurred. Then the bubble burst. Mass layoffs occurred. Not only tech companies but all the smaller industries that depended on them got hit, . Whatever tax revenue they were relying on to finish the new city hall dried up and became deficits. Not only did the city themselves need to cut expenses everywhere and cancel projects, they scrambled to find funds to complete the new city hall because.. they couldn't just halt it. Suddenly it all seemed like a colossal waste and extravagance. More truckloads of Aeron chairs going to the scrap collectors. CISCO seemed like one of the biggest offenders, with multiple office buildings that had been constructed but remained empty—you could see from windows on one side clear through to the other side, "empty fish tank buildings" as I called them. And these things sat around for, in my recollection, 5-8+ years, constantly reminding everyone there was no limit to how much was spent on things nobody could use.
Always been more job growth than housing? In San Mateo County? I'm old enough to remember when who knows how many thousands of us here in the Bay Area left the area, the industry, or both, and it wasn't even 20 years ago, and a huge chunk of those jobs were in San Mateo Co. Yes, new housing construction there will be slower than just about any other Bay Area county since it's the exurb-iest, except possibly for Marin. Residential construction has occurred with the least friction in the East Bay and south of SJ (Morgan Hill and towards Gilroy), so SM is kind of a cherry-picked example.
If by "job growth" you include *negative* growth, well yes, *change* in jobs occurs faster than change in housing. The latter obviously has more inertia (except in the degenerate case of "jobs in residential construction") and always will.
Your whole last paragraph depends on the assumption that there is still “space” to build out into, that taxes will always be lower in that space, and that said arrangement is remotely self-sustaining (and not in truth something resembling a Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme - Google it!).
Under what circumstances would taxes ever be lower in urban San Francisco than in suburban Morgan Hill or rural Gilroy?
Salaries and compensations for city workers, from elected offices to the lowest workers, would always be higher (higher costs of living), more infrastructure to pay for, more complex projects, more complex planning, higher real estate values/sqft thus higher property taxes.
I drove out of the local metro region a few weekends ago. There was lots of much less developed, open space, yes, much occupied by farmland, but also much occupied by mostly dried weeds.
Came here to say more or less this.
In practice, Urbanism and NIMBYism go hand-in-hand. Urbanists sit and drink their lattes and waddle around their pedestrianized theme parks, while the best mom-and-pop eateries are in strip malls. There's plenty of room to spread out in exurbia without arousing NIMBY opposition. If anything, Aspen's problem is urbanism in miniature.
That's a very interesting definition of urbanism you have there, and not consistent with how anyone I know who would describe themself as urbanist would think about it.
The YIMBY / Urbanist types I know aspire to build enough housing that the folks who work in the cafés, as well as teachers, cops, etc, can all live in the same neighborhoods with them, rather than commuting in from hours away. I live in a very ethnically and economically diverse neighborhood myself, but it's not going to stay that way for long if we don't build a lot more new housing at all points on the price scale, because there are too many young engineers who want to move to town for jobs at our local tech giants, who will rent and eventually buy _whatever_ housing stock exists.
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/understand-citys-pace-gentrification-look-its-housing-supply
As Noah has sometimes put it, we need a bunch of yuppie fishbowls to catch those people, so that they don't snap up the older stock. We also need to build a bunch more smaller units that, even if they're not _immediately_ affordable, can be rented by younger HENRY types, and then in a decade can age into being "naturally affordable" for a larger cohort of younger renters who are more working-class.
I also kind of want a law that links office development to housing development, to explicitly address the jobs/housing imbalance issue. Like, if your J/H is out of whack, then you _can't_ permit new office space that would match approximately X jobs, unless you can point to X*1.5 housing units that are also getting built nearby.
You're assuming that, all other things being equal, people (at any income level) would prefer to live at higher densities. That ain't necessarily so. Those service workers might prefer to have their own bungalow in their own neighborhood -- even if Jane Jacobs wouldn't approve.
If people didn't want dense housing, you wouldn't have to fight so hard to prevent developers from making it.
Seriously. Like, if we get rid of R-1 zoning, there will still be plenty of single family homes. Nobody is going to force anyone to replace a SFH that they like with something else.
But _some_ people will build something slightly denser, like duplexing their house so an adult kid can use one side as a starter home. Personally I'm looking at adding an ADU (which I can do, w/o going through some insane NIMBY-red-taped planning process, thanks to the CA legislature) to eventually house my aging parents.
