Growth of cities and the increase of wealth of cities is 5,000 year trend, that includes in its history pandemics and plagues.

Given that we've had multiple localized epidemics or global pandemics in the last two decades alone (SARS, Ebola, Swine Flu/H1N1, etc), the likelihood of more seems increasingly high. Perhaps it doesn't even matter whether the next one will have a higher CFR; whether large cities prosper depends not only on whether people believe it will, but also on how well the cities do in many other respects, such as crime, taxes, pollution, trash, homelessness, etc. SF is not only suffering because of the pandemic: the pandemic just put an extra sense of urgency on the snowball effect that was already happening.

When cities are safe, healthy, clean and beautiful, they're great and everyone is happy to live there, but now? Not so much.

It’s important to note also that sanitation, preparedness, and scientific knowledge will all continue to improve over time. Pandemics may become more common but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be as deadly or effective as the current one.

1. The growth of information/knowledge (the Information Age) jobs, which are now the majority of all jobs in the U.S.

2. The growth of remote work tools (the jury is out on how productive people are remotely at the moment, but new tech will drive this soon so that you will be just as or almost as effective in your kitchen or local coffee shop)

3. The growth of global transportation (the Jet Age) that allows previously localized diseases to spread globally in hours, instead of months or years

These factors are new and together likely presage a historic shift in how and where people work.

Ironically, except for this market adjustment in larger cities, the ability for people to work productively in other locations will put continuing downward pressure on the cost of living in cities as people leave, and probably hit some sort of equilibrium at some point soon.

... all this to mean that you should sell your investment properties in the Tenderloin ;)

To me the question is whether companies/employees will continue letting/wanting to work remotely in the future. I am certainly not concerned about a population collapse in big cities because many companies and people want to live there and don't because of cost.

I don't believe this; very few companies are okay with permanent remote work after the pandemic is over, even though they are very notable exceptions, eg Facebook.

This also assumes the population of people interested in living in destination cities is constant, but it's been growing every year the last decade except this one. COVID and the possibilities of remote work and COVID will dampen growth, but when we get through COVID, I expect demand to be higher than ever. It's not like SF will solve their systemic housing problems in the next 20 years, or our lifetimes.

By a long shot, the largest expense for large companies in employee salaries - rent, by comparison, is a drop in the bucket. What follows is that companies should be most concerned about employee and team productivity rather then office expenses.

I know companies in Canada that are way ahead of the curve on this: they've been consulting for American companies for years, meaning they can afford way more person hours than american counterparts given a US dollar contract size solely because of the salary gap difference.

The US vs. not-US gap is certainly larger, but I expect that US-based companies would much rather hire someone 3 timezones away than 8 or 12. Having to be on conference calls at 7am or 8pm gets old real quick.

I haven’t heard of one, and I would think this would be a huge selling point so anyone doing it would want to advertise it to engineers.

On the other hand there are plenty of companies transparent about their policy to match pay to cost of living, for instance gitlab publishes their conversion percentages for different cities. Many places in the US they pay ~60% of Bay Area.

https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...

https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...

Can companies measure productivity of knowledge workers to that granularity?

Office expenses make a relatively small fraction of employee overall expenses. Say 10% to be extremely generous. NYC five-borough average back in 2015 was around $15K per year [1]. A fully-burdened employee expense is around 2X base salary, so a $100K salary position clocks in around $200K fully-burdened, or around 7.5% of that 2015 NYC average figure. I don't currently see companies wholesale changing employment strategies for 10% differentials.

I'm not sure companies can measure productivity down to that expense detail level for knowledge workers.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-much-your-compan...

I personally don't know of any large corporations that track it well enough on a corporation wide level to be able to tell you if any change significantly affected developer productivity.

But the check they write every month for rent is very easily measured and reduced.

Also I was specifically told by the VP who was in charge of making the decision for his division why he was doing it, and it was costs savings.

Will young people suddenly not want to live in close proximity to other young people? Will that become another luxury item for the well-connected?

I’d counter that many young people permanently leave their “hometown” for financial opportunities that are currently only available away from that “hometown”.

For privileged young folks who are “amenity migrants”, your statement would be admittedly true. It might be a bit classist to extend that assumption to all young people.

Sure, people who grew up in $COOL_PLACE but moved to $OTHER_PLACE for a job might want to (and be able to) move back to $COOL_PLACE now, but I don't think that generalizes to most of America.

The US is expected to add 80m people in the next 30 years. So that seems very unlikely, even if there is a shift in behavior.

Edit: reduced the population estimate with newer numbers from the census bureau.

Step out of your bubble and think about all of the people making the goods you order, maintaining your roads, construction workers that fix your home, the workers at the grocery store, the person that delivers your packages, the warehouse workers, etc etc etc.

The world runs on people being physically present working jobs that can’t be done from home... that must continue so that you CAN work from home. Until robots can do those jobs, it'll always be the minority that works from home.

If you reduce the need to maintain both a worksite for people and a home, while you will increase the need for labor to maintain/service the home and supporting infrastructure somewwhat, it will probably be less than the reduced demand for labor to maintain and service the worksite. The initial effects of a large scale shift to telecommuting is going to include a lot of net physical service/maintenance/support jobs lost.

Step out of your bubble and think about what it would mean if 40% of Americans worked from home full time.

It can be done, we've seen that, now people are running the numbers and seeing what that means. Pre-covid it was something like 3% that worked from home at least half the time.

If 3% turns into 40% - or even 20% or 6% - that starts to change things.

The whole WFH discussion is an upper-middle class discussion. Low income workers don't have the option of working from home.

Remote collaboration tools like GH have been crucial for remote work for software developers, but that's a really small slice of the pie.

Every one since then was someone I knew online for many years first.