Fair point if WFH is and remains the primary means of working.
On the other hand, if we believe the offices have value, as in people working together in one place has value, having offices in centralized locations because it is more of a known quantity for commuting.
Once you settle down roots, you don't want to have to upend your life if you lose your job or just want to find another job. And from the perspective of the company, you have more of a talent pool because you can recruit from all the other companies in the area with the benefit of not asking someone to move or change their routines.
I am in the camp of believing there being some benefit to people coming together to work on projects. Maybe not 5 days a week, but even if it is hybrid or occasional, there is still benefit for me to be central. I have worked 5 different jobs within 2 mile of each other and have never had to reconsider locations or commutes. I also benefit from being able to get lunch/drinks with old coworkers, attend impromptu 'meetups' and still make it home for dinner with my family because I can walk everywhere.
From a city planning point of view, there is a network effect to cities. Businesses move to cities because that is where there are services. Services are built because there is economy of scale to density.
Decentralized office locations means less density which means public transportation makes less sense, and dense services make less sense. Then you end up with Los Angeles (and Orange County). Which has lots of scattered office parks with little to nothing to do around them and that are only accessible by cars.
This is all a very American point of view. If instead we looked at European cities that were not built around cars and have good trains even for small hamlets, then absolutely, decentralized offices would make sense to me. It would satisfy my main concern of reliable transportation and ease of finding new jobs/networking.
So with many US city planning problems, the issue is our car centric culture.
So first of all, I don't want to get stuck in a home office. I want to share an office with my coworkers and engage in normal human social behavior during the workday. A coworking space does not appeal to me either: I'm not comfortable spending my workday around strangers who appear and disappear every few weeks.
That's all fair enough. Everyone is going to have their own preferences for something like this. But why should the office be located in a hard-to-reach central area at all, if most or all of its staff live somewhere else?
But besides that, I think that work is only one part of the equation. There are other reasons why people live in big cities. I grew up in a German city with 100k inhabitants, and there was basically nothing I could do after 8PM once shops had closed.
Again, that's a fair point. I did acknowledge that there would always be a need for some facilities to be located more centrally and serve a wider area. Anyone wanting to use those facilities will also benefit if there are fewer unnecessary journeys competing for space with their private vehicles or overcrowding public transport, though.
That's not to say that everyone wants to live, or should want to live, in a big city. But it's not a good idea to force everyone to live in small communities either.
I agree, and this is the point I was trying to make in my final paragraph before. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
The problem, IMHO, isn't having large cities. Many people prefer to have less personal living space but be nearer to a wider range of facilities, much as you described yourself. The problem, IMHO, is the design of many large cities today where there is a central area with most of the places people want to go, surrounded by suburbs with most of the places where people live.
The geometry of such a design prevents it scaling well. As the city grows, the residential area spreads outwards. This means more people live further from the area with the services. Typically, the area available for the services also can't grow proportionately, creating a problem of where to put enough new services to meet the needs of the growing population.
A less centralised design based on clusters that each combine residential accommodation, basic services for the local population, and possibly some sort of business district, has much more ability to grow without separating large numbers of people from their everyday needs, even if you then position large numbers of such clusters close together, introduce additional areas among the clusters for more specialised facilities, and form a big city.
Businesses are concentrated in city centers because that's where the people (i.e. potential employees) are. Even better, there is a robust market for both employees and employers, meaning people are not stuck in an area where only one company exists and everyone living in a 20 miles radius is not either a coworker or someone working a service industry job that gets half of its revenue from people working at your one available office employer. I don't think it would do much for ones quality of life to have to move every time one changes jobs.
I get where you’re coming from here, but outside of a few major metro areas most people are spread around, which is precisely the problem. Driving 20 miles (or 30 minutes) to your place of work is not clustering and is causing us all sorts of economic problems. Just Wednesday my dental hygienist told me she drives around an hour to get to the office. That’s an anecdote of course, but that’s a normal thing for Americans. That’s a huge problem.
