There’s an assumption here that remote work can always replace in person work amongst high paid professionals. This isn’t always true. I’m one of those high paid professionals in Boston biotech, and I’ve been going to work every day during the pandemic, because my work requires a laboratory! I can’t do lab work remotely, and we can’t manufacture and QC a therapeutic remotely, either. So I need to live in commuting range of Boston to do my job.
I would guess that another sector resistant to becoming remote is elite education. And healthcare, of course: you can’t treat patients remotely. These three sectors sort of define Boston.
It’s possible that the folks working in offices that support the functioning of labs, hospitals, and lecture halls could all work remotely, but there’s definitely a core of high paid professionals that will continue to come into Boston and Cambridge every day.
I'll throw some bearish cold water on remote work for computers, an industry where you'd think remote work would be perfect.
My company has been all remote since before it was cool, and it's _hard_. As a manager, you literally don't know what your employees are doing hour to hour; if someone is not getting work done because e.g. they're having a personal crisis, you find out days later from the black hole in their work output, instead of the immediate feedback of seeing them "not be themselves" in the office from day 1. I work with a few superstars who could work on the moon and it'd be okay, but I have coworkers who still struggle with this, and we selected for remote. I don't know that this scales to a lot of companies.
There's also a huge difference between "relocatably remote" (that's what we are, we hire people where they live and tell them to stay put and get good internet) and "less commuting" (e.g going from 5 days a week in the office to 1 or 2 days in the office).
Giving people 1 or 2 days in the office instead of 5 can be a cheap win if they have tasks they can do mostly remoting and still be in person for planning, and if someone has a crap commute that's a win. But that just changes the equilibrium within the superstar city - it makes an hour commute into downtown Boston manageable (once a week) instead of miserable (five days a week).
So in tech I'd say a discovered viability of remote work (e.g. managers and employees were forced to try it because of the pandemic) might shift people further into the ring suburbs of Boston, but they're not going to noticeably shed people out of the metro area.
(The Boston area also has tech outside the city core, e.g. on the 95 and 495 belt and a bunch of hardware companies, which are more like the biotech labs, which makes me think a shift will be even more muted.)
I work in tech and can agree from the other side that I have way more days where I do nothing because I’m distracted from family and in a funk from just being at home all the time. I’m much more consistently productive in an office where everyone else is working. That said, I’m also more productive at a coffee shop, so maybe once Covid is over we will see remote productivity rise as people get out of the house.
Ha ha yes - even as someone who was happy working at home, working at home with all these other people in the house (WHO ARE THEY?? WHERE DID THESE KIDS COME FROM? :-) is brutal.
We've been doing a lot of hiring at my tech company over the past year, and my standard line has been "you need to come into the office at least 1-2 times a month." That's let us hire people from Deep Orange County and San Diego to work in LA, and it's easier for my guy in Ojai, but that still leaves out a lot of places.
I think it's pretty clear that remote work everywhere is going to lead to productivity drops. But that doesn't mean we're going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle. And presumably there will be some improvements to productivity again as best practices for managing remote workers spread.
It's a little bit of both, though. My Ojai employee is saving 3+ hours a day on his commute, time that he can use to work a little more, or just rest and feel better about work in general! Maybe he gets a little more distracted, but in the aggregate he's almost certainly better off.
Yeah, but the average commute is way less than 3 hours. People are deep in denial about this, but most people are less productive at home. Some aren't! But most are.
But not massively less productive. If they were a ton less productive, maybe WFH would die, but it's like maybe 5-10% less productive. So, when all your competitors are offering WFH, what do you do? Say, "No, I'd rather take 100% of the productivity of a 25th percentile employee?" Or "90% of the productivity of 50th-100th percentile employee?"
A model that I suspect tech is likely to try is "everyone on a team meets somewhere for a week every month or two", rather than one or two days a week (Basecamp did this pre-pandemic: https://basecamp.com/handbook/11-our-rituals): this makes living elsewhere viable. This also has some distributional consequences re who's able to do semi-lengthy business travel and who isn't....
I read that and went "man, too bad we don't have a bunch of high speed rail all over the place". :-)
My fully remote company used to do a sit-down every 6 months before the pandemic, and one of the things that always struck me was how little of the giant wasted commuting day was spent _actually_ traveling on an airplane, vs. the overhead.
Yea, I live in a DC burb that has a pretty strong biotech cluster, a lot of that work can't be done remotely and all the biotech companies are juiced up on vaccine dollars so it seems like the economy here could really take off (counterintuitively). All the more reason to advocate for more home building here!
At risk of sounding like the Detroiter that I am: I feel like Matt is really underselling Detroit’s great winter amenities, like being able to cross country ski out of the front door of your house and directly onto the abandoned property around you because the city doesn’t plow side streets. Come join me, we have plenty of houses and space. 😎
I would be very happy with some solid BRT. That being said my particular neighborhood has a variety of good and mostly reliable bus routes. Now to remove the stigma to riding the buses... bit of a challenge in “the motor city”.
Yeah, I think I'd be fine with solid BRT. The main thing that's actually keeping me from moving back is I don't want to deal with waiving in to the Michigan Bar and I've come to rather like Philly on the merits. It's good to hear that bus service is improving in Detroit, but they really do need to get the stigma off it. I suspect they may need to build rail transit to get people into the transit system (since it lacks the stigma) and ease people into buses that way.
As a Bostonian, I think the universities (Harvard and MIT in particular) and to some extent the elite hospital complexes will always serve as in-person bulwarks that won’t meaningfully shift to remote in a similar way to the federal government in DC.
Right - also, you can build a whole community around:
1. Went to college in Boston (lots of capacity)
2. Stayed in Boston for the jobs, but also lots of young people also stayed, so it's a good place to be in your 20s - city has bars and restaurants etc. etc.
3. Formed a family, stayed because the amenities there are pretty good (generally high functioning public education), green space, museums, etc.
The housing prices are a headwind on all of this, but so far it's not the Hurricane of, e.g. SF. This is why I bore all my friends here with YIMBY stuff - we have the "superstar" jobs to let housing go bananas, we have the Atlantic ocean to keep us from building out more, we _could_ have housing prices double and at that point Boston becomes "you only stay after college if you damn well have to".
Yeah I think there's a reasonable lifestyle case for Boston, as someone who grew up there, went to Harvard, and then moved to SF in my mid 20s I often thought about going back. The winters do suck as Matt outlines correctly in his article, but it's a good place to raise a family, the Boston suburbs are just really nice in terms of being quaint, safe, have top notch public schools, and you can still get a babysitter and have date night in the city or whatnot.
Boston's high temperature averages at least in the 50s F from March to November: A) Yglesias's mischaracterizations aside, just not that cold (compared to places like Chicago, Toronto, Twin Cities, etc); and, B) the truly "cold" season lasts about 1/4 of the year.
Honestly, the bigger issue is that the metropolis needs to do a better job with snow removal, because, although the region doesn't always get excessive snow, it does frequently enough for it to be a major pain (eg. winter of 14-15) when it does.
