I stayed in my city and don't plan to leave. I'm not the only one, by far.

Most office workers didn’t have a choice before. The jobs are in the city. A handful of software companies were fully remote but most businesses are still stuck in the industrial model of work

It really is so outdated, this commitment where you spend 40 hours a week at your machine on the assembly line, pulling the right levers to produce products to sell. Some knowledge workers really are spending 90+ hours thinking about the various problems the company has and how to fix them. Of course some are lazy and just play politics to get ahead/avoid the axe. It's all so nebulous understanding who actually provides the value, at least when you have a 10000 foot view of the organization.

Luckily, the economy has companies of all shapes and sizes. So if the (supposed?) overhead of office politics gets too large at big organisations, they can be outcompeted by nimbler outfits.

If existing laws and regulations allow competition, that is. Some sectors are severely locked down.

People who live in cities are not a uniform hive mind. Some people left but the vast majority stayed.

"People who live in cities are not a uniform hive mind"

We need more of this! It seems so much of our public discourse is worsened by putting people and their opinions into firm groups, then assuming that anything anyone in that group ever says is a core believe of that group and then vilifying the group for that believe.

Is that "mass exodus" really that sticky though? At least in NYC, rents are back up above what they were pre-pandemic. Nobody I know can find an apartment.

NYC’s population is still below pre pandemic levels. . Exorbitant rent prices there are due to multiple factors, but population increase is not one of them: https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/8/4/23819420/why-is-nyc-rent-so....

Yes but this is not really exodus. What happened at the onset of COVID was that the domestic migration out of coastal megacities continued apace, and the international migration into coastal cities abruptly stopped. You have to look at both flows to understand the population process.

Isn't not being able to find an apartment more of a function of rent control than anything else?

In eg Singapore rents are also up, but finding an apartment is just as easy (or hard) as ever. You just have to pay up.

Every clause of your post is false. There was not a mass exodus from cities during COVID.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/12/16/in-2020-f...

Urban people do not look down on rural people. It’s the opposite. Rural people are the most likely to hold negative opinions about people who live in other situations, and urban dwellers are the least likely.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/how-peo...

I appreciate the data! However on the second point, I will note that I don't know of any term used recently by rural communities to describe urban dwelling. City Slickers being the only term that I know but have never heard or seen written in news.

"Flyover Country" is thrown about often however. Especially around election time and regarding how they are controlling to much of the country's politics.

I'm not sure it's proper to conflate flyover vs. coastal states with rural vs. urban. Even the middle-most states of the continent are majority urban dwellers. Most people in Kansas live in either KC or Wichita. The only state that is really majority rural is Vermont.

I disagree.

1. Those who express disparaging remarks towards others do not need to utilize a specific term.

2. A common narrative is that urban environments/cities are mismanaged, possess dangerous amounts of crime, and filled of corrupt politicians.

3. "Flyover Country", in a political context, is generally a complaint about the structure of representation.

Flyover country just alludes to the reality that people from the coasts don't go to places like Kansas for vacation or really much reason at all.

"coastal elite" I guess. The entire trumpist movement is built on the back of negative feelings toward urban dwellers.

That second source doesn't support what you said at all. I think you need to reread it. The conclusion I'm getting from it is that people, regardless of where they are from generally think the same about people from other areas. They assume they are able to understand other's situations but don't think others are able to understand theirs's.

The contempt rural people have for urban dwellers is palpable if you ever spend any substantial time with them. God forbid if you’re from California cause then you might as well be Satan’s spawn come to harvest their children for adrenochrome.

In cities, not one single person has ever felt the need to stop their vehicle, roll down their window, and shout a homophobic epithet at me. Outside of cities, this seems to happen regularly.

When a rural person comes to town, do the local urban people take a moment to shout something derogatory at them? If that happens I have never seen it.

Somehow I constantly see rural fans bashing cities and city people for no reason in contexts unrelated to any of that ... while rarely the opposite. I do prefer to live in a city and would not want to live in rural place, yep, mostly due to proximity to things. Both pre and post covid.

I live in the city, 20 minute bus to office location. Love the city, urbanism, density.

I'm one of the ardent never-RTO crowd, leaving a 9 year tenure.

It's kind of funny to me that rural people are so dependent on a international system of gas/diesel production that they can be priced out of being able to get food without significant Federal Govt intervention during price shocks

Don’t forget the water subsidies and the fact that many are living on land that their family got for free through homestead acts if they’ve had “the farm” in the family for a few generations. Talk about government handouts.

I live in a city and I want to work from home. I'd never want to live in a rural area, the benefits or urban life are orthogonal to my career.

Some people like living in cities, some people like rural living.

If we let the people who like to live in cities bunch up closer together (by legalising more density there), the rest of us have more space in the rest of the country. It's a win-win situation.