To your point about big single offices where all of these workers are “in the city” which mostly are spread out suburban office parks, I would agree, which is why we need less sprawl and more people living closer together and clustering around the cities that they are residing in.
Your argument is basically sound, but IMO based on a wrong starting point.
> Our starting position is that a lot of employment is very centralised in big cities or industrial areas, sometimes for historical reasons that aren't necessarily as relevant today.
So first of all, I don't want to get stuck in a home office. I want to share an office with my coworkers and engage in normal human social behavior during the workday. A coworking space does not appeal to me either: I'm not comfortable spending my workday around strangers who appear and disappear every few weeks.
But besides that, I think that work is only one part of the equation. There are other reasons why people live in big cities. I grew up in a German city with 100k inhabitants, and there was basically nothing I could do after 8PM once shops had closed. I now live in a larger city where there is a lot of stuff going on everyday in some place (tech meetups, concerts, etc.). You just don't have that in a village or small city.
Another, smaller thing: I have some chronic ailments, so it's convenient to be living in a large city with a good coverage of specialist doctors and hospitals. A small city (say, 10k inhabitants) will have a couple GPs and probably an ophthalmologist, but will likely lack more niche specialists.
There are more reasons. That's not to say that everyone wants to live, or should want to live, in a big city. But it's not a good idea to force everyone to live in small communities either.
I think it's more that residential areas are 1hr+ commutes from offices/downtowns. You could build an office next to a residential area, and some do, but many of the job applicants will be in a different residential area -- often even in a different city. Suburban sprawl, y'all.
You could have smaller offices in different neighborhoods, but there's usually not enough people in any given suburban area to justify an office. Co-working spaces are one compromise but larger companies dislike them for security/secrecy reasons.
I would also add that many people have reasons for not moving closer to work even if they could. Also people are no longer working for decades at the same job, and moving is a hassle if you're changing jobs every few years.
The article argues for telecommuting to reduce commutes. I think a far less radical approach would be to open multiple offices and put teams in more affordable secondary cities. Modern technology has made it pretty easy to spread your organization across multiple offices. I work at an organization of less than 35 people that has offices in three cities. Outsourcing IT/HR/building administration makes it pretty low-cost to have additional offices, to the point where it might actually be cheaper when you weigh the fixed overhead of each location against the cheaper office space outside NYC/SF.
I live in Baltimore now, and before that in Wilmington, and I'm astonished that more companies don't have offices in those cities. Both cities have a lot less traffic than D.C. and Philadelphia, respectively, and are well-served by rail. I'd imagine there would be a lot of talented people who would sign up at offices in those cities so long as they weren't backoffice locations and they could still do frontline work.
E.g. I live in a European city with awesome public transport - it's comfortable, cheap, precise, frequent, fast and goes everywhere. I totally enjoy this but this provokes 2 thoughts:
What if I move to the US occasionally (for some years at least) - will I be forced to drive a car because public transport is bad, expensive and doesn't go everywhere there? I doubt I'm going to be able to afford (or even like) living near the office in a city centre. This frightens me.
Despite the public transport is amazing at my location and you can even get to a neighboring town quickly, comfortably and at no additional cost (unlimited public transport subscription card is cheap and covers heavy rail together with light rail, subway, buses and even ferries), businesses still concentrate near the center (not even in alternative districts of the city) of the capital and the only businesses you can find in neighbouring towns are e-shop + very small businesses providing essential services to the locals. No IT companies of any kind (but above mentioned small e-shops and small hardware stores) or anything like that. Why? If I were a full time developer I'd love to live in such a town and work in an office there (in fact I used to live there but the office still was in the megapolis center, thanks to the trains it wasn't a problem), needless to say office rent is a way cheaper there. Why does this phenomenon take place and how might we stimulate geographic dispersion of businesses? Set particularly low taxes where we want them to move perhaps?
