But housing, transportation, daycare costs make that impractical. If they really want me in the office, companies need to engage on these issues in the metros they live in. They need to clear NIMBY barriers to urban housing, support transit, and good parental leave.
It's rent, the answer is almost always rent. Its my rent, its my child-care workers rent, it my kids school-teachers rent. It's always rent.
And the people working in those places provided the customer base for local and regional financial services, along with the rest of the commercial base that made small towns and provincial cities good places to live and raise a family throughout the 20th century.
And of course, a household only needed one person employed, so there was less pressure to move to a bigger city that could provide opportunities for two different careers.
The chaos and noise (especially the car noise) are just an explicit choice American cities have made.
I really hope you get the irony of being a suburbanite complaining about there being too many cars in cities when most of those cars are suburbanites who’ve given up on improving the public transit in their cities.
I live ~20 minutes away from my job and you eventually get tired of that, too. Car maintenance, bad weather, bad drivers, etc. grind you down little by little everyday.
Sometimes I just want to be at home to do deep thinking without anyone bothering me.
Sometimes the weather makes it so I don't leave the house.
Just let me decide where I work from.
I think the thing people miss about RTO is that management are more likely to be extroverted. They’re the kind of people who thrive on being surrounded by people. I don’t think RTO is as nefarious as people here make out - it’s just extroverts wanting to mold the workplace to for them.
That makes them bad managers, but not necessarily bad people.
But what if they can't? The options aren't great:
1. One of them takes a hit on their career for the benefit of the other.
2. Both move to an area with OK-ish jobs for both, sharing the sacrifice.
3. Both take optimal jobs wherever they are and move into a long distance relationship.
With kids in the mix, it becomes even harder, you might want to be around family to have a support network etc.
RTO mandates generally seem pretty tone deaf about this aspect.
Regressive attitudes tend to not come alone.
(That being said, this isn't an excuse to be an absentee, deadbeat dad. Traditionally, most people lived in villages, living agrarian lives. Family life was much more involved. That meant both parents were generally present throughout the day. And with age, the fatherly role becomes increasingly important for development. The strict division of mom-in-suburban-home/dad-away-at-urban-office is hardly traditional or representative of historical realities.)
Not on all dimensions, of course. People with kids e.g. will have to find a solution for who gets to work how much, it's a similar conflict WFH addresses partly at best.
Doctors can find a clinic to work at nearly anywhere. If their partner needs to move they can go with.
If both can WFH, they can even choose the place they want to live in regardless of where their optimal employment options are based.
I enjoy sitting on the tram/bus, reading a book and getting into the "work time now" mindset. Having half an hour to relax, look at the scenery, the people, and so on, is always nice.
> getting into the "work time now" mindset
This is actually the reason I never liked WFH. I don't want to be in the work mindset at home, it degrades my ability to relax at home.
Commute "distance" is definitely measured in minutes and not kilometers.
Mass Transit will never, ever, ever work in rural areas where houses are 2-5 miles apart from each other. It would barely work in suburbs, and only certain kinds like bus transit. You're never going to get a subway to work in the suburbs. Mass Transit is great for cities though, we should be building more of it.
But then again I balance that by claiming some rebates for using my home office, now and again.
This is a really good point. At one point in my career I lived close enough to the office that I could ride my bike to work. It was actually pretty nice to work that close to home and I didn't really mind going into the office.
Hiring by catchment area does seem very appealing for anyone - neither the companies nor the candidates.
In this new, for me, city, Boston, it's quite hard to build housing for reasons that seem to only favor those in existing houses.
An urban city can be or have an industrial hub. By industrial I don't necessarily mean manufacture.
> Urban cities tend to have more than one employer too
They can also have those employers at a couple hours commute (not walking) from each other. That helps my point, not hinders it.
> there were maybe a dozen or so companies that were hiring devs where I lived
Assuming those were all within 15 minutes walking distance, then it would qualify as the kind of industrial hub I mentioned - although a dozen or so may not be good enough for an employee to shop around and get good deals.
> now after moving there are around 800 companies that hire devs
Again, within 15 min walk of each other? I find that hard to believe, but assuming so, that is an industrial hub.