I have no problem with ADUs. ADUs can be adapted to either paradigm. They're not ultimately what urbanism's all about.
Don't believe the hype. NIMBYs notwithstanding, if people truly wanted density (living crammed-together, sharing walls), planners wouldn't have to fight so hard to limit "sprawl." ;-)
Planners do not limit sprawl. It’s everywhere. The whole NIMBY/YIMBY thing covers a tiny frontier within an exceptional set of cities. It’s not even about limiting sprawl, it’s about whether not-sprawl gets any place to exist.
Currently paying $5000/mo for not-sprawl. Please tell me more about how all the people bidding such insane rates while the subdivisions and strip malls are dirt cheap would really rather have those. What’s stopping them?
Consider: if you like driving & the kinds environments you drive through so much, who cares about remote work? Remote work is exciting for suburbanites because it means they no longer have to venture out into suburbia.
How are planners in any way fighting to limit sprawl?
Except it's not even legal to build bungalow courts in most places now -- that's one of the "missing middle" forms that urbanists want to bring back, along with small-plexes and rowhouses. The classic bungalow court sticks several small units on a single lot, with a shared access to the street. It _does not_ fit into standard R-1 zoning.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/3/making-normal-neighborhoods-legal-again
By "bungalows," I wasn't thinking of bungalow courts -- more of the small-ish houses in towns like El Cerrito or San Leandro -- or some of the cities in the Central Valley (or for that matter, in mid-sized cities in Texas or the Midwest).
Even in Texas, minimum lot sizes, setbacks, and so on, have regulated little bungalows out of existence. (Or at least new ones. You can still find 50-year-old ones, but those are gradually decaying.)
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/10/21/we-used-to-just-call-these-houses
And of course we're starting to see the housing shortage bite in severely in Austin, and even to some extent in Houston.
I keep hoping the conservative Texas legislature will de-regulate land use state-wide, to own left-NIMBY libs in Austin.
I started a virtual company in 2005 and over the years it has become more difficult to hire people who live in other states (specifically NY, IL, and CA) and their tax laws and regulations. My company is small and just trying to figure out all the jurisdictional issues in hiring one person takes time and money. Some county districts impose more regulations than the states do, as well. I want to hire the best and brightest from anywhere but at some point it's just not worth the hassle. I hired one gal as a contractor from another state. She did one project on her own time that was only worth $500. The project ended. She sued me for unemployment and won! The fine was only $8 so it wasn't worth my time hiring a lawyer over, but it could have been much worse. As more people go remotely, there's got to be a simpler way to hire employees from different states for small business.
I agree, Laura. We've looked at hiring people out of state, and the legalities and payroll hassles are too much for a small company. That said, a solution will be found in time to make this easier.
Rather than hire a person as an employee, why not take on contract (gig) workers? As long as they are independent contractors you don't face jurisdictional issues and benefits problems.
One thing that never seems to be mentioned in these discussions is that it is likely to lead to downward pressure on wages for remote workers.
Yes, it is very nice if one can move from a high-priced city to a lower-priced city and keep the same income - which then goes three times further (as an example). But it also holds that an employer can then hire (and integrate into the workforce) someone from that low-priced city for one-third the salary - which means in turn that there is no good reason to pay you three times as much.
Indeed, it would seem likely that the longer-term result will be a new version of international outsourcing: "insourcing" employees from Poland, or India, or some other low-wage location (and all that this implies for high-wage jobs in the USA).
Offshoring tech labor was aggressively tried throughout the 90s at various tech firms. Many of them failed, largely IMO because they didn't invest enough in foreign talent and management, including training them in business specific needs. They also optimized for the lowest labor cost rather than finding the appropriate balance between cost and value delivered. The foreign teams were set up to fail because execs wanted to show a quick improvement in financials.
Many big tech companies today already have some physical presence in lower wage nations and do benefit from the lower labor costs. [1] Yet, there is significant overhead to running these offices and additional costs for coordination. Further, there is a limited quantity of talent in low-wage nations and many of the most ambitious and capable workers aim to immigrate to a high-wage nation. These firms could already have chosen to accelerate growth of their campuses in foreign markets if they saw a significant opportunity for labor cost savings.
