YES! State workers in California are threatening to strike over their right to perform their jobs remotely. Zero solidarity with their union brothers and sisters who are taking care of children, performing inspections, repairing water systems, cleaning up parks, etc. Those remote workers can do their laundry and cook their dinners while on the job; take their dogs on a walk during breaks; and avoid having to dress for work. The privilege is so overwhelming I don't even know how to characterize it.
dark laughter in oil prices forcing remote on Europe and Asian countries
Not all jobs can be remote, but the existence and availability of remote jobs encourage non-remote employers to try to be better considering there is competition.
Not to mention there are cities like Tulsa that use remote work to their advantage in getting new taxpayers; this is in real life and worth studying (along with a couple of places in East Asia and Europe who also pulled this off).
I don’t really get this tension some YIMBYs have with remote work
This isn't really about whether or not remote work is good or not: individuals and companies can best figure that out for themselves, and no doubt it's working very well for many. The problem I'm highlighting is that many cities haven't really figured out how to manage it, particularly when it comes to families.
Tulsa is a great example of a city that appears to have figured it out by building an ecosystem around their program. The incentive program attracted people, the community kept them there. This article does a great job of explaining what Tulsa got right, comparing it to what the author perceives as the failure of Portugal's program (foreigners got a visa, but no community or help integrating): https://goncalohall.substack.com/p/portugal-spent-millions-attracting
Great piece, Ryan! This hits different for me because I've been on every side of this. Started as a grocery store manager, totally place-bound, then moved into corporate retail consulting, which was still in-office. Now I'm remote. And as a shopper, I used to walk the aisles for a living, and now I get everything delivered to my door without a second thought. It's wild how fast you forget what it takes to make that convenience happen once you're on the other side of it.
Thanks, Quy! Yes, I've been on both side of it—including during the pandemic. I was going into the school daily, my husband was 100% remote, but suddenly everything-else-by-delivery became our reality. It was surreal at first.
“We briefly called them “essential workers,” a moment of clarity about interdependence that faded almost as quickly as it appeared.”
“Ahah!” To that. And a wistful chuckle.
The irony that “Place” is a highly sought after dwelling, and also where many can find themselves “stuck” is worthy of an essay I think. It relates somehow to the urban-rural divide but is more than that of course. We are solving for pattern (Wendell Berry) in our lives, or at least attempting to do so.
I observed an extremely niche Covid real estate boom in the mountain towns and hobby ranches of the West- those within reach of at least a mid-size airport. That, and Airbnb greatly increased the difficulty of baristas remaining there to serve them coffee.
Ryan, are you the artist of your Substack drawings? Love the technique.
Thanks, Clark! I think you point to something interesting: place works both ways. For some it represents opportunity, for others, the dearth of it. The pandemic resorting certainly exacerbated things, but many cities (including Austin) were already showing signs of strain before the migration boom.
I use Midjourney and a prompt I've developed to generate a consistent aesthetic across images, while attempting to capture some aspect of the essay theme. It's an iterative process.
Incisive analysis — I’ve restacked this, thank you for writing.
To play devil’s advocate: doesn’t the creation of jobs in more affordable locations help those places — in effect spreading the wealth? Is the net effect of what’s bad for cities actually good for the country? As a former CEO I worked for put it after the pandemic, “the best coffee moved to the suburbs.”
The lack of solidarity or commitment to a place is interesting. Could it be a kind of flex — an exercise in agency — within a demanding work environment? As the partner of a tech worker, I know how intense those workloads can be.
Perhaps the deeper issue is the instability — the flakiness of the setup. If the top 20% drift in and out, cities’ already delicate finances can’t really absorb that.
The choice to opt out of civil society can seem grossly blasé, but maybe it follows naturally from a system that treats people as consumers or labour rather than citizens. Once people are abstracted, place gets abstracted too — especially in a culture so oriented toward optimisation.
Thanks, David—really thoughtful comment, and I appreciate you restacking.
I think you’re right that some of this spreads opportunity geographically. From a metro-area perspective it can look like a wash—or even a gain—but it masks local disparities: the places people move to benefit, while the central city (and especially urban school districts) can be left with a weaker tax base and the same or greater fixed obligations. That’s not just redistribution—it’s fiscal stress, and we’re seeing it pretty clearly here in Austin.