Basically, though, Greater Boston gets a perfectly lovely spring, summer and fall, followed by a less pleasant but (generally) eminently bearable winter (when all sensible folk concentrate on NBA games and Netflix, plus the odd trip to the slopes of Northern New England).
Haha you must be friends with Calvin’s dad. I found they mostly left me with seasonal depression but I do enjoy a good post snow storm southie parking fight.
Agreed, although the number of people who live in Vermont or on the coast in RI or ME and drive into Boston 1-2x a week while working remote the rest of the time may go up.
Same. Also many of the jobs in biotech and medicine aren’t going to be remote anytime soon. Our company had R&D and production staff at the lab almost throughout all of 2020, we made adjustments for social distancing etc but there’s no remote cell culture or flow cytometry options
Also with global warming... while winter in Boston isn't great (-8 with wind chill as I write haha) the summers are still a beautiful 80 and breezy, while everything south of Philly is a 100 degree swamp...
Biotech cannot work 100% remotely. Some managers doing generic management work can (and have, during shutdowns). But most things that are actual biotech are wet-lab work done in the lab in person. So the forces that made car manufacturing agglomerate in Detroit 100 years ago still apply to biotech, making it difficult for Moderna to move to Nowheresvile, TX.
I have zero knowledge about this, but I would not be surprised at all to hear that 99.5% of BioTech Company X's employees are all support and only .5% are actual people in labs.
So ... what should we do in Cleveland? Just make it a complete party town? Bars don't ever close? Legalize brothels? When you can work anywhere, why not do it with a hangover in Cleveland!!
You don't need to report violators. Just make it really difficult to get a legit job outisde their targer metro area. H1B visas already make it really hard to quit your job. You can still do it and get a job picking grapes for cash under the table but those aren't the jobs H1Bs come here for.
Latino and Asian populations have been growing in Detroit even as others flee.
If you are a skilled worker, who moved to the US to do your work, I'm not sure you're going to be excited to lose your legal status just so you can move to NYC. There's more downsides to not having a legal status than risk of deportation, and there could be more.
I am not above seeing local upsides to global catastrophes, but I just think that, with Cleveland's luck, climate change is going to bring like hordes of super mayflies that will make the city uninhabitable.
Cleveland specifically has one geographical advantage. If you get a map and draw a straight line from New York to Chicago, it goes through Cleveland (actually, it goes through Lake Erie just outside of Cleveland, but still).
That means that any surface transport route between those two cities will almost certainly go through Cleveland. My proposal for Cleveland is simple: build a high-speed rail line direct from NYC to Chicago via Cleveland, with the only intermediate stop being Cleveland (you may well have a suburban NYC stop in Westchester County but nothing else in between). Building aggressively fast (ie being prepared to run tunnels through mountains to keep the line-speed up as high as possible), end to end with one or two stops should be down to just over three hours. Three hours ten minutes from NY Penn Station to Chicago Union Station with a stop in Cleveland, three hours fifteen minutes with an additional stop in Westchester County would be about the timing. Most HSR proposals are to build Cleveland to Philadelphia via Pittsburgh, but NYC-Philly-Pitt-Cleveland-Chicago would be much too slow to compete with flying. Station to station in 3h15 is almost certainly faster for a journey from a Midtown office to a Loop office than flying - you're going to spend at least an hour getting to an airport in NYC and the same again getting from ORD to the Loop, add on security and the actual flying time and it's well over three hours.
At that point, creating a business in Cleveland that has clients in both NYC and Chicago looks really attractive. Living in Cleveland with a job in NYC and a partner who works in Chicago becomes possible (especially for the sort of "work from home, visit the office once or twice a week" job that the pandemic is creating). For both of those, Cleveland is the only city that could provide that service. It's hard to have a truly unique proposition for a city, but Cleveland - unlike just about every other Midwestern city that isn't Chicago - could have one.
Now, you just need the quarter-trillion dollars that rail will cost.
Isn't there a whole movement of people that want to retire as early as possible through spending as little money as they can? Living in Cleveland seems like a good option for that.
I live in Seattle, so maybe I'm biased, but I think you underrate Seattle's amenities. It's one of the only proper cities in the US with easy access to spectacular hiking and camping. That draws in a lot of young people who enjoy the outdoors.
Seattle does have easy access to spectacular hiking and camping but it was only differentiated on that axis among the population of top tier tech cities. I would expect that many tech employees who want to buy a house and live in the city will suddenly see areas like Salt Lake or Denver as places with those types of amenities as a more desirable location to be long term.
I still expect to see the flow of young people in particular towards these major industry centers for the purpose of on the job training. I think an underrated function that most high paying companies are partaking in is training college grads to do a good job in their industry. If companies think this is valuable, I think we're going to continue to see a majority of these companies still ask junior employees to move to these cities and enough senior employees to stay to train the next generation.
If it provides any hope, the NBA is now almost desperate for expansion, and it appears to be a given that one of the two new teams will be in Seattle (I’m hearing that the 2nd will likely be in Vegas). I’m rooting for you, great basketball town.
The one thing your analysis leaves out about why people might move post pandemic is for family. I have a good friend who has been trying to move back to Cleveland from the DC burbs to be closer to family (he also really likes Cleveland) but hadn’t been able to find a job there. He finally found one that he started remotely and will then move in the spring, but had been planning to ask his old job to
Let him work remotely permanently if he didn’t. I could see lots of people moving to places that had been losing population for employment reasons to get some of them back as people look to be closer to family. Lots of people aren’t looking for great amenities at all. They’re looking for family help raising kids, or to be near old friends, or a little nostalgia. If the housing costs are cheap, so much the better. Lots of people these days seem to not like much change and this would also be a way to hang onto the past a bit.
This is what I was going to write. Aren’t you glad I scrolled through the comments! I am a bit suspicious that people will just randomly move to one of their favorite vaca spots. And even weather. If you grow up or go to school in cold, it just factors in less. Take that from someone who grew up in ND, moved to the Bay Area and is now happy in Minneapolis (Beta City baby, a level up on Seattle).
The sweet spot for quality of life is in those beta cities and/or midsize college towns that punch over their weight. The economy, dating scene, and cultural amenities are all more than good enough, and you don't have the hellish financial and time trade offs that come with finding a manageable commuting strategy in the larger metros.
Agree with the lifestyle aspect, but if you have any niche interests/affinities it can be hard to reach the critical mass to sustain an irl community. For example the metro here is around 200k and we barely have a proper gay bar. If you also want to date within that affinity group there’s a sort of Dead Sea effect that you run into once you reach an age where dating college students is weird.
Agree. There's something lacking in the logic that prefers scorching hot summers and useless brown winters over temperate summers and snowy wonderland winters....
This is exactly right. I grew up and went to college in Ohio then took a job in Boston. I loved the area but had no desire to live in the city (or at least, I didn't think the amenities justified the cost). When my wife and I had two kids, we wanted her to stay home with them. SFHs in the Boston suburbs will stretch a single income household to the limit. When my company offered me the chance to work remotely from Ohio, it was a no-brainer. We're closer to family and friends, I keep the Boston-area salary and benefits, and our quality of life is much better. And here's a news flash: Smaller cities have symphonies, theaters, restaurants and sporting events too.