Remote work may certainly improve the economics of employing foreign labor, but I fear some firms may fail at this because they will again prioritize lower cost and quick ROI too heavily. Remote work has unique costs and challenges, and overseas WFH will have additional ones (e.g., timezone and language differences). Firms will need to make significant investments in remote work processes — particularly onboarding and ongoing mentorship — if their endeavors are to succeed.
[1] E.g., Google “has more than 70 offices in 50 countries”, https://about.google/intl/en_us/locations/
Yes, offshoring was tried in various ways in the last 30 years, and yes, it was often unsuccessful. A few years back I worked on a project to re-insource teams that had been outsourced to a foreign company, and I know a number of people who have dealt with the difficulties of this sort of offshoring/outsourcing - coordination, training, mentorship, etc.
The point is that, if a business has decided to move to a remote work model, then everything changes, because the business "will need to make significant investments in remote work processes" in any case. Once these processes are in place, it will make very little difference whether a remote worker is located in Truckee, Shenzhen, or Lagos, because the processes will be the same for all of them. Yes, "[r]emote work has unique costs and challenges", but if a business has decided to embrace remote work, then the company has decided to address those challenges for all workers, which levels the playing field for workers that are much more remote in a way that was not previously the case.
As for the "limited quantity of talent in low-wage nations", I can only wonder whether this reflects ignorance, arrogance, or both. I suppose there is technically some limit, but I suspect that the amount of "talent" in South America, Africa, India, or China easily exceeds that of Europe or North America.
Aside from a handful of companies like Airbnb, it seems as though even the resource-plentiful Big Tech firms require their remote worker emigres to take a pay cut. When reading your comment I think back to a friend who went through a tech boot camp in West Virginia only to find that the local tech jobs rarely passed the $20/hour threshold. Ironically, she migrated to another state to get the higher wages and still afford a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
Exactly. "Same pay scale no matter where you live" actually translates to "If you want to live somewhere where wages are higher, that's on you, not us."
I think recent urban crime spikes are another good reason for the exodus from cities. We moved out to a Chicago suburb and there have been many young couples with kids who have done the same. Protecting your young precious assets is top priority, and the added benefit of remote work seals the deal. We have all the amenities of the city here, which are easier to access and within walking distance. Never looking back.
I retired to downtown Portland about 5 years ago. I enjoyed the high density, public transit and mostly not having to drive and find a park space. Besides in Portland I could actually afford a place downtown. But I decamped for the burbs about a year ago -- the combined disorder of rising crime, homeless encampments, and protest related vandalism and arson near my home convinced me that my urban adventure had come to an end. I now live in a townhouse about a half mile from the light rail line -- its sort of a compromise. At some time I and anyone who is lucky enough to have a long life will need to stop driving and will need to consider how suburban life will look to someone who is unable to drive.
I think something like electric bikes or scooters might be good compromise, especially if you could have some dedicated lanes. I am lucky enough to work 1-2 miles from home in the burbs so ride a scooter in and its very fun. Feels much safer riding it on side streets in burbs also rather than busier city streets.
I pretty much agree -- I just wish they would ban right turn on red -- its very dangerous for both cyclists and pedestrians. All too often cars just slow down rather than stopping and only look left before making their turn into pedestrians in the cross walk.
Are there sidewalks? I walk 2.5 miles to work, which is a great mental/physical health benefit for me.
Both of you are unfortunately talking about a small fraction of American suburbia where things are in walking distance and you can have some of the benefits of a city with diverse housing types and stores. We should make these legal to build again.
Obviously it’s not a top priority, or you wouldn’t put them in and around cars so often.
Your children are far more likely to die in a car than a shooting. Urban kids are actually less likely to die than suburbanites because cars are so dangerous. They are the number one cause of death for people under 18.
I am far more interested in the number of patents pre-2019 vs today.
Glaeser and Cutler believe that workers in knowledge industries are less creative and therefore less productive over time, more than making up for the slight gains we got initially. Companies like Google, Apple and Facebook are requiring people back in the office three days a week, in spite of the impact on morale and retention. You can guarantee those companies didn’t make this decision without evidence.
Anecdotally, new employees and especially those new to the workforce suffer from the informal mentoring new people get in the office. It is impossible to acquire company culture via a screen.
