Almost all remote-work news is negative now but was positive in the beginning of the pandemic. Have you noticed this or am I going crazy?
Almost all remote-work news is negative now but was positive in the beginning of the pandemic. Have you noticed this or am I going crazy?
Earlier in the pandemic many news and magazine organizations would proudly write about how working from home always actually can lead to over working and being too "productive". I am yet to collect some evidence on it but I think we remember a good amount about this.
Now after a bunch of companies want their remote workers back at the office, every one of those companies are being almost propaganda machines which do not cite sound scientific studies but cite each other and interviews with higher ups in top companies that "remote workers are less productive". This is further cementing the general public's opinion on this matter.
And research that shows the opposite is buried deep within any search results.
Have you noticed this? Please share what you have observed. I'm going paranoid about this.
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It isn't propaganda to look at the real-world ramifications of this.
- The hard drop in commercial real estate is going to end in a lot of big loans going unpaid. Might end in some bank failures.
- The drop in assessed value is going to hit cities hard in the pocket as they depend a lot on these property taxes from commercial properties to pay theirs bills (social programs, subsidized public transportation, police, fire, public housing, roads, etc).
- It will increase sprawl as more people can now live anywhere and push into wilderness areas and we lose more open space.
- A lot of small businesses depend on those dense commercial areas. You'll see more contractors, restaurants, etc having to close and downtowns getting deserted like happened in the 70s as people fled to suburbs.
You see a lot of people saying "just turn them into residences!". It is very difficult and expensive to turn buildings designed as open office spaces into residences.
Well... mabye they shulould have been nice to workers and have normal apartment prices.
I wouldn't call those examples real world, they created their own problem. Real world is worker trying to live semi normal life.
Re: Sprawl. The world is actually rather empty. A lot of changes are going to happen in domino fashion.
Indeed. And work location is still only one of many reasons to prefer city life. Cinemas, grocery stores, bars, stadiums and playgrounds aren't going to instantly spread into our most rural areas.
Good points. Regarding point 2, I think we're going to see cities shift to trying to attract people rather than corporations.
Attracting an employer is now a less reliable way to attract their staff to a community.
I suspect we will soon find that policies that attract great grocery stores into a walkable neighborhoods are more effective for cities than implementing lax corporate tax policies.
But corporations have achieved very difficult things in a very short span that cost very many billions like - pivoted to AI which was very difficult until ChatGPT became popular.