I guess the main takeaway is that a lot of the migration to these superstar cities has been career/job related, and less focused on amenities. If more of us can work remotely and be closer to home, I think we'll take advantage of it.
I agree. I have had terrible luck finding a post-college job near my family (despite them living in a booming small city with horrendous housing costs). I am currently 0 for 3 jobs. If I could go remote, I would absolutely move nearer to family.
But now I am trying to convince my family to move near me—my parents are retiring and my sisters job skills are in high-demand (small business admin and IT) and there are good cultural amenities and outdoor recreation an hour or so south...
I've seen zero evidence the pandemic is prompting a sharp increase in moves driven by "desire to be close to family." Sorry, but your "good friend" is very unlikely to be statistically significant.
I live in Seattle and I think agree that Seattle's status as a Superstar City probably won't stick. Like Matt said in the piece, it really is an outlier among those other cities in terms of its size, and as a transplant here about 7 years ago I've always felt like Seattle lacks a sense of ambition, vision and civic pride that I think other Superstar Cities share. It's a provincial place at its core and Seattle really belongs in the tier of American cities that are healthy, perfectly pleasant, and certainly not declining; but not really going anywhere on the global stage either. Places like Minneapolis, Denver, and our little brother Portland, OR. Whatever category those cities fit into, that to me is what Seattle is.
I also think this is really tragic for Seattle. I'm someone that loves big dynamic places and I admire NYC and LA for their pride and ambition. There are fundamentals in place in Seattle that could set it up to vault ahead of its kissing-cousin cities: A global port; a large research university; an important anchor employer in Boeing that complements the tech sector; a pretty natural setting. I've been really disappointed in the lack of ambitious civic leadership in Seattle that looks to sieze on these fundamentals and do things like celebrate our pace of growth and revise our land use laws to absorb more and more people.
I'm not going anywhere and I do have some hope that Seattle will break out of the prevailing "Make Seattle Great Again" mindset. But that would be a big shift. In the very near term I think we have a super important Mayoral election this year. The candidates so far are all pretty small-ball in my opinion, and I truly hope someone joins the race who is bold and audacious in their vision for the City.
I think that the four cities you mention make a natural class, and I would add Austin too (and maybe Nashville). But I would say that this is a class of cities on the move to superstar status. These aren't St Louis and Philadelphia and Baltimore and Phoenix and Orlando - they're cities that get national attention beyond what their size dictates.
1) It's not clear to me that "liking to visit a place" and "wanting to permanently move there" are strongly correlated, or at least I'd need that demonstrated. I love going skiing for a day or two, but am absolutely not looking to live at the foot of a mountain. People blame "labor market unworkability" for not moving to Maine, but is that just what they SAY, and the reality is it's really nice in the fall when the leaves are changing but cold/boring the rest of the year, but they don't want to bad-mouth the place they're standing in?
2) On Seattle in particular, I think you have to account for climate change. I grew up here, moved to LA for 15 years, and then moved back, and it's very clear that the weather is better than when I was growing up. Go out 10, 20, 30 years and you're looking at an absolutely prime climate for exactly the kind of lifestyle attraction you mention.
As usual, though, high-skill immigration and building more housing would help, whatever the details and gripes are.
I'm sure, I mean I'm not bagging on Maine or anything. I live somewhere that's not sunny most of the year too. But that's why more people don't move here! It's nothing to do with "labor market conditions", so I'm suggesting the same is possible for Maine.
I think the overall frame is right but I think there are two missing pieces in the analysis that make it a little bit too harsh on Seattle.
First, lifestyle amenities are much more than just nationally apparent fun things to do. College-educated people want to move to places like Seattle so they can meet similar people to socialize with and date. Yes, the weather is a drag but you have good restaurants, etc. in addition to relatively good schools and public services (sort of like Des Moines). So a more all-encompassing view of lifestyle amenities makes a place like Seattle look a lot better and Miami look worse.
Second, the labor market situation may matter less, but I think people will still want to go to a place that has some pre-existing industry presence for their industry. Pre-pandemic, the top remote working locations are not really places like Miami (which is essentially entirely based on tourism) but were more secondary tech cities like Portland, Denver, Raleigh, etc.. https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/cities-with-the-most-remote-workers
Finally, on the Seattle/Miami point specifically I suppose the point was to be somewhat provocative. But I think it is pretty hard to overstate how strong the draw of Microsoft and Amazon are going to be for the next 10 years. These aren't just two huge companies, they are also the two dominant cloud service providers. Cloud is going to grow and other companies are going to want to co-locate to poach their people and plug in to those networks, unless proximity truly does not matter. By contrast, the only large companies located in Miami are a gas distribution company, Lennar homebuilding, Ryder trucking, and Office Depot. I think that proximity may matter less in the next decade but I'm still betting on Seattle to continue to do great.
Wait, is Seattle supposed to have *bad* weather? I think of Seattle as a city that basically has *good* weather, with only California being reliably better! It's a little dreary and grey, but it's never hot and it's never cold. And the rain is light enough that it's not even unpleasant to bike in it a lot of the time.
Seattle has an extremely agreeable climate. Basically very, very nice from mid-May to mid-October, with few very excessively hot days, mostly comfortable temperatures, and little humidity (plus plenty of sunshine and a lot of daylight). Seattle gets substantial precipitation and cloud cover the other half of the year but, A) contrary to popular belief overcast conditions aren't ever-present (Seattle sometimes does get sunny or partly sunny days in the late autumn and winter!), and B) temperatures are generally mild.
If you value a fairly distinct change of seasons but overall want comfortable conditions, Seattle truly has one of the best climates in America.
I think of Seattle's climate as being a slightly nicer version of England's. Perhaps more similar to Cornwall or even northwest France (Brittany, Normandy, the Loire Valley).
Grey skies quite a lot, but also plenty of sunshine, rains quite a lot of days, but still not all that many, and the rain is light; you might want to carry an umbrella, but it won't soak you to the skin very often. Mild temperatures: almost never over 100F, not over 90 all that often; lots of 80s in summer; dips below freezing in Winter, but not much below and not for long, certainly never under 20F.
Also, almost no "severe weather events" - hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, etc.
Seattle is also a major tourist destination, especially in the summer. Many young people move to Seattle not for jobs but to be in close proximity to hiking, skiing, etc. (in the 90s they moved to Seattle for music). Seattle is a town of booms and busts mainly because it was a one company town for so long (Boeing). It now has a bit more industrial diversity. I think a lot of people who have moved to Seattle really enjoy the fairly unique lifestyle of an urban environment in a spectacularly beautiful natural environment, and will not be so quick to leave for low rents in St. Louis. Usually young people leave St. Louis at adulthood to be in a place like Seattle. They enjoy the unique lifestyle and do not tend to leave when they have kids and move into a single family home. There may be a drop, but I don't see it being significant.