Some workers are just as productive and perhaps more so when they are 100% remote. But not most in most high skill jobs. We will settle on some kind of hybrid configuration for most creative office jobs.
I think the creativity and new staff issues will prove to be minor as people get more and more used to chatting via video call and the technology improves.
@Auros:
"The YIMBY / Urbanist types I know aspire to build enough housing that the folks who work in the cafés, as well as teachers, cops, etc, can all live in the same neighborhoods with them, rather than commuting in from hours away."
The trouble is that it doesn't work that way at all in most large metro areas, or nearby locations. I live about 20 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, and in spite of a major increase in housing stock in the form of cheap $hit apartments has only INCREASED the cost of living.
YIMBYs like to scream and shout and act oh...soooooo.....virtuous...and condemn those of us who are saying "STOP! THIS ISN'T WORKING!" If you want to make a difference you have to get in there and unearth all the issues that are contributing to the problem. You also need to understand that many of those shiny websites like "Strong Towns" that YIMBYs LOVE to quote and link to, are pretty much captive to big development. I've never seen ANY suggestion from any of these sites that isn't designed to make developers a freaking fortune.
Here's the problem: The developers are not trying to build enough housing to make things affordable. Why on earth should they? The other problem is that rental rates are no longer driven by market need or demand. These developers would rather have a half-empty building than lower their rents. Why? Because the value of the property is geared to current rental rates. The fact that half the units are vacant doesn't matter.
Other issues involve corrupted town Councils as well as planning and building departments. Any corrupt mayor or council will be happy to approve new height limits and setback rules if their palms are greased generously. This is irregardless of whether the city has the INFRASTRUCTURE for such concentrated development.
What happens when a water main breaks and the drainage system has to be dug up and replaced? The residents get to pay for it!
What happens when a developer gets the "freedom" to clear cut at the top of a hill because it's "easier" for them without regard to the water table? The residents downstream end up with flooded basements and have to PAY THROUGH THE NOSE to make their homes inhabitable.
What happens when the developer offers a pile-o-money to get out from under the "affordable housing" requirement? Bye-bye ANYTHING affordable.
Then, my favorite..is the Swiss cheese effect. These landowners are literally "flipping" properties after they've leveled the previously (perfectly sound) housing. This often displaces people who were in some of the few affordable rentals. Then they build a huge hole in the ground and decided the project is not profitable enough. It will make them far more money to sell the "hole in the ground" to another developer at the souped up price due to zoning changes. They will sometimes apply for MORE air rights and MORE density - holding the city council hostage because they know if they don't grant them what they want, they are going to have YEARS of a hole in the ground earning no revenue. Our downtown has been looking more like a moonscape than a downtown as a result. If they sell to someone else, they have to submit THEIR plans and start the process over again. This can literally go on for over a decade while these guys flip properties and change density ordinances.
So pulllleeeeaaaasse. Don't tell me it's simply a matter of building more crappy housing. There are a million reasons why this isn't working as advertised. Most of it comes down to simple greed and the fact that there are more ways to make money off of real estate than selling it and renting it.
I absolutely understand why people dislike the developers we have; but the dominance of that kind of developer was _caused by_ our dysfunctional land use policies.
If you think YIMBYs are purely aligned with the interest of developers, well, you're not paying much attention to what YIMBYs are getting up to. Possibly the single biggest news story about the YIMBY movement, thus far, involved one of the founding figures, Sonja Trauss, suing a developer to demand that he build the original project he'd submitted, which was a larger number of smaller / more-affordable units, rather than compromising down to fewer bigger / more-expensive units, because making that compromise with the city would've let him pocket profits sooner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-crisis-conor-dougherty-golden-gates.html
YIMBY Law also has quite prominently fought and won several cases making sure developers in California abide by our "no net loss / right of return" rules from SB 330, which say that if you demolish a building that had covenant-affordable units to build something new, you must _at minimum_ replace those units (and if you're using any kind of density bonus rules, you can't count the replaced units, you need to add _more_ covenant-affordable units), and you must ensure that the people who were in the old units get the chance to occupy the new units.
https://www.yimbylaw.org/right-of-return
New York, like SF, has not added housing as fast as it's added jobs over the last fifty years. In the SoHo/NoHo zoning review a few years back, they added barely any at all, because they just basically blanket decided everything was historic, and they didn't want anything to change. One of my all time favorite public comments was from an acquaintance who works with OpenNY, who was working in SoHo but taking the train from across the river every day, that people seemed to be defining "community", for the purpose of "community input", to mean only the people who could already afford to live there. They asked a bunch of people who had been lucky enough to move in decades ago, or who had inherited, if they thought more housing was needed, and since they already have housing they said no. If folks bothered to ask the many thousands of people who are commuting in to work in the high-paid jobs there and who pay taxes, spend money at the restaurants, and so on; not to mention all the commuters who _work_ in those restaurants, clean the streets, etc -- they might hear a different answer.
