My totally subjective priors about remote work
While I do have a physical office location in downtown Chicago and generally prefer to work from it, I have always collaborated with people from multiple other states on a daily basis as part of my job, and as such, working from home doesn’t do all that much to disrupt my day-to-day. Providing employees with flexibility is generally a good thing for employers to do, and being able to live wherever you want is great and it makes it easier to balance one’s work and personal life. So in a vaccum, I really have nothing against the concept of remote work, and think it’s a nice benefit.
However, nothing really occurs “in a vaccuum”, and I do think that given the extremely anti-urban culture of the United States, and the key role that jobs-rich Central Business Districts play in holding major metros together, a widespread move towards remote work would probably be pretty bad for American cities and climate policy. But most of the takes I’ve seen from fellow YUMBOs seem to be relatively dismissive of this threat, with lots of hand-waving and vague references to “agglomeration”. So I’d like to lay out my baseline priors on this subject, and explain why I think urbanists should be at least moderately concerned about it.
In a sense, remote work is the ultimate “Agglomeration Economy”
By far the most common explanation I’ve seen from urbanists that aren’t concerned about remote work is the (correct) assertion that employers want the “agglomeration effects” that come from having an office in a large metro with lots of specialized talent.
But here’s the thing: in a sense, going fully (or mostly) remote gives employers access to the ultimate agglomeration economy: the entire world (or at least the entire country). If you can recruit employees without any regard to geographic location, there’s no restriction on your ability to attract talent. Meanwhile, only being able to recruit people who want to live in the NYC or San Francisco Bay area is a restriction on your talent pool, even though it’s a smaller restriction than recruiting from Indianapolis or Cincinnati.
The idea that “we don’t care where you live, we just want the best people” is something I can see appealing to a lot of employers, particularly in tech.
At least one government agency is actively pushing the long-term adoption of remote work
Last week, the Bay Area’s Transportation Commission declared that remote work is a viable tool to fight climate change, and large companies should be *mandated* to implement WFH at least 3 days a week.
It’s hard to put into words how moronic this is, especially for a region that has a meaningful amount of extant transit infrastructure and tons of residents with low-carbon commutes. There is no good reason to restrict walking, biking, or taking transit to the office, and to even think about doing so is purely a product of the deranged obsession Bay Area politicians have with owning the techies and pleasing retirees.
While I don’t expect other US metros to be quite as smooth-brained as the Bay Area, it should be a wake-up call to urbanists to see a government agency not only fail to defend the economic importance of its CBDs, but actively undermine it.
Many tech companies seem eager to adopt expanded WFH policies in the long-term
WFH was already decently common among tech companies pre-pandemic, and many tech companies have already expressed an intent to have a much larger WFH focus moving forward. This is unsurprising, and should be expected to continue to some degree.
More traditional white collar fields like say, Finance, seem less likely to embrace long-term WFH. And indeed, we already see many firms on Wall Street returning to offices despite thousands of daily new Coronavirus cases in the US, something that basically no prominent tech company has done.
The reasons for this bifurcation are mostly cultural: tech companies are more willing to try new things, and they care a ton about “recruiting the best talent” and competing with other tech companies i.e. employee perks and flexibility. Older fields are more resistant to change.
Younger employees will be less enthusiatic about WFH, all else held equal
By far the biggest challenge my company has had in adjusting to company-wide WFH is running our summer internship program and onboarding fresh college grads. Younger employees benefit from in-person mentorship from experienced employees, they benefit from in-person interaction with each other, and they enjoy the social aspects of the office. In general, more experienced employees are more capable of being productive remotely.
Because of this dichotomy, I could see a lot of companies expanding WFH opportunities for experienced employees, but continuing to require early-career employees to be primarily based out of a physical office. And just like “Tech companies adopt more WFH, finance companies don’t”, this would represent a speeding up of pre-pandemic patterns, not a change in direction.
Extremely widespread WFH would probably be disastrous for our cities
While I think there’s plenty of question as to how likely it is that a large chunk of the American economy will become primarily remote moving forward, I believe it’s virtually certain that if something like say, 50% of the jobs that were being peformed remotely in Spring 2020 stay remote long-term, it would be an absolute disaster for the future of climate and urban policy in America.