"...nationally apparent fun things to do. College-educated people want to move to places like Seattle so they can meet similar people to socialize with and date. Yes, the weather is a drag but you have good restaurants, etc. in addition to relatively good schools and public services (sort of like Des Moines). So a more all-encompassing view of lifestyle amenities makes a place like Seattle look a lot better and Miami look worse."
Unless you speak Spanish as your first language or are truly bilingual.
Miami is not an American city. It is a Latin American city. It took me a long time to understand and embrace that fact after moving here, but it *is* a fact. And Miami attracts professionals from all over Latin America - many of whom are the elite in their home countries.
You're correct about the relative lack of headquarters of large corporations, but every bank in the world that does substantial business in Latin America has a large office on Brickell Avenue in Miami, as does every international bank in Latin America. The same is true for international law firms. There is also the Port of Miami which is the largest passenger port in the world and also has a large cargo port. Miami is also a cultural hub with a fairly large recording industry and is where a significant portion of TV shows for Latin America are made (Telemundo and Univision).
Miami's economy is far from being "entirely based on tourism." You're thinking of Miami Beach, which is a different city.
Fair--I do think Miami is well positioned to capture more people who are in finance and related fields since there is already a lot of that work in existence there. I do not think many tech workers will want to relocate there though.
Boston/Cambridge should be less affected than most. Biotech labs can't work from home, as we've seen during this year, unless you happen to have a clean room in your house. Many of them have instead gone to 2nd and 3rd shifts to allow for more spacing.
Also on NYC, you appear to believe that NYC = Manhattan, but 82% of people in NYC live other boroughs. I can't imagine the less fashionable parts of Brooklyn and Queens will maintain their allure entirely.
On the "less fashionable parts" of the Outer Boroughs, I think the issue is that the people who live in those neighborhoods overwhelmingly do non-remotable jobs. They're the ones working in the stores and restaurants, cleaning the houses, staffing the hospitals, etc.
If Fancy New York unwinds then Unfancy New York goes with it, because the unfancy people are there to perform in-person services for the fancy people. But if, as I believe, Fancy NYC is robust then Unfancy NYC goes along with it.
For the same reason I think this is somewhat "worse" for SF than Matt seems to think. They are very high on the cost side and their primary industry, tech, is the one that seems the likely and able to embrace highly distributed work environments.
NY finance, publishing, advertising or prestige law firms seem like they're mostly in the middle. They're going to want to maintain a marquis office space, but people won't need to come into it everyday. Having people only come in 40-60% of the time will have a knock on effect for downtowns as well.
Yeah, but the Bay Area has a pretty reasonable lifestyle case to be made as well. There's some really world class food and wine, a mild climate most of the time, plenty good biking and hiking near by. I think if anything the Bay Area deflates moderately on cost and is just net better off, more fo the people who kind of wanted to be in New York or LA (or Austin / Miami) just go to those places and work remote.
Seeing how SF has changed since COVID started I've certainly had some friends leave but it seems to have bottomed out for now and be kind of back to where we were a decade ago (not even on rent honestly, just closer) which was fine. There's still a real critical mass of human capital that's established here and that seems unlikely to go to zero anytime soon. Time will tell though!
I don't think SF is going to turn into Detroit or anything. But the prices there are really in a different league and their primary industry is the most remote friendly. So they may have a pretty sizable adjustment.
Overall at the end of it the citizens are probably better off. But the adjustment period could be difficult if for no other reason than most real estate being financed with nominal debt.
My first guess is that this will be good for Lower Manhattan (which will see more residential and cultural development which already has a good foothold) and bad for Midtown, where overdevelopment has destroyed whatever was of interest previously) Midtown's commuting advantages will be less advantageous if people aren't commuting as much. I wonder what this means for the $13 billion we just sunk into East Side Access.
Also, as some other people mentioned (but Matt didn't), there's the university infrastructure. It's not just MIT/Harvard; there's 50 colleges in the Boston metropolitan area, with 250k college students when school is in session, and all of the people.
I think that one lesson of the pandemic is that online education sucks and residential education still is something people want and that's going to keep something in Boston for a long time.
I'm sceptical of companies truly going fully remote. Rather, I suspect they'll reduce their office footprint by having fewer required days in the office per week, but still have periodic "team days" where your in the office with the rest of your team for planning and collaboration, similar to Google's 3/2 workweek plans.
This might make long commute suburbs more appealing, and free up commercial office space for retail and housing in urban cores, but I don't think it will necessarily free work from particular metros.
That's absolutely where my tech company is going. I think we can see the benefit of more working from home, but also the clear benefit of being in the same room at times. I don't see full-time remote being all that much more attractive in the future.
Are we missing a large piece of the employee picture here? I know a lot of people at my company are very eager to get back to the office and meet in person. Companies may find cost advantages in WFH but if talented employees want to have access to a live workplace, companies who can afford it may have to keep providing urban-centered offices.
Just a tangential thought on remote work ... it's so hard. I have the same conversation with all my peers. We can't wait to get back into the office. In just a work context, it's so challenging to hire, onboard, build trust, track productivity, brainstorm, collaborate, etc. There's no way this is sustainable. We're burning out our middle management layers. They're taxed just keeping track of their teams and their individual goals are falling behind.
As an organization, you need to go all in (e.g., https://basecamp.com/ ... Jason literally wrote the book). Everyone else stuck in these hybrid operating models which just suck.
There’s an assumption here that remote work can always replace in person work amongst high paid professionals. This isn’t always true. I’m one of those high paid professionals in Boston biotech, and I’ve been going to work every day during the pandemic, because my work requires a laboratory! I can’t do lab work remotely, and we can’t manufacture and QC a therapeutic remotely, either. So I need to live in commuting range of Boston to do my job.
I would guess that another sector resistant to becoming remote is elite education. And healthcare, of course: you can’t treat patients remotely. These three sectors sort of define Boston.
It’s possible that the folks working in offices that support the functioning of labs, hospitals, and lecture halls could all work remotely, but there’s definitely a core of high paid professionals that will continue to come into Boston and Cambridge every day.
I'll throw some bearish cold water on remote work for computers, an industry where you'd think remote work would be perfect.
My company has been all remote since before it was cool, and it's _hard_. As a manager, you literally don't know what your employees are doing hour to hour; if someone is not getting work done because e.g. they're having a personal crisis, you find out days later from the black hole in their work output, instead of the immediate feedback of seeing them "not be themselves" in the office from day 1. I work with a few superstars who could work on the moon and it'd be okay, but I have coworkers who still struggle with this, and we selected for remote. I don't know that this scales to a lot of companies.
There's also a huge difference between "relocatably remote" (that's what we are, we hire people where they live and tell them to stay put and get good internet) and "less commuting" (e.g going from 5 days a week in the office to 1 or 2 days in the office).
Giving people 1 or 2 days in the office instead of 5 can be a cheap win if they have tasks they can do mostly remoting and still be in person for planning, and if someone has a crap commute that's a win. But that just changes the equilibrium within the superstar city - it makes an hour commute into downtown Boston manageable (once a week) instead of miserable (five days a week).
