State Of Work

Checking in on urbanism vs. remote work

Quick note: Today is the three-year anniversary of the day I first started offering paid subscriptions! April 20, 2021. If you’ve been thinking about going paid, it’s a fun day to hit that button. Thank you for reading!

It’s been awhile since I’ve written here about the whole question of remote work and cities. You may have come across a piece I wrote a couple of years ago, arguing that whatever its effects on cities, remote work might be good for urbanism in general, because remote workers spending more time in their suburban or small-town communities might want or appreciate the amenities that come with density and good placemaking. Or that, at least, lots of people spending their whole day in their community of residence might help a lot of places move beyond the status of bedroom community.

I’ve also seen the argument that remote work is in a certain sense selfish. This often came from the political right, paired with a swipe at the “laptop class” or whatever. But it also comes from some urbanists who fear that suburbs have in many ways benefited from cities over the decades and are now “keeping” workers who bring needed money into the city. Transit agencies need the fare revenue from commuters, lots of businesses cater to the lunch crowd, and—probably most importantly—a commercial real-estate collapse could be a big problem for cities. (Possibly relevant here is the Strong Towns thesis that the advent of suburban development back in the early 20th century basically destroyed the financial viability of cities by cratering their land values.)

I don’t know what I think about the idea that we “owe” cities our commuting or lunch dollars (it took me only a couple of weeks to figure out that it wasn’t worth buying lunch, back when I worked in a downtown office; I brought or skipped lunch almost every day I went in.)

I think my issue with this is that nobody—commercial landlords and tenants, firms, workers/commuters—ever understood themselves to be fulfilling some duty to the city by doing what they did. It was just…what you did. The issue is that once it becomes optional, it takes an extra mental lift to do it. I’ve written about that recently—about how opening up choices and options makes it impossible to do what you used to do unselfconsciously. So “as a resident of the greater metro area you owe something to the city” seems like a post hoc explanation of the downtown office commute that nobody ever really thought about in those terms until it became optional.

(It’s also difficult to unwind this as a practical matter, because some folks who probably would like to go to an office are with companies that downsized or got rid of them entirely, and/or went to “hot desking” or some other innovation that would lead most people to prefer their home office if they’re allowed to.)