We have made an enormous shift in that direction post-COVID and it turns out that: [drumroll] people still largely prefer to live in cities when financially viable. The price tag of cities is itself evidence of this. San Francisco isn’t expensive in a vacuum. If there wasn’t demand for housing at these prices, they would fall. And yet people continue to willingly pay an enormous premium for the privilege of living here.

I can walk across the street to get my groceries. I have at least fifty restaurants within walking distance. My doctor is four blocks away and a large hospital is six. I have access to a large park three blocks away.

There is a streetcar that goes straight downtown one block away and three buses that go throughout the city are right at the end of my block. I can bike to virtually anywhere I want to go if walking is too far or transit is annoying.

And all of this keeps us healthy. It’s no secret that obesity is approaching near universality in areas of the country where driving is the only option to reach basic amenities. It also correlates with reduced energy use and therefore to reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Making cities cheaper goes a lot further than trying to make cheap but fundamentally broken suburbs and exurbs less miserable. And part of that is precisely what this article highlights: the rentier class siphoning away the profits of workers while providing little to no value themselves. And I say this as a homeowner (and therefore landowner) myself.

> Give people the option to work remotely and they can live wherever they want, and that is not in crowded expensive cities most of the time.

COVID dramatically increased the opportunities for remote work. Yet housing prices in major cities went up, not down.

Anecdotally, my friends who moved during COVID remote work all moved to cities they wanted to live in. I knew more people leaving mid-sized towns to move to Seattle, NYC, and the Bay Area than the opposite.

There’s a lot more to life than a job. Most jobs can’t be done remotely. How do you convince a barista to move to New Billings? Is there anything to do there after work?

There is a lot to do there, but it might not to be to your liking. If you don't like guns the fact that you can safely shoot off your deck is f no value. Meanwhile you get one musical in town per year and they expect you to be in it (that is not very high quality).

That's part of it, yes. But some areas can be more desirable for other reasons, too.

It'd be better overall for society if we just got rid of exclusionary zoning and made it easier for people to live where they wanna live.

i work remote and i live in an expensive city. why? because I was raised here and have many friends and there is much cultural events going on. work aint everything

Even with remote work, it may still be beneficial to live in or near a large metro area. From an American point of view, large metro areas generally offer many amenities such as a variety of cultural events (concerts, exhibits, festivals), a variety of shops and restaurants, international airports, a populace that is diverse and is more accepting of people from diverse backgrounds, expanded opportunities for education, and much more. Even if one chooses not to live in the Bay Area or New York City due to housing costs, there are still other desirable metro areas in the United States that offer these amenities and have lower (though definitely not low) housing costs. To add, if one could afford the housing costs of the Bay Area and New York City, there are many reasons to live in those places.