So in tech I'd say a discovered viability of remote work (e.g. managers and employees were forced to try it because of the pandemic) might shift people further into the ring suburbs of Boston, but they're not going to noticeably shed people out of the metro area.
(The Boston area also has tech outside the city core, e.g. on the 95 and 495 belt and a bunch of hardware companies, which are more like the biotech labs, which makes me think a shift will be even more muted.)
I work in tech and can agree from the other side that I have way more days where I do nothing because I’m distracted from family and in a funk from just being at home all the time. I’m much more consistently productive in an office where everyone else is working. That said, I’m also more productive at a coffee shop, so maybe once Covid is over we will see remote productivity rise as people get out of the house.
Ha ha yes - even as someone who was happy working at home, working at home with all these other people in the house (WHO ARE THEY?? WHERE DID THESE KIDS COME FROM? :-) is brutal.
We've been doing a lot of hiring at my tech company over the past year, and my standard line has been "you need to come into the office at least 1-2 times a month." That's let us hire people from Deep Orange County and San Diego to work in LA, and it's easier for my guy in Ojai, but that still leaves out a lot of places.
I think it's pretty clear that remote work everywhere is going to lead to productivity drops. But that doesn't mean we're going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle. And presumably there will be some improvements to productivity again as best practices for managing remote workers spread.
It's a little bit of both, though. My Ojai employee is saving 3+ hours a day on his commute, time that he can use to work a little more, or just rest and feel better about work in general! Maybe he gets a little more distracted, but in the aggregate he's almost certainly better off.
Yeah, but the average commute is way less than 3 hours. People are deep in denial about this, but most people are less productive at home. Some aren't! But most are.
But not massively less productive. If they were a ton less productive, maybe WFH would die, but it's like maybe 5-10% less productive. So, when all your competitors are offering WFH, what do you do? Say, "No, I'd rather take 100% of the productivity of a 25th percentile employee?" Or "90% of the productivity of 50th-100th percentile employee?"
(It's the latter.)
A model that I suspect tech is likely to try is "everyone on a team meets somewhere for a week every month or two", rather than one or two days a week (Basecamp did this pre-pandemic: https://basecamp.com/handbook/11-our-rituals): this makes living elsewhere viable. This also has some distributional consequences re who's able to do semi-lengthy business travel and who isn't....
I read that and went "man, too bad we don't have a bunch of high speed rail all over the place". :-)
My fully remote company used to do a sit-down every 6 months before the pandemic, and one of the things that always struck me was how little of the giant wasted commuting day was spent _actually_ traveling on an airplane, vs. the overhead.
Yea, I live in a DC burb that has a pretty strong biotech cluster, a lot of that work can't be done remotely and all the biotech companies are juiced up on vaccine dollars so it seems like the economy here could really take off (counterintuitively). All the more reason to advocate for more home building here!
I responded to Matt’s blooper on biotech without first looking through comments. You are making these points much better than I have.
At risk of sounding like the Detroiter that I am: I feel like Matt is really underselling Detroit’s great winter amenities, like being able to cross country ski out of the front door of your house and directly onto the abandoned property around you because the city doesn’t plow side streets. Come join me, we have plenty of houses and space. 😎
I will return to Detroit if and only if they build a subway.
(I kid, I kid...not really.)
But we have the Q Line! (sarcasm)
I would be very happy with some solid BRT. That being said my particular neighborhood has a variety of good and mostly reliable bus routes. Now to remove the stigma to riding the buses... bit of a challenge in “the motor city”.
Yeah, I think I'd be fine with solid BRT. The main thing that's actually keeping me from moving back is I don't want to deal with waiving in to the Michigan Bar and I've come to rather like Philly on the merits. It's good to hear that bus service is improving in Detroit, but they really do need to get the stigma off it. I suspect they may need to build rail transit to get people into the transit system (since it lacks the stigma) and ease people into buses that way.
As a Bostonian, I think the universities (Harvard and MIT in particular) and to some extent the elite hospital complexes will always serve as in-person bulwarks that won’t meaningfully shift to remote in a similar way to the federal government in DC.
Right - also, you can build a whole community around:
1. Went to college in Boston (lots of capacity)
2. Stayed in Boston for the jobs, but also lots of young people also stayed, so it's a good place to be in your 20s - city has bars and restaurants etc. etc.
3. Formed a family, stayed because the amenities there are pretty good (generally high functioning public education), green space, museums, etc.
The housing prices are a headwind on all of this, but so far it's not the Hurricane of, e.g. SF. This is why I bore all my friends here with YIMBY stuff - we have the "superstar" jobs to let housing go bananas, we have the Atlantic ocean to keep us from building out more, we _could_ have housing prices double and at that point Boston becomes "you only stay after college if you damn well have to".
Yeah I think there's a reasonable lifestyle case for Boston, as someone who grew up there, went to Harvard, and then moved to SF in my mid 20s I often thought about going back. The winters do suck as Matt outlines correctly in his article, but it's a good place to raise a family, the Boston suburbs are just really nice in terms of being quaint, safe, have top notch public schools, and you can still get a babysitter and have date night in the city or whatnot.
Right - and if you grew up here you know that the winters suck but build character. :-)
Boston's high temperature averages at least in the 50s F from March to November: A) Yglesias's mischaracterizations aside, just not that cold (compared to places like Chicago, Toronto, Twin Cities, etc); and, B) the truly "cold" season lasts about 1/4 of the year.
Honestly, the bigger issue is that the metropolis needs to do a better job with snow removal, because, although the region doesn't always get excessive snow, it does frequently enough for it to be a major pain (eg. winter of 14-15) when it does.
Basically, though, Greater Boston gets a perfectly lovely spring, summer and fall, followed by a less pleasant but (generally) eminently bearable winter (when all sensible folk concentrate on NBA games and Netflix, plus the odd trip to the slopes of Northern New England).
I'm going to visualize those averages while I chop wood - it's 17 right now. :-)
40's by next weekend!
Haha you must be friends with Calvin’s dad. I found they mostly left me with seasonal depression but I do enjoy a good post snow storm southie parking fight.
Agreed, although the number of people who live in Vermont or on the coast in RI or ME and drive into Boston 1-2x a week while working remote the rest of the time may go up.
Same. Also many of the jobs in biotech and medicine aren’t going to be remote anytime soon. Our company had R&D and production staff at the lab almost throughout all of 2020, we made adjustments for social distancing etc but there’s no remote cell culture or flow cytometry options
Also with global warming... while winter in Boston isn't great (-8 with wind chill as I write haha) the summers are still a beautiful 80 and breezy, while everything south of Philly is a 100 degree swamp...
Biotech cannot work 100% remotely. Some managers doing generic management work can (and have, during shutdowns). But most things that are actual biotech are wet-lab work done in the lab in person. So the forces that made car manufacturing agglomerate in Detroit 100 years ago still apply to biotech, making it difficult for Moderna to move to Nowheresvile, TX.