I also agree that at the individual level, mobility is a form of agency, and people are using it. So I’m not saying remote work is bad...my husband and I both work from home in Austin, and I try to stay pretty involved in civic life here. I’m more pointing to the fact that cities haven’t fully internalized how much value that flexibility has for people. The city’s value proposition now has to compete with it.
And while all of this is happening in the context of a long-term decline in civic participation, cities still have to operate within that reality. Right now, a lot of the choices they’re making—especially around affordability—aren’t really helping. If anything, they’re making the underlying pressures worse.
So to me the deeper issue is that instability, and whether cities are really taking that seriously. Thanks again for reading and for the comment!
Great article overall. Re: the gated communities, we have to remember those walls work in both directions. We have broad swaths of America that can be ginned up to be afraid of foreigners because they don't experience them in their day-to-day. They can assume cities are cesspools of violence b/c they don't live in cities (in fact, per capita gun violence is higher in most red states or rural counties than it is in blue cities). They can believe everyone needs a gun to protect themselves because they haven't lived in a city where that isn't necessary at all.
It is the coastal "elites" that experience world travel more, and experience international people more, and get out of their bubbles more. And the sameness of some rural areas is its own bubble - and they don't get out of it nearly as often. That seems like the problem that the rest of us under-estimated and somehow Trump tapped into.
It isn't coastal "elites" - it is people with higher educational attainment and more diverse interactions with people. The guy sitting in Medellin with no interactions with co-workers was much more likely to be radicalized into a Trump supporter than anyone going into an office and socializing with people every day.
Thanks, Scott! No doubt that social isolation breeds contempt! And yes, I agree that what you’re describing has fueled much of the anti-urban bias that has characterized this administration. But that’s why it’s incumbent on cities to get their act together: the rest of the country is not rooting for urban America, and Washington is not coming to save them.
that is very much true - and the irony is that cities have amazing ROI for the investments they need to make. It's shocking really. more density = more people (more sales tax) and more property values (more property tax) and more vibrant city with more jobs and and and... so every lifestyle investment is an investment in building that community and that outcome.
YES! State workers in California are threatening to strike over their right to perform their jobs remotely. Zero solidarity with their union brothers and sisters who are taking care of children, performing inspections, repairing water systems, cleaning up parks, etc. Those remote workers can do their laundry and cook their dinners while on the job; take their dogs on a walk during breaks; and avoid having to dress for work. The privilege is so overwhelming I don't even know how to characterize it.
dark laughter in oil prices forcing remote on Europe and Asian countries
Not all jobs can be remote, but the existence and availability of remote jobs encourage non-remote employers to try to be better considering there is competition.
Not to mention there are cities like Tulsa that use remote work to their advantage in getting new taxpayers; this is in real life and worth studying (along with a couple of places in East Asia and Europe who also pulled this off).
I don’t really get this tension some YIMBYs have with remote work
This isn't really about whether or not remote work is good or not: individuals and companies can best figure that out for themselves, and no doubt it's working very well for many. The problem I'm highlighting is that many cities haven't really figured out how to manage it, particularly when it comes to families.
Tulsa is a great example of a city that appears to have figured it out by building an ecosystem around their program. The incentive program attracted people, the community kept them there. This article does a great job of explaining what Tulsa got right, comparing it to what the author perceives as the failure of Portugal's program (foreigners got a visa, but no community or help integrating): https://goncalohall.substack.com/p/portugal-spent-millions-attracting
Great piece, Ryan! This hits different for me because I've been on every side of this. Started as a grocery store manager, totally place-bound, then moved into corporate retail consulting, which was still in-office. Now I'm remote. And as a shopper, I used to walk the aisles for a living, and now I get everything delivered to my door without a second thought. It's wild how fast you forget what it takes to make that convenience happen once you're on the other side of it.
Thanks, Quy! Yes, I've been on both side of it—including during the pandemic. I was going into the school daily, my husband was 100% remote, but suddenly everything-else-by-delivery became our reality. It was surreal at first.
“We briefly called them “essential workers,” a moment of clarity about interdependence that faded almost as quickly as it appeared.”
“Ahah!” To that. And a wistful chuckle.
The irony that “Place” is a highly sought after dwelling, and also where many can find themselves “stuck” is worthy of an essay I think. It relates somehow to the urban-rural divide but is more than that of course. We are solving for pattern (Wendell Berry) in our lives, or at least attempting to do so.