And that was a few years ago now, that option no longer exists; I might be able to get an apartment if I pay 2x as much as what I did for my house.
In fact, I've never actually commuted into the city for a job, it's always been suburb to suburb commutes - part of the problem there has been it's not worth moving for a job that lasts on average 3-5 years.
But in my line of work I'm often put next to people from all over the country, and / or on assignments where most the employees already do live close.
I did get a job close to home once, but one, the job was a bit bleh, and two, the pandemic started three months in so we were all asked to work from home for the next 2+ years.
Furthermore, there's a vicious cycle that keeps cities at a disadvantage, to a large part driven by the parasitic nature of suburbs themselves. Suburbs are financially completely unsustainable. Tax revenue doesn't come close to paying for the maintenance of suburban roads, infrastructure, and utilities. They survive by draining state and federal money, which itself is disproportionately drawn from urban centers where economic activity is highest. This takes money away from cities that should be reinvested back into cities.
One thing we should do is tax municipal bonds. There are other ways in which suburbs are actively and artificially propped up, of course. The point is that the suburbs has always been a Frankenstein on life support that's been bleeding cities.
So I think one way to address the suburb is to attack the parasitic dimension. By forcing suburbs to pay their own way, no one can be accused of robbing suburbs; it would incriminate the suburbs and call out their hypocrisy. It would also strike at the heart of the "adulthood" and "manhood" artificially bound up with owning a house in the suburbs. How adult and how masculine is it to mooch off of others to maintain the suburban lifestyle?
This would then fortify the urbs and also push back on the stupidity of the housing market in cities, the poor land use in many of them, as well as bad public transportation.
Sorry, no, I'm not going to raise my family of six plus a dog in a high rise. Encouraging happy, productive families by subsidizing suburbs is good.
You're not thinking systematically. Increased demand isn't the only variable. Consider also how gov't and the market respond to increased demand and need, especially if the paradigm of normative human settlement changes. Social pressure forces changes. Diffusing pressure allows gov'ts to kick the can down the road, which is what led to the suburban debacle.
> I'm not going to raise my family of six plus a dog in a high rise.
Where did I say you must live in a high rise? Urban development isn't limited to high rises. Small towns and cities exist, yes? It's a question of density and particular patterns of urban planning that enable a healthy social environment. Traditional urban planning did a far better job of that than the suburb.
And btw, what's the problem having a large family in a high rise? Living in a high rise actually reduces the maintenance costs (both in terms of time and money). Owning a suburban house comes with more overhead. In well-designed cities, there is ample green space. In a landscape dotted with cities, you are also within reach of more expansive natural landscapes that haven't been spoiled, scarred, and deformed by sprawling suburbs.
> Encouraging happy, productive families by subsidizing suburbs is good.
I assure you: the suburb is neither good for families nor productive. They are extraordinarily wasteful. Children are shackled and isolated at home, because getting anywhere requires driving. Parents are then burdened with the task of driving their children everywhere or making arrangements. You can't do or buy anything without driving. People waste countless hours commuting. And as I already wrote, it is very expensive to maintain suburban utilities. It takes a lot more energy to keep the suburban machine running. Suburbs are basically on gov't welfare funded by city tax payers.
This naturally comes off as entitled: entitled not to live in a high rise (which, as I said, is not necessarily entailed by the word "city", so rather moot) and entitled to subsidies that drain resources from cities. Why don't suburbs pay for the luxury of their own existence? Funding them is not a matter of the common good, nor is it charity. It's exploitation of others to satisfy a private fetish and fantasy, one that incidentally harms the common good.
I encourage you to visit Strong Towns[0]. There's plenty of material there that targets a popular audience that covers this subject. You might find these ideas less threatening than the urban boogeyman of your mind.
The government already isn't effectively responding to increased demand and need, so I really disagree that making the problem worse will overall help anything. That is basically accelerationism.
The rest of your post I disagree with from value-based first principles, e.g. "children are shackled and isolated" and "you can't do...anything without driving", as though the only things for children to do in the world are shop and consume in an urban center, so there is no point discussing it.