This is a good point! I probably should have thought harder about the specifics of biotech. It's possible that Boston is the city fo the future.
And Philadelphia! Cell and gene therapy capital of the world!
And the Bay Area and San Diego -- big biotech metros.
I have zero knowledge about this, but I would not be surprised at all to hear that 99.5% of BioTech Company X's employees are all support and only .5% are actual people in labs.
So ... what should we do in Cleveland? Just make it a complete party town? Bars don't ever close? Legalize brothels? When you can work anywhere, why not do it with a hangover in Cleveland!!
I think the One Billion Americans proposal is really good!
I think the question is what should *Cleveland* do? They can't control immigration well
Haven't actually read One Billion Americans, but... what keeps all the extra people from just flocking to the aforementioned cool places?
You make their immigration status contingent on staying in the sponsor city
You don't need to report violators. Just make it really difficult to get a legit job outisde their targer metro area. H1B visas already make it really hard to quit your job. You can still do it and get a job picking grapes for cash under the table but those aren't the jobs H1Bs come here for.
Latino and Asian populations have been growing in Detroit even as others flee.
If you are a skilled worker, who moved to the US to do your work, I'm not sure you're going to be excited to lose your legal status just so you can move to NYC. There's more downsides to not having a legal status than risk of deportation, and there could be more.
You do have the symphony and the art museum and presumably climate change will help with the weather...
I am not above seeing local upsides to global catastrophes, but I just think that, with Cleveland's luck, climate change is going to bring like hordes of super mayflies that will make the city uninhabitable.
Cleveland specifically has one geographical advantage. If you get a map and draw a straight line from New York to Chicago, it goes through Cleveland (actually, it goes through Lake Erie just outside of Cleveland, but still).
That means that any surface transport route between those two cities will almost certainly go through Cleveland. My proposal for Cleveland is simple: build a high-speed rail line direct from NYC to Chicago via Cleveland, with the only intermediate stop being Cleveland (you may well have a suburban NYC stop in Westchester County but nothing else in between). Building aggressively fast (ie being prepared to run tunnels through mountains to keep the line-speed up as high as possible), end to end with one or two stops should be down to just over three hours. Three hours ten minutes from NY Penn Station to Chicago Union Station with a stop in Cleveland, three hours fifteen minutes with an additional stop in Westchester County would be about the timing. Most HSR proposals are to build Cleveland to Philadelphia via Pittsburgh, but NYC-Philly-Pitt-Cleveland-Chicago would be much too slow to compete with flying. Station to station in 3h15 is almost certainly faster for a journey from a Midtown office to a Loop office than flying - you're going to spend at least an hour getting to an airport in NYC and the same again getting from ORD to the Loop, add on security and the actual flying time and it's well over three hours.
At that point, creating a business in Cleveland that has clients in both NYC and Chicago looks really attractive. Living in Cleveland with a job in NYC and a partner who works in Chicago becomes possible (especially for the sort of "work from home, visit the office once or twice a week" job that the pandemic is creating). For both of those, Cleveland is the only city that could provide that service. It's hard to have a truly unique proposition for a city, but Cleveland - unlike just about every other Midwestern city that isn't Chicago - could have one.
Now, you just need the quarter-trillion dollars that rail will cost.
In this case I'm gonna plow all my meager savings into White Plains real estate pronto.
Isn't there a whole movement of people that want to retire as early as possible through spending as little money as they can? Living in Cleveland seems like a good option for that.
You could also move federal agencies there. NIH (or part of it) seems like a good candidate.
I live in Seattle, so maybe I'm biased, but I think you underrate Seattle's amenities. It's one of the only proper cities in the US with easy access to spectacular hiking and camping. That draws in a lot of young people who enjoy the outdoors.
Seattle does have easy access to spectacular hiking and camping but it was only differentiated on that axis among the population of top tier tech cities. I would expect that many tech employees who want to buy a house and live in the city will suddenly see areas like Salt Lake or Denver as places with those types of amenities as a more desirable location to be long term.
I still expect to see the flow of young people in particular towards these major industry centers for the purpose of on the job training. I think an underrated function that most high paying companies are partaking in is training college grads to do a good job in their industry. If companies think this is valuable, I think we're going to continue to see a majority of these companies still ask junior employees to move to these cities and enough senior employees to stay to train the next generation.
Agree on top companies being important for training, and also that it will happen in person. I also haven’t seen this idea as much.
I made a different comment but this was next in the cannon
“Seattle doesn’t even have an NBA team!“
Do you say things like that just to hurt me?
TIL the SuperSonics aren’t a team anymore and haven’t been for, like, 13 years.
If it provides any hope, the NBA is now almost desperate for expansion, and it appears to be a given that one of the two new teams will be in Seattle (I’m hearing that the 2nd will likely be in Vegas). I’m rooting for you, great basketball town.
The NHL's also about to unleash the Seattle Kraken: https://www.nhl.com/kraken
If the city balks at giving them stadium money (which I think is most likely) who knows if they will still be as interested.
The one thing your analysis leaves out about why people might move post pandemic is for family. I have a good friend who has been trying to move back to Cleveland from the DC burbs to be closer to family (he also really likes Cleveland) but hadn’t been able to find a job there. He finally found one that he started remotely and will then move in the spring, but had been planning to ask his old job to
Let him work remotely permanently if he didn’t. I could see lots of people moving to places that had been losing population for employment reasons to get some of them back as people look to be closer to family. Lots of people aren’t looking for great amenities at all. They’re looking for family help raising kids, or to be near old friends, or a little nostalgia. If the housing costs are cheap, so much the better. Lots of people these days seem to not like much change and this would also be a way to hang onto the past a bit.
This is what I was going to write. Aren’t you glad I scrolled through the comments! I am a bit suspicious that people will just randomly move to one of their favorite vaca spots. And even weather. If you grow up or go to school in cold, it just factors in less. Take that from someone who grew up in ND, moved to the Bay Area and is now happy in Minneapolis (Beta City baby, a level up on Seattle).
The sweet spot for quality of life is in those beta cities and/or midsize college towns that punch over their weight. The economy, dating scene, and cultural amenities are all more than good enough, and you don't have the hellish financial and time trade offs that come with finding a manageable commuting strategy in the larger metros.
Agree with the lifestyle aspect, but if you have any niche interests/affinities it can be hard to reach the critical mass to sustain an irl community. For example the metro here is around 200k and we barely have a proper gay bar. If you also want to date within that affinity group there’s a sort of Dead Sea effect that you run into once you reach an age where dating college students is weird.
Agree. There's something lacking in the logic that prefers scorching hot summers and useless brown winters over temperate summers and snowy wonderland winters....
This is exactly right. I grew up and went to college in Ohio then took a job in Boston. I loved the area but had no desire to live in the city (or at least, I didn't think the amenities justified the cost). When my wife and I had two kids, we wanted her to stay home with them. SFHs in the Boston suburbs will stretch a single income household to the limit. When my company offered me the chance to work remotely from Ohio, it was a no-brainer. We're closer to family and friends, I keep the Boston-area salary and benefits, and our quality of life is much better. And here's a news flash: Smaller cities have symphonies, theaters, restaurants and sporting events too.