The bad part about having a job tied to an expensive metro area is that prices in the walkable core are stratospheric, so the merely affluent have to live in the car-dependent sprawl parts. Having the "freedom" now to live in places which are 100% sprawl feels pretty anti-climactic.
The places where I can have a pleasant walk from a condo to cafes and restaurants and shows are... New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Same as before. Whereas the set of places where you need to take the freeway to the grocery store already included the New York, Chicago, and San Francisco metro areas.
"A pleasant walk"? I live in a condo in Oakland Chinatown, but the produce is better at Berkeley Bowl, and there's more variety at 99 Ranch. My next car will be electric. What's so great about schlepping groceries when I can cue up the Beach Boys' "I Get around" and hit the road?
It's only "sprawl" when you're looking down on it. You can expect to pay a premium if you insist on living in a theme park.
I agree. I live in an extremely dense Asian city (denser than Paris; 2x the density of London or New York; 4x the density of San Francisco; etc) that in many respects could be considered "walkable". There is a wet market, a dozen cafes, a dozen or more places to eat, four convenience stores, a bottle shop, a half dozen barbers, nail salons, and more all within a 10 or 15 minute walk.
But having private transportation (in our case this is *not* a car) means you aren't limited to simply what is within walking distance. Instead of eating at a perfectly okay but not that great local noodle shop, we can quickly travel 3 or 4 kilometers to one that is vastly better.
It also means that niche products become a lot more viable. Opening, say, an Ethiopian restaurant is a much harder thing to do unless you are able to pull customers from a fairly broad geographic area.
When I travel through the smaller towns in this Asian country I am mostly struck by how homogeneous they are: because their local customer base can only really support 2 or 3 restaurants so it is always the same: one noodle place, one rice place, one grilled meat place.
There are dozens of sprawl communities to chose from in the East Bay. Why live in the only dense part (and undermine it!) when like 95% of housing units would better fit your preferences?
I was born in Brooklyn, but was thrilled when my family moved out to Long Island in 1959 (ten minutes' drive from the Walt Whitman Mall and 15 minutes from Jones Beach), and I thrived amid the space.
I bought the Downtown Oakland condo in 2009, under all sorts of extenuating circumstances, but those have changed. Also, though I'm three blocks from BART (which I'd take to SF for a daytime appointment), that's now rare (as I have little use for SF these days). I'm also a block from the freeway (with parking in the building), and I drive happily to other parts of the East Bay (and elsewhere in Oakland [e.g., Temescal]) -- or if I plan to be out late in SF -- setting my own route and schedule. It's safer than walking (especially in Oakland Chinatown).
My love of car culture resonates with Kerouac and Springsteen. Sorry if you consider me subversive; I'm accustomed to that.
I've yet to see a suburb (at least in the SFBA) that isn't walkable. We've parks and trails all around and most of our streets have sidewalks that are also walkable. Tons of people walk for recreation.
The basic mechanic that makes sprawl un-walkable is that housing subdivisions contain only houses. Destinations are in other pods, and to get to those other pods you need to use the arterials, which are nasty places to be if you’re not in a car. No one says you can’t go for a walk! But it is very hard to walk to anything besides a neighbor’s house, even when the distances involved are small. Even when a shopping center is 100 feet away there’s often a wall forcing you to go out to the main road.
Having light retail uses inside the subdivisions and pedestrian paths that connect pods while avoiding the main roads are two examples of urbanism in a suburban context.
In my experience when people say walkable they don't mean sidewalks and parks - they mean restaurants, movie theatres, bars, cafes, bookstores, retail, convenience stores are within walking distances of people's homes.
So when urbanists say 'walkable', what they really mean is "light recreational commercial use, for day-to-day activities, where they don't need to carry anything bulkier or heavier than would fit in their arms or a rolling tote cart"...
