The problem is where the jobs are. It’s easy to build a supermarket in the suburbs. Try building a factory, or the headquarters of a major corporation. When you do manage to do the latter, you create the very problem we started with: Suburban areas of million-dollar homes where more dense housing is prohibited.
People aren’t generally commuting to go shopping. They’re commuting from where they live to where they work.
magnet
2654
I’m not so sure. Anecdotally, commutes out of the city are equally bad as those into the city. This suggests that people don’t live close enough to where they work, but not that jobs per capita are higher in the city. I don’t have any hard data to support that, but looking at a list of corporate HQs for the top 20 Fortune 500 firms is revealing:
Walmart: Bentonville, AR (population 35K)
Exxon: Irving, TX (Dallas suburb)
Apple: Cupertino, CA (San Jose suburb)
Berkshire: Omaha
Amazon: Seattle ++
United Health: Minnetonka MN (Minneapolis suburb)
McKesson: SF
CVS: Woonsocket RI (Providence suburb)
AT&T: Dallas
Amerisource: Chesterbrook PA (Philadelphia suburb)
Chevron: San Ramon CA (SF suburb)
Ford: Dearborn MI (Detroit suburb)
GM: Detroit
Costco: Issaquah WA (Seattle suburb)
Alphabet: Mountain View CA (SF suburb)
Cardinal health: Dublin OH (Columbus suburb)
Walgreens: Deerfield IL (Chicago suburb)
JPMorgan: NYC
Verizon: NYC
Kroger: Cincinnati
That a pretty even distribution, or maybe even favoring suburbs. I suppose it’s reasonable to expect financial companies be based in a city. But retail, tech, etc seem indifferent. It probably depends on who offers the biggest incentive.
I don’t know what that means. In any event, I’m not making an argument about whether people should live in the suburbs or the cities. I have a point of view, of course, but we’ve argued about that before. I’m saying that the biggest single factor driving commuting is the need to get to/ from work. People should live where the jobs are. If that’s in the suburbs, fine, but then you’ll need high density housing in the suburbs or you’ll have long commutes. If it’s in the cities, which I suspect, then more people ought to live there instead.
Alternatively, companies could realize 80% (making a number up here, but surely the large majority) of work done by white collar employees can be done from anywhere, and let employees work remote most days. As an added long term bonus the business can scale down its physical footprint, saving on building-associated costs (rent, utilities, whatever). Some people will lose out on that cushy corner office but their egos will have to deal with it.
I can see a downside where more work gets offshored to teams that can be hired at a fraction of the cost but in my experience the output quality isn’t there yet.
Zylon
2658
Is it drawing a distinction between “in” and “out” that’s confounding you?
Remote work is interesting. Certainly the work CAN be done remotely, but productivity and collaboration is all over the place. Some people take well to working remotely, others become totally disconnected and unproductive. I think businesses, technology, and individuals need to get better at making it work.
Scuzz
2660
The medical world was supposed to have a job boom. My wife started coding, Then she was able to code from home. Then companies started outsourcing that coding to other countries. So those $35 an hour coding jobs never fully materialized.
Bingo. 50k people is not enough of an economic engine. It’s more like an economic horse and buggy.
Yep. I’ll never take a fully remote job again if I can help it.
The freedom to work from home when a kid is sick or it’s blizzarding out or the plumber is coming over or whatever is great, though.
Menzo
2663
I worked from home last year and hated it. But now I work in an office with an open floorplan and vastly prefer working from home. Open floor plans are the worst thing to happen to work since ever.
Agreed, open offices are the worst.
No, it’s the attachment of ‘anecdotally’ to something that seems to purport to be a fact. If it’s just personal experience, it’s irrelevant to this particular conversation. If it’s more than personal experience, what does ‘anecdotally’ mean as a qualifier? Thus, I don’t know what it means. You run along and play nice now.
I am on my second year of working remotely. So far, it been pretty good. I get things done, I can move around and snack, and I can check on the kids from time to time.
It helps that my kids are home though, because it doesn’t feel so lonely.
Zylon
2667
It means it was an anecdote, Oh Mighty Gatekeeper of All That is Relevant.
Krassensteins BANNED from Twitter. Thank heavens. The fewer Resistance Grifters there are out there, the better.
You’re welcome, Great Contributor.
I’ve always wondered if it’s more efficient for 300 million people to donate to 1.5 million charities, or for everyone to just pay their damned taxes.
In fairness, more businesses are doing this. My girlfriend works for a very large organization that actively insists that their employees work remotely. They are permitted to come in one day per week, because they company realized that they really do not want to pay for premium class office space in a major metropolitan area for someone to come sit at a desk and use a computer and telephone.
I realized this years ago as an attorney at the time. I billed by the hour, and the majority of every day consisted of sitting at a desk, using a computer, and making telephone calls. I realized that every day, I was losing 1.5-2.0 billable hours by sitting in traffic in order to use a computer and telephone downtown, instead of at home. It was utterly stupid.
I asked my partners why they wanted to lose around $500-1,000 a day for me to use a different computer and telephone. But older attorneys are conservative, and all I would get were some platitudes that really did not make much sense then (and really do not make much sense now).
For law, in particular, remote work only makes sense. Even the fear that people won’t actually work at home, but will just screw around, is lost. Because for a law firm, you either bill the time or you don’t. It becomes very apparent very quickly if you’re fucking around and not working, because you don’t bill time.
There are definitely associates who bill time, despite just fucking around. Not all billed hours are equal and as a partner, I have to write down time frequently due to inefficiency/ineffectiveness.
The issue of certain people not working well remotely/independently is a thing in law, too. But that’s not law specific, it’s human nature specific. Some folks just aren’t good at it; admittedly, some folks get overly distracted by having too many people around, too. Managing people sucks.
Also, were you offering to the partners to convert those commute hours to billed hours? So you would go from billing like 7 hours a day to billing 9 if they let you work remotely?