I guess the main takeaway is that a lot of the migration to these superstar cities has been career/job related, and less focused on amenities. If more of us can work remotely and be closer to home, I think we'll take advantage of it.
I agree. I have had terrible luck finding a post-college job near my family (despite them living in a booming small city with horrendous housing costs). I am currently 0 for 3 jobs. If I could go remote, I would absolutely move nearer to family.
But now I am trying to convince my family to move near me—my parents are retiring and my sisters job skills are in high-demand (small business admin and IT) and there are good cultural amenities and outdoor recreation an hour or so south...
I've seen zero evidence the pandemic is prompting a sharp increase in moves driven by "desire to be close to family." Sorry, but your "good friend" is very unlikely to be statistically significant.
I live in Seattle and I think agree that Seattle's status as a Superstar City probably won't stick. Like Matt said in the piece, it really is an outlier among those other cities in terms of its size, and as a transplant here about 7 years ago I've always felt like Seattle lacks a sense of ambition, vision and civic pride that I think other Superstar Cities share. It's a provincial place at its core and Seattle really belongs in the tier of American cities that are healthy, perfectly pleasant, and certainly not declining; but not really going anywhere on the global stage either. Places like Minneapolis, Denver, and our little brother Portland, OR. Whatever category those cities fit into, that to me is what Seattle is.
I also think this is really tragic for Seattle. I'm someone that loves big dynamic places and I admire NYC and LA for their pride and ambition. There are fundamentals in place in Seattle that could set it up to vault ahead of its kissing-cousin cities: A global port; a large research university; an important anchor employer in Boeing that complements the tech sector; a pretty natural setting. I've been really disappointed in the lack of ambitious civic leadership in Seattle that looks to sieze on these fundamentals and do things like celebrate our pace of growth and revise our land use laws to absorb more and more people.
I'm not going anywhere and I do have some hope that Seattle will break out of the prevailing "Make Seattle Great Again" mindset. But that would be a big shift. In the very near term I think we have a super important Mayoral election this year. The candidates so far are all pretty small-ball in my opinion, and I truly hope someone joins the race who is bold and audacious in their vision for the City.
I think that the four cities you mention make a natural class, and I would add Austin too (and maybe Nashville). But I would say that this is a class of cities on the move to superstar status. These aren't St Louis and Philadelphia and Baltimore and Phoenix and Orlando - they're cities that get national attention beyond what their size dictates.
Two gripes with this one:
1) It's not clear to me that "liking to visit a place" and "wanting to permanently move there" are strongly correlated, or at least I'd need that demonstrated. I love going skiing for a day or two, but am absolutely not looking to live at the foot of a mountain. People blame "labor market unworkability" for not moving to Maine, but is that just what they SAY, and the reality is it's really nice in the fall when the leaves are changing but cold/boring the rest of the year, but they don't want to bad-mouth the place they're standing in?
2) On Seattle in particular, I think you have to account for climate change. I grew up here, moved to LA for 15 years, and then moved back, and it's very clear that the weather is better than when I was growing up. Go out 10, 20, 30 years and you're looking at an absolutely prime climate for exactly the kind of lifestyle attraction you mention.
As usual, though, high-skill immigration and building more housing would help, whatever the details and gripes are.
This is a good point. Much of California is becoming uninhabitable, while Oregon & Washington start to get a California climate.
Yeah I mean obviously California still has a warmer climate, but the gap is closing, and the size of the gap matters a lot at the margin.
Maine is quite nice June - September. (Mid-July through Mid-September much of the state has the most agreeable weather almost anywhere.)
I'm sure, but that's not much of the year! ;)
People manage to have fun in the winter. There's snowmobiling, ice fishing, cross country and downhill skiing, staying indoors, etc.
I'm sure, I mean I'm not bagging on Maine or anything. I live somewhere that's not sunny most of the year too. But that's why more people don't move here! It's nothing to do with "labor market conditions", so I'm suggesting the same is possible for Maine.
Naw, Matt is correct on this one. The Maine economy has been in a long, long, long decline.
I think the overall frame is right but I think there are two missing pieces in the analysis that make it a little bit too harsh on Seattle.
First, lifestyle amenities are much more than just nationally apparent fun things to do. College-educated people want to move to places like Seattle so they can meet similar people to socialize with and date. Yes, the weather is a drag but you have good restaurants, etc. in addition to relatively good schools and public services (sort of like Des Moines). So a more all-encompassing view of lifestyle amenities makes a place like Seattle look a lot better and Miami look worse.
Second, the labor market situation may matter less, but I think people will still want to go to a place that has some pre-existing industry presence for their industry. Pre-pandemic, the top remote working locations are not really places like Miami (which is essentially entirely based on tourism) but were more secondary tech cities like Portland, Denver, Raleigh, etc.. https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/cities-with-the-most-remote-workers
Finally, on the Seattle/Miami point specifically I suppose the point was to be somewhat provocative. But I think it is pretty hard to overstate how strong the draw of Microsoft and Amazon are going to be for the next 10 years. These aren't just two huge companies, they are also the two dominant cloud service providers. Cloud is going to grow and other companies are going to want to co-locate to poach their people and plug in to those networks, unless proximity truly does not matter. By contrast, the only large companies located in Miami are a gas distribution company, Lennar homebuilding, Ryder trucking, and Office Depot. I think that proximity may matter less in the next decade but I'm still betting on Seattle to continue to do great.
Wait, is Seattle supposed to have *bad* weather? I think of Seattle as a city that basically has *good* weather, with only California being reliably better! It's a little dreary and grey, but it's never hot and it's never cold. And the rain is light enough that it's not even unpleasant to bike in it a lot of the time.
Seattle has an extremely agreeable climate. Basically very, very nice from mid-May to mid-October, with few very excessively hot days, mostly comfortable temperatures, and little humidity (plus plenty of sunshine and a lot of daylight). Seattle gets substantial precipitation and cloud cover the other half of the year but, A) contrary to popular belief overcast conditions aren't ever-present (Seattle sometimes does get sunny or partly sunny days in the late autumn and winter!), and B) temperatures are generally mild.
If you value a fairly distinct change of seasons but overall want comfortable conditions, Seattle truly has one of the best climates in America.
I think of Seattle's climate as being a slightly nicer version of England's. Perhaps more similar to Cornwall or even northwest France (Brittany, Normandy, the Loire Valley).
Grey skies quite a lot, but also plenty of sunshine, rains quite a lot of days, but still not all that many, and the rain is light; you might want to carry an umbrella, but it won't soak you to the skin very often. Mild temperatures: almost never over 100F, not over 90 all that often; lots of 80s in summer; dips below freezing in Winter, but not much below and not for long, certainly never under 20F.
Also, almost no "severe weather events" - hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, etc.
