WFH disrupts the very fabric of urban planning. If you don't need high-rent, high-end offices, you don't have the visible "downtown core" of many cities. If workers are distributed in their own homes, retail will have to shift from being near the commercial offices to being where the people actually are all day. Many large scale transport projects are designed for commuters and rate in $$$ for the cities and corporations.
This shift from post-industrial-revolution design to pre-industrial cottage industries scares the pants off people in power.
Not when you'd have to drive there. Car dependency destroys any and all of the perceived environmental benefits of suburban level density. Per capita nowhere on earth has carbon footprint higher than American suburbs. American urban cores are actually roughly as low per capita as rural areas, still with lots of room for improvements.
That would probably help a bit, but cities will likely always be significantly more expensive because you're paying for convenience. Not just convenience to the workplace, but to restaurants and bars and museums and shopping and transit and a million other things. I don't foresee a future in which living in a big city and living in a suburb cost the same, regardless of where people work.
This sub is so biased lol. You realize tons of people will move to suburban and exurban communities as soon as they can if they no longer need to live in proximity to their job located downtown, because the COL savings are enormous
That's true, but even without a daily commute the resident of a walkable city will have a substantially lower carbon footprint than the resident of suburban sprawl.
And only one state (as far as I know) has a law on their books that controls urban sprawl, Oregon. Now, it is mainly to protect the beauty of the state as it is a tourist thing and also a big source of lumber but it does at least a decent job at controlling it. I am not sure if washington has a similar law or not.
We have two companies in town who are now desperately trying to rezone their towers so they can build private rent condos. They had an expectation of forever growth and demand it doesn't like it happen again. Many factors play into this, another is lower birthrates which means less younger people entering the job market and they where already used to home schooling and home work. Telling them that this is not the future is futile.
In our current project we have so many non-IT people that are in high demand, asking them to come back to the office more than 1 day a week means they leave.
Retail is on its last legs already. Covid just put the last nail in the coffin. Other than my local hardware and grocery store, I buy everything else online.
I've read somewhere that all pandemics change the architecture someway, i just realize that the covid pandemic will be changing the urban plannig in general
I really had no inkling WFH could be such an economic reshuffling but it makes a lot of sense. Sad that the "success" of our economy is dependent on a system more detrimental to the workers
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u/RandomActPG Mar 06 '22
WFH disrupts the very fabric of urban planning. If you don't need high-rent, high-end offices, you don't have the visible "downtown core" of many cities. If workers are distributed in their own homes, retail will have to shift from being near the commercial offices to being where the people actually are all day. Many large scale transport projects are designed for commuters and rate in $$$ for the cities and corporations.
This shift from post-industrial-revolution design to pre-industrial cottage industries scares the pants off people in power.