But there are many more of those.

Maybe total value still decreased, because people no longer pay such a large premium for the limited city center space.

As such, total money paid on rent is less.

Total money spent on card catalogs went down since 1980. Does that mean value was destroyed?

In a weird coincidence, I have been trying find a card catalogs or two for home storage for a couple months. These are often incredibly well-made solid wood furniture, and yet most libraries worldwide have just been scrapping them. (Their size and weight makes them extremely difficult to ship - buyers/sellers aren't well aligned.)

So, in short, yes. We also got new value, but tons is being unnecessarily destroyed.

Imagine someone were to invent a miracle power source that could be produced easily and cheaply by anyone and allowed all vehicles to be powered for free, completely obliterating the fossil fuel industry. In this situation, would you say value was created or destroyed?

If we just let the fossil fuel infrastructure rust/sink? Lots definitely destroyed.

Perhaps material-neutral "value" is not a particular good measure of anything.

Did they? Can we see that the entire value of these properties moved? Sounds like an impossible thing to measure. Considering most people already had space to work from home so they didn't move value anywhere. There is also the problem where the property which is most profitable for local governments has been the hardest hit. When you look at the maps that have been produced on this you can see some serious issues coming up where the profit centers of cities are all at risk while the ROI negative areas are expanding.

https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/minneapolis-mn/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/minneapolis-mn/

> Considering most people already had space to work from home so they didn't move value anywhere.

This is a very debatable statement. Looking at my coworkers in the past two years, opinions seem to have been pretty evenly 50/50 split between people who had enough space/comfortable home to be able to work from home, and people who had no real good option to work from home (family situation, loud kids, living in a single bedroom apartment with no desk, etc). I know A LOT of people who specifically rented apartments that were only serving the purpose of "a place to sleep, close to the office", because these people's lives revolved around doing 90% of their stuff outside of their house (eat at the office, go out during weekends, travel, etc). These people got gutted when the pandemic hit and we were forced to work from home. I always wanted a large apartment (far from the office, so less expensive) at the exchange of a longer commute. I always wanted my own work/office area. And now that we're started returning to the office I applied for (and was granted) fully remote work. However I know that if this is going to become the norm for a lot of other people, apartment layout and demand is going to change.

My wife is also working from home, and we're expecting a baby. We're likely going to buy a new house and one of our specific requirements is going to be two separate offices for both me and her, plus a room for our baby. This kind of stuff wouldn't have likely happened before.

Du no about the US, but covid caused England and Wales prices to increase in rural areas far faster than urban areas

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/20/rural-house-...