During "White Flight" New York lost a substantial, but not enormous number of people, but still the effects on the city budget caused quality of life to plummet, as crime spiraled and infrastructure crumbled.

I was reminded of this after reading this recent New York Times article about the current massive budget shortfall as the tax base flees the city:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/nyregion/nyc-budget-coron...

If you're working remotely, why should your employer pay you more just because you prefer more expensive cities? Should you also get a pay raise for preferring more expensive cars, or having expensive hobbies?

It would be great to have more good salaries and good jobs available nationally.

The same could be true if someone has a family member incarcerated at a certain prison and needs to live close by for visits or to help with legal procedures.

Subsidizing high-CoL people who get the advantages of being in a city is not fair at all. It’s only tolerated because high-CoL cities tend to be where the talent is most concentrated so you have to compete for them.

For example, Google will not pay Zurich engineers Bay Area equivalent salaries despite there being similar CoLs.

Would you think it’s fair if you lived in the same city but your company paid more money to people with more expensive houses?

I'm aware of several teams that have done this with success in the past. Everybody, no matter their region of choice, gets compensation enough to enable an appropriately comfortable standard of living desired based on the actual costs of living where they choose. This is what we're talking about when we advocate for adjusting salaries for COL. It creates incentive for your employees to live where they actually want to live, work, and be happy - rather than wherever they feel like they can extract the most cash value from the company.

So the equivalent “comfortable standard of living” they’re used to in Manhattan would require a $5 million annual salary.

That said, I really don't think remote work will be permanent. Once the Pandemic is over, people will relish going into the office. Most people WANT to work at an office, regardless of the commute. It runs between 60-75% of all people want to work from an office, and it is more efficient.

It also all depends on the office setup and where people reside. If someone has a casual bike ride to an office they probably don't mind the commute, v.s. if someone has to take an hour + BART ride without seating, packed like sardines and some homeless junkie smoking crack, they probably feel differently.

There is nothing physical that makes it more expensive to build dense, walkable communities. On the contrary: Shorter distances mean less roads, less pipes, and apartment buildings (and smaller apartments) mean less heating costs. It should be cheaper, from the material point of view.

The problem is political: People already living in walkable communities tend to vote for keeping newcomers out of moving into their walkable communities, vote against building more homes in their communities or expanding the walkable communities at their edges. This shortsighted selfishness, pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you-attitude of people already living and voting in walkable communities is doing the penalizing. And potential newcomers don't have the right to vote in the local elections of the walkable communities they are only aspiring to move in to.

I also don't think this is unreasonable. we're not entitled to live in the most expensive corners of the world just because we want to. currently engineers in high-COL areas get paid a premium because the company sees value in having offices there and having most people work in the office. once that perceived value-add no longer exists, what entitles you to get paid much more to enable your lifestyle than joe schmoe in iowa who does the same work? if this feels unfair, it sorta calls into question whether it's fair for SWEs to get paid so much more than other professions in the first place.

I previously worked for an all-remote team that, over time, shifted from mostly within the US to HQ'd within the US on paper, but with just a few employees left in the country. When I left to take a local job, the guy who replaced me in Latin America was every bit as talented an engineer and tech leader, but for less than a third of the cost to the company compared to what I was making in NYC.

I get the feeling a lot of people are looking at this as their first step towards more tech jobs in cheap parts of the US, but the reality will probably end up as more tech jobs offered to people from much cheaper parts of the developing world - also a great thing... but with potential impact to those of us in the country if wages move faster than COL does.

My justification for finding my walkable community in one of the only places it exists in the US was always high wages, but if that changes, there's little reason to not pursue parts of western europe with a much better social climate and lower wages - but also lower wages. Who knows what will happen post-pandemic though, and how much of this will stick outside of a few SV companies.

See also

https://iism.org/article/why-are-ceos-failing-software-engin...

But what is your solution to this? If companies can make this work, why should they ignore the huge talent pools that exist in the middle of the country? That said, I think there will always be employers who prefer to have most everyone sitting in the office.

The alternative is Mary Tyler Moore’s salary being lower than her male counterpart because he has a family to support / a higher cost of living.

My suggestion: join your local YIMBY group and work toward making cost of living more affordable in your area.

Cities like New York (and SF, London, Berlin, etc, etc) still have a bright future and are still going to attract large companies - and most of those companies are likely to remain predominantly office based for the foreseeable future.

As it is, you could already work full time remote and get much higher salary than those companies that adjusted for COL and publicly advertised their pay scales(Gitlab, Stack Overflow, etc). If you were interested in money, and willing to get after it, those salaries were laughably low for someone with the talent and history to back it up.

So now what? The same as always, get paid what you can get paid? If you want X money go get X money. If you can't, maybe you don't have what it takes to live in a high COL city(is that so different from now)? Perhaps the COL will come down to reflect a reduced demand for those particular urban centers. Or to reflect ability to pay high rents and prices?

IMHO the potential downsides are more social; risk of increased social/economical stratification. Maybe the cities end up even more packed with a certain "type" that can pull the big money while everyone else is servicing them on scraps. IDK.

I think it is a little silly that companies pay someone more just because they like living in a city. I admit that I have a strong preference for rural areas, but I don't expect an employer to pay me more (or less) because of that. I am constantly surprised that more companies don't setup in lower COL areas, but I guess that much of the in-person talent desires that enough to make it work.

Most people agree that it is good to treat people equally regardless of their background, and this policy seems to promote that.

Reality will probably be somewhere in the middle.

The idea of an employer daring to adjust my pay because they think I should get a roomie (or make any other decisions about my cost of living) is crazy.

Over the years various employers have entered into negotiations, mid employment, to change the terms of my contract. More often than not it’s been a good opportunity for both parties to seize the opportunity for some fresh air — new job for me somewhere else, new chump for them!

The end result (as I'm imagining it) would be that these new national-average tech salaries can still provide a very comfortable living in low-COL areas, but are no longer comfortable in high-COL areas.

Realize with areas like SV you're also competing because of desirability not related to job market. If you want to live in certain parts of CA it's going to cost more.

If what you are worried about does happen I suspect it would take on the order of a decade to show up. But regardless of timespan, I must say I don't care. Your post is just crocodile tears.

It might even be that if a bunch of people who value things like walkable communities move to a place and get involved, they could even make one. It's just crazy enough to work.

Check out https://www.walkscore.com/cities-and-neighborhoods/

Keep in mind that even cities that have lower scores overall often have some very walkable neighborhoods. For example, Los Angeles has an overall walk score of 68, but has several neighborhoods that score 90 and above.