I observed an extremely niche Covid real estate boom in the mountain towns and hobby ranches of the West- those within reach of at least a mid-size airport. That, and Airbnb greatly increased the difficulty of baristas remaining there to serve them coffee.
Ryan, are you the artist of your Substack drawings? Love the technique.
Thanks, Clark! I think you point to something interesting: place works both ways. For some it represents opportunity, for others, the dearth of it. The pandemic resorting certainly exacerbated things, but many cities (including Austin) were already showing signs of strain before the migration boom.
I use Midjourney and a prompt I've developed to generate a consistent aesthetic across images, while attempting to capture some aspect of the essay theme. It's an iterative process.
Or somewhere in between. Literally. AM Hickman posts up there on his Substack. Rural dreams and realism.
Incisive analysis — I’ve restacked this, thank you for writing.
To play devil’s advocate: doesn’t the creation of jobs in more affordable locations help those places — in effect spreading the wealth? Is the net effect of what’s bad for cities actually good for the country? As a former CEO I worked for put it after the pandemic, “the best coffee moved to the suburbs.”
The lack of solidarity or commitment to a place is interesting. Could it be a kind of flex — an exercise in agency — within a demanding work environment? As the partner of a tech worker, I know how intense those workloads can be.
Perhaps the deeper issue is the instability — the flakiness of the setup. If the top 20% drift in and out, cities’ already delicate finances can’t really absorb that.
The choice to opt out of civil society can seem grossly blasé, but maybe it follows naturally from a system that treats people as consumers or labour rather than citizens. Once people are abstracted, place gets abstracted too — especially in a culture so oriented toward optimisation.
Thanks, David—really thoughtful comment, and I appreciate you restacking.
I think you’re right that some of this spreads opportunity geographically. From a metro-area perspective it can look like a wash—or even a gain—but it masks local disparities: the places people move to benefit, while the central city (and especially urban school districts) can be left with a weaker tax base and the same or greater fixed obligations. That’s not just redistribution—it’s fiscal stress, and we’re seeing it pretty clearly here in Austin.
I also agree that at the individual level, mobility is a form of agency, and people are using it. So I’m not saying remote work is bad...my husband and I both work from home in Austin, and I try to stay pretty involved in civic life here. I’m more pointing to the fact that cities haven’t fully internalized how much value that flexibility has for people. The city’s value proposition now has to compete with it.
And while all of this is happening in the context of a long-term decline in civic participation, cities still have to operate within that reality. Right now, a lot of the choices they’re making—especially around affordability—aren’t really helping. If anything, they’re making the underlying pressures worse.
So to me the deeper issue is that instability, and whether cities are really taking that seriously. Thanks again for reading and for the comment!
Great article overall. Re: the gated communities, we have to remember those walls work in both directions. We have broad swaths of America that can be ginned up to be afraid of foreigners because they don't experience them in their day-to-day. They can assume cities are cesspools of violence b/c they don't live in cities (in fact, per capita gun violence is higher in most red states or rural counties than it is in blue cities). They can believe everyone needs a gun to protect themselves because they haven't lived in a city where that isn't necessary at all.
It is the coastal "elites" that experience world travel more, and experience international people more, and get out of their bubbles more. And the sameness of some rural areas is its own bubble - and they don't get out of it nearly as often. That seems like the problem that the rest of us under-estimated and somehow Trump tapped into.
It isn't coastal "elites" - it is people with higher educational attainment and more diverse interactions with people. The guy sitting in Medellin with no interactions with co-workers was much more likely to be radicalized into a Trump supporter than anyone going into an office and socializing with people every day.
Thanks, Scott! No doubt that social isolation breeds contempt! And yes, I agree that what you’re describing has fueled much of the anti-urban bias that has characterized this administration. But that’s why it’s incumbent on cities to get their act together: the rest of the country is not rooting for urban America, and Washington is not coming to save them.
that is very much true - and the irony is that cities have amazing ROI for the investments they need to make. It's shocking really. more density = more people (more sales tax) and more property values (more property tax) and more vibrant city with more jobs and and and... so every lifestyle investment is an investment in building that community and that outcome.
Well said. Essential workers are precisely that—essential.