When the IT boom was beginning about 15 years ago I thought IT companies are going to build developer campuses, call centers etc in cheaper towns because this can save tons of money while IT workers can work anywhere thanks to the Internet (and, thanks to the great public transport system, they still can get anywhere quickly once they need to attain some kind of event). But, as we can see now, this is not the case.
There is no middle ground -- WFH is self-reinforcing trend, because offices are much less useful when they are half-empty and all processes have go online. As soon as some coworkers move, others follow. If people start working 2-3 days at home ... they start to think about moving somewhere better. I wonder what is the endgame of this rearrangement? Perhaps nomadism will become common? But in that case, cities will lose even more cohesion than they ve lost so far. If we take away the work factor, the question "where do i/my family live" becomes much more open-ended. Obvious choice #1 is near extended family. What else motivates people to move?
Decentralization of office work will have effects that ripple out for decades to come. There's nothing inherently superior to urban, suburban, or rural living. Everything is a tradeoff. We'd all be better off if more costs of infrastructure were more directly connected to those utilizing them.
I agree, but I don't think the problem is so much "the office", but rather how poorly cities are designed in the USA;
- The lack of mixed use zoning makes it just that much more likely that one live so far from their workplace. The choice is too often "a house far away from everything" or "a high-rise close to the noise, smells, and un-pretty sights of town"
- There's so little space to build offices cities end up having super-dense downtowns, with very tall, expensive and crowded buildings. This is great for office real-estate, but terrible for everyone else because it means traffic. Since cities tend to have only one mega-downtown, cause zoning in the USA is pretty adamant in grouping everything together, things get even worse, because everyone is moving in the same direction at the same time.
- This hyper-dense core, but hyper-sparse suburb outskirts in cities make it very hard to bike to work; many people in the USA wouldn't even consider it an option. It's also hard to build efficient public transit. The routes that make sense are radial, so they might be good to get to work, but inefficient for leisure. Things are so far apart in the suburbs one it's hard to put stations close to everyone where they live.
The fact so many people prefer to not leave their home for work should be considered a moderate victory for remote communication technology, but an abysmal failure in urban design.
The main argument--and really the only significant one--is that people choosing to live in dense cities near an urban employer suddenly need a bigger place which is $$$. But I don't actually expect many employers to not have an urban office (assuming they have one currently) for those who want to come in--albeit maybe in a hoteled type of arrangement. But eliminating routine commutes is a big win for most people who choose to take advantage of it.
If the city is ringed by suburbs, being in the city center gives you access to potential employees from all the suburbs, not just the nearest ones. As well as employees who would prefer to take transit to work rather than drive (a growing demographic). Plus if you're trying to attract younger employees, they'd generally prefer to work somewhere that's convenient to the same places that are convenient to their friends' offices and close to bustling after-hours businesses. They want to meet friends after work, and would rather travel 15 min within the city rather than 40 min back to the city or in a ring around the city in order to do that.
The problem, though, is that the density outside of cities doesn't exist to support the talent pool required for a large office of a major multinational corporation. By the time you've added enough people to have a sustainable population for the highest tier of a given industry -- which includes multiple alternative employers plus the whole attendant service industry -- you end up with a city.
Of course I accept that not everyone wants to live in a city. The point is, though, that you have to make serious sacrifices if that's your first priority -- you need to either accept a long miserable commute, or acknowledge that you're limiting your ability to grow into the top tier of your chosen profession. Cities have very real beneficial network effects for businesses.
Is density or the huge highway required? We're commuting to a huge number of white collar jobs completely unnecessarily. Move information, not people.
So much property value is tied up in this assumption we need to be close to jobs to work and it's all a lie. Many of the jobs that do require an in-person presence are only located where they're located because the assumption is the jobs need to be there to serve the workers who don't need to be there in the first place. I don't think any part of how we're making cities actually makes sense, because they're designed for the world of 2020, and not the world of 2030.
People have this mindset that's outmoded, they think about how to get the workers into offices. The thought now should be how to get goods and services to the workers.