Jobs-rich CBDs drive transit ridership and entice people who could buy McMansions in the suburbs to instead live in the urban core for shorter commutes. When someone switches from working in a downtown office to primarily working from home, we can expect two primary changes to their housing preferences:
- Desired square footage rises to accomodate the need for home office space
- With commute times no longer a factor, there is less incentive to live in or even near the urban core
We can presume that this would have two primary effects on the housing dynamics of a given metro:
- Many people who previously lived in the urban core, sacrificing square footage in exchange for a shorter commute, will move out to the suburbs for a larger home
- Many people who prefer an exurban or rural enviornment, but had been living in an inner-ring suburb to give themselves a reasonable commute, will now move even further from the urban core
Note that in “Rust Belt” metros I would expect to see mostly surburbs-to-exurbs movement, mostly just because very few white collar workers live in the urban cores of these metros to begin with. Meanwhile, in “Superstar” metros I would expect to see lots of core-to-suburbs movement, since a lot of white collar workers currently do live in the urban core of these metros, and pay a lot of money to do so.
What about inter-metro moves?
In additon to movement from the core to the suburbs and from the suburbs to the exurbs, there would probably be a significant amount of inter-metro moves caused by WFH. The two biggest patterns I would expect are:
- A net migration from more expensive metros to cheaper metros. This is mostly bad, because most US metros with decent transit are expensive (notable exceptions: Chicago, Philadelphia).
- A net migration from places with lots of jobs but poor weather / geographic attractions to places with few jobs but good weather / geographic attractions. Again, this is mostly bad a thing, with people moving to places like Montana and Florida that have mountains or beaches, but not a lot of transit.
The ratio of intra-metro moves to inter-metro moves would primarily be driven by whether companies tend to adopt an “all-remote” strategy or a “mostly-remote” strategy (like “everyone comes into the office on Wednesdays only”). If more people end up working under “mostly remote” policies, you’d expect to see more of the intra-metro shifts (like moving from NYC to New Jersey), whereas if more workers become~100% remote, you’d expect to see more inter-metro shifts (like moving from the Bay Area to Montana).
WFH is not a Climate Change Solution
Claims that WFH will save us from Climate Change are similar to claims that autonomous electric cars will save us from Climate Change — they’re half baked theories that ignore second-order effects, born out of a desire to believe that we can sufficiently lower our carbon emissions without changing the fundamental lifestyle of a single family home for each household and a car for each adult.
In metros where transit use is already incredibly low (i.e. Indianapolis or Kansas City), it’s possible that modest carbon reductions could be had from widespread WFH, but that’s mainly because these metros are operating from an atrocious baseline level that’s 6 times where it needs to be. What these metros need is a total transformation of the way they live, and WFH is not going to be conducive to such a transformation.
Meanwhile, in metros like NYC that currently have large urban cores with high transit use and low per-capita carbon emissions, the upshot of remote work and the corresponding shift in housing preferences would be larger homes (which require more energy to heat and cool), less transit ridership, and an increase in overall vehicle miles traveled, inspite of a reduction in commute vehicle miles traveled.
There are no non-drastic climate change solutions
The pathway to reaching 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year revolves around most major metros following these steps:
- Get more people to live in the extant urban core, where emissions are not that far from target levels.
- Extend the extant urban core by densifying housing and improving transit service on the edge of the current urban core.
- Rinse and repeat, until most people in the metro area live in a “green” area rather than a yellow, red or purple one
We need people to want to live in cities
Jobs are not the only reason that people live in cities. If I become a remote worker long-term, my instinct will probably be to move to New York City. But polling suggests that the share of Americans that currently live in large cities is greater than the share that want to, and the primary reason for this is jobs and agglomeration. If remote work is going to become much more common in America (which may or may not happen), the only solution is to make cities places that most people want to live, regardless of the job market.
We need to build more housing in cities with good transit, so people don’t have to pay sky-high rents to live free from car dependency. Likewise, we need a carbon tax and dividend to make it expensive to live the traditional middle-class suburban lifestyle, while putting money in the pockets of poor urban families with low carbon footprints. We need federal gun control and economic reforms like universal health care to reduce poverty and violence across America, and thus make Americans less scared to live near lots of other people. And we need a massive investment in public transit in all cities, so that it’s not horribly inconvenient to sacrifice car ownership.
Note that these aren’t new ideas: they’re the same policies we should be pursuing regardless of the future of remote work. Ultimately, urbanism is about making cities good places that people want to live in, and making non-city dwellers actually pay for the externalities they inflict upon others. That’s all there is to it. The difficulty is conjuring up the political will to do so in one of the most anti-urban countries in the world.
Note: To read more on the carbon footprint differences within and between metros, see this awesome paper.