Winter days are pretty short and pretty dark but I agree the weather is good June-September or so
You are correct.
Seattle is also a major tourist destination, especially in the summer. Many young people move to Seattle not for jobs but to be in close proximity to hiking, skiing, etc. (in the 90s they moved to Seattle for music). Seattle is a town of booms and busts mainly because it was a one company town for so long (Boeing). It now has a bit more industrial diversity. I think a lot of people who have moved to Seattle really enjoy the fairly unique lifestyle of an urban environment in a spectacularly beautiful natural environment, and will not be so quick to leave for low rents in St. Louis. Usually young people leave St. Louis at adulthood to be in a place like Seattle. They enjoy the unique lifestyle and do not tend to leave when they have kids and move into a single family home. There may be a drop, but I don't see it being significant.
"...nationally apparent fun things to do. College-educated people want to move to places like Seattle so they can meet similar people to socialize with and date. Yes, the weather is a drag but you have good restaurants, etc. in addition to relatively good schools and public services (sort of like Des Moines). So a more all-encompassing view of lifestyle amenities makes a place like Seattle look a lot better and Miami look worse."
Unless you speak Spanish as your first language or are truly bilingual.
Miami is not an American city. It is a Latin American city. It took me a long time to understand and embrace that fact after moving here, but it *is* a fact. And Miami attracts professionals from all over Latin America - many of whom are the elite in their home countries.
You're correct about the relative lack of headquarters of large corporations, but every bank in the world that does substantial business in Latin America has a large office on Brickell Avenue in Miami, as does every international bank in Latin America. The same is true for international law firms. There is also the Port of Miami which is the largest passenger port in the world and also has a large cargo port. Miami is also a cultural hub with a fairly large recording industry and is where a significant portion of TV shows for Latin America are made (Telemundo and Univision).
Miami's economy is far from being "entirely based on tourism." You're thinking of Miami Beach, which is a different city.
Fair--I do think Miami is well positioned to capture more people who are in finance and related fields since there is already a lot of that work in existence there. I do not think many tech workers will want to relocate there though.
What's so different about tech workers?
As someone who works in tech, there is a strong overlap between working in tech and liking to hike.
Surfing is just like a good hike. Techbros will be as happy on beaches as they are in mountains (and no state income tax in FL)
True of course in WA but it means they’re more comparable!
I used to hike a lot, and I miss it. But I like warm winters.
because there is a pre-existing finance cluster but no pre-existing tech cluster?
Just like in other cities. Until there was.
Boston/Cambridge should be less affected than most. Biotech labs can't work from home, as we've seen during this year, unless you happen to have a clean room in your house. Many of them have instead gone to 2nd and 3rd shifts to allow for more spacing.
Also on NYC, you appear to believe that NYC = Manhattan, but 82% of people in NYC live other boroughs. I can't imagine the less fashionable parts of Brooklyn and Queens will maintain their allure entirely.
On the "less fashionable parts" of the Outer Boroughs, I think the issue is that the people who live in those neighborhoods overwhelmingly do non-remotable jobs. They're the ones working in the stores and restaurants, cleaning the houses, staffing the hospitals, etc.
If Fancy New York unwinds then Unfancy New York goes with it, because the unfancy people are there to perform in-person services for the fancy people. But if, as I believe, Fancy NYC is robust then Unfancy NYC goes along with it.
For the same reason I think this is somewhat "worse" for SF than Matt seems to think. They are very high on the cost side and their primary industry, tech, is the one that seems the likely and able to embrace highly distributed work environments.
NY finance, publishing, advertising or prestige law firms seem like they're mostly in the middle. They're going to want to maintain a marquis office space, but people won't need to come into it everyday. Having people only come in 40-60% of the time will have a knock on effect for downtowns as well.
Yeah, but the Bay Area has a pretty reasonable lifestyle case to be made as well. There's some really world class food and wine, a mild climate most of the time, plenty good biking and hiking near by. I think if anything the Bay Area deflates moderately on cost and is just net better off, more fo the people who kind of wanted to be in New York or LA (or Austin / Miami) just go to those places and work remote.
Seeing how SF has changed since COVID started I've certainly had some friends leave but it seems to have bottomed out for now and be kind of back to where we were a decade ago (not even on rent honestly, just closer) which was fine. There's still a real critical mass of human capital that's established here and that seems unlikely to go to zero anytime soon. Time will tell though!
I don't think SF is going to turn into Detroit or anything. But the prices there are really in a different league and their primary industry is the most remote friendly. So they may have a pretty sizable adjustment.
Overall at the end of it the citizens are probably better off. But the adjustment period could be difficult if for no other reason than most real estate being financed with nominal debt.
Or maybe the adjustment will be less than that.
My first guess is that this will be good for Lower Manhattan (which will see more residential and cultural development which already has a good foothold) and bad for Midtown, where overdevelopment has destroyed whatever was of interest previously) Midtown's commuting advantages will be less advantageous if people aren't commuting as much. I wonder what this means for the $13 billion we just sunk into East Side Access.
Also, as some other people mentioned (but Matt didn't), there's the university infrastructure. It's not just MIT/Harvard; there's 50 colleges in the Boston metropolitan area, with 250k college students when school is in session, and all of the people.
I think that one lesson of the pandemic is that online education sucks and residential education still is something people want and that's going to keep something in Boston for a long time.
I'm sceptical of companies truly going fully remote. Rather, I suspect they'll reduce their office footprint by having fewer required days in the office per week, but still have periodic "team days" where your in the office with the rest of your team for planning and collaboration, similar to Google's 3/2 workweek plans.
This might make long commute suburbs more appealing, and free up commercial office space for retail and housing in urban cores, but I don't think it will necessarily free work from particular metros.
On the margin, full-remote work is going to increase. That doesn't mean every company is going full remote.
That's absolutely where my tech company is going. I think we can see the benefit of more working from home, but also the clear benefit of being in the same room at times. I don't see full-time remote being all that much more attractive in the future.
You make great points but overlook the key aspect that not even remote work will entice people from Boston to leave Boston.
Bill Simmons lives in LA!
could always move back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ByRpNTGBik
didn't he move to LA for a job in show business?
When did Boston become uncool? 😢 Also, several of my coworkers have already left Boston, and I’m seriously considering it
Hate to break it to you but Boston was never cool.
It was cool in 1890
Are we missing a large piece of the employee picture here? I know a lot of people at my company are very eager to get back to the office and meet in person. Companies may find cost advantages in WFH but if talented employees want to have access to a live workplace, companies who can afford it may have to keep providing urban-centered offices.
Just a tangential thought on remote work ... it's so hard. I have the same conversation with all my peers. We can't wait to get back into the office. In just a work context, it's so challenging to hire, onboard, build trust, track productivity, brainstorm, collaborate, etc. There's no way this is sustainable. We're burning out our middle management layers. They're taxed just keeping track of their teams and their individual goals are falling behind.
As an organization, you need to go all in (e.g., https://basecamp.com/ ... Jason literally wrote the book). Everyone else stuck in these hybrid operating models which just suck.