The theory goes that these high-density population centres have higher productivity, for a couple of reasons:
- "Truer" competition -- distance is an artificial barrier that reduces employees' access to jobs and reduces employers' access to job candidates. It also reduces companies' access to each other.
- More cross-pollination as people a free to move jobs more often and (in theory) have more interactions with other companies.
There are no doubt some downsides to concentrating all of your nation's business in one place, and things like telecommuting and fast public transport will have the effect of bringing people closer together without straining infrastructure as much, but there's really no alternative to density.
I could have worked fully remotely in the past 3 years, but I choose to live in a big city and only work from half the time. There are way more things to do in the city than just work. Cinemas, restaurants, museums, stores. Everything in cycling distance. It's easier to network, find people with mutual interests. All these things won't work without the economy of scale.
What it can bring is lower average house prices cities and gentrification of neighborhoods farther away from the city center. People could move farther from the city center because they don't have to commute to work every day. (This is EU specific)
It can be both. Prior to the current situation, many/most companies preferred people who could/would commute to a company office. Which gives more options to people willing to work near one of those hubs and mostly work in an office.
At the same time, many people prefer to live near one of those hubs whether because they just like NYC, Boston, Austin, Bay Area, Seattle, etc. or because they believe it gives them more flexibility in changing employers. (And/or being in proximity to many like-minded individuals.)
It seems like the main issue is proximity to work and the reasonable demand for a short commute.
If that need would be satisfied then i think the resulting effect of wanting to build more in already crowded cities wouldnt be there, thus nimby’ism wouldnt be an issue because either since locals wouldnt feel threatened.
When i moved to london uk i had the same opinion as your colleague. I wanted a place to live as close as possible to work so that i would spend as little time wasted on commute as possible.
But remote work gave me the option to live anywhere and as such i chose an area outside london. Having the option to leave crowded centres i took it because it satisfies my need for work and a short commute.
So i am wondering isnt the root of all evil the fact that high paying jobs are clustered around large urban centres? Shouldnt tech have solved this issue by now? Even if people prefer office work, cant this work be done in smaller urban areas? Or at the edge of large cities such that people can easily commute from surrounding areas? I get it that in the last blue collar work had to be done in city centres so everyone can access services. But why do software engineers need to be seated in expensive city centres? Or indeed accountants, or even lawyers.
I question how many people would actually want to live there if the offices are so empty. In principle, there's no reason you couldn't have a city the residents of which mostly commute out to work and/or work from their homes. But historically jobs have been the main magnet that attracts people to actually live in cities. Yes, especially among younger people, cities are also attractive for other reasons but by and large not enough to cause them to live there lacking other drivers.
On the other hand, if we believe the offices have value, as in people working together in one place has value, having offices in centralized locations because it is more of a known quantity for commuting.
Once you settle down roots, you don't want to have to upend your life if you lose your job or just want to find another job. And from the perspective of the company, you have more of a talent pool because you can recruit from all the other companies in the area with the benefit of not asking someone to move or change their routines.
I am in the camp of believing there being some benefit to people coming together to work on projects. Maybe not 5 days a week, but even if it is hybrid or occasional, there is still benefit for me to be central. I have worked 5 different jobs within 2 mile of each other and have never had to reconsider locations or commutes. I also benefit from being able to get lunch/drinks with old coworkers, attend impromptu 'meetups' and still make it home for dinner with my family because I can walk everywhere.
From a city planning point of view, there is a network effect to cities. Businesses move to cities because that is where there are services. Services are built because there is economy of scale to density.
Decentralized office locations means less density which means public transportation makes less sense, and dense services make less sense. Then you end up with Los Angeles (and Orange County). Which has lots of scattered office parks with little to nothing to do around them and that are only accessible by cars.
This is all a very American point of view. If instead we looked at European cities that were not built around cars and have good trains even for small hamlets, then absolutely, decentralized offices would make sense to me. It would satisfy my main concern of reliable transportation and ease of finding new jobs/networking.
So with many US city planning problems, the issue is our car centric culture.
reply