To me, 'walking' and 'bicycling' mean literally just those things. But for many of us who live out here in suburbia, daily commercial activity involves the pretty regular movement of a lot more stuff than we can carry around on our person or in a tote cart, but can fit handily in a vehicle. (Peer into the average vehicle in suburbia some time and see.) We're rarely using our cars for only personal transport with extremely limited cargo that fits in a backpack.
When a lot of us in suburbia perform commercial activities, it includes a lot of stuff beyond light single trips:
- larger department stores (Target/Walmart, Sears/Macy's, sporting goods)
- consumer electronics stores (Best Buy, whoever else's still around)
- furniture stores
Suburbia also contains a lot of commercial and industrial businesses that, for a variety of reasons, need and want space around them that dense, urban downtowns would make prohibitively expensive:
- home improvement/construction stores (Home Depot, Lowes)
- building supply yards (lumber yards, stone/gravel/marble/tile, other materials)
- appliance stores
- trades supply shops (plumbing, electrical, hvac, landscaping)
- all the factories, plants, warehouses, suppliers, and distributors/distribution centers that feed any and all of the above
Many of these require the capacity to ship stuff, both in on the supply side, and out on the sales side, as well as for end-consumer customers to move in and out, all without regularly block either each other or the surrounding roads.
It's certainly possible for individuals of certain demographics and lifestyles to never have to involve themselves with these and thus never need to visit such places. But I'd say there's a lot more of us who do either interact with these places, or do so indirectly with businesses/providers who are extremely adjacent to those.
Any further densification of a lot of these suburban areas would only create congestion that would rapidly degenerate into near constant crippling dysfunction, as already exists in the current densest urban areas of the Bay. Not every developed area can be downtown, and there are probably very practical reasons why it shouldn't be.
Greetings from Kalispell! Our pleasant town is a popular destination. Housing prices are through the roof. Property values and rents have risen very high. There are not enough homes to go around. We are building new houses, mostly apartments and rental cottages, as fast as we can. Hard to find workers, and if you can find them, they can't find a place to live. But it is exciting and I think we will get through these housing hiccups and benefit from all the newcomers. :)
It's fascinating reading the comments regarding this article. I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a single comment from anyone living in Texas, as I do. I live in Fort Worth, which will likely surpass 1M in population this year. We don't suffer the NIMBY issues here, and statewide I can't think of any city besides Austin that would have to deal with that issue. I work at a small architecture firm that was formerly located in Hurst, 7.5 miles from my home. The owners decided to shut the office down this year after we'd all been working from home since March 2020. We're all productive and satisfied with the arrangement. One of my coworkers has relocated to a lake house 75 miles away and loves it. For many professionals this is an optimal arrangement, and I believe it will continue and become more prevalent. The bosses are happy, they're set to sign a tenant for part of the office, which they own. Now other people will have to commute there; I'm content to spend less of my time on the road, I'm not getting any younger.
This post confirms what I've supposed about the remote work transition all along: the exodus's spillover effects have the potential to bring dynamism to more affordable regions that might have seen depressing economic trends during the aughts's offshoring boom up until the present.
Rather than prioritize the development of new remote worker villages, however, how much residential slack can remote worker emigres tap into within existing exurban and suburban locales? The deciding factor, in many instances, will be running water, the quality of Internet connections, and other available amenities.
Additionally, I'm curious why this blog seems to promote benefits vis-a-vis the creation of remote worker villages; whereas leftist publications like Current Affairs discussing the creation of new cities is "trolling?" Is the difference in the size and scope?
Realistic vs not, is my guess.
The difference could also be laissez-fare versus government-subsidized. Nomad worker communities already exist, albeit many are international as opposed to domestic. It would take fewer resources to build around organically formed remote worker villages than to try and build one from scratch.
American city mayors currently try to entice remote professionals to come by their districts with tax breaks, amenities, and the like. That’s the other approach.
All of the above are significantly less resource-intensive than subsidizing new construction with the hopes “if you build it they will come.”
Balaji Srinivasan has written a book about this. He calls it the network state.
Also worth thinking about whether there is a diversity aspect to the donut effect.
https://startupsandecon.substack.com/p/could-remote-work-make-inequality?s=w
Of course there is. Been to Detroit in the last half-century?
I work remotely from hell now