If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office.
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.
This is the right answer. I have a child, work remotely and while I appreciate the flexibility, I kind of hate it for my career. The article is mostly vibe-y without any digging into why people with children need to commute from so far.
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.
It's also consolidation of jobs in big cities. When I was a kid you didn't need to move away from home to find a stable income. WFH could have solved that, but I think the cultural movement to relocating has just become too entrenched.
When I was a kid the Detroit automakers bought air filters manufactured at a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin and brake pads manufactured in Peoria, Illinois and lubricants from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
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.
Not necessarily. We happily moved away to suburbs because we grew tired of the city noise and chaos. The child can stay outside, we have a proper backyard, there are barely any cars in the street. It was much more affordable but was a side effect rather than the main reason to move. And when both parents work from home, as we do, we are doing just fine with a single car. For those exceptional circumstances when we need to be away in different places at the same time, the cab is still nearly infinitely more affordable than a second car.
I moved away to Europe where there are none of those things and my child can walk himself over to a park 10x the size of an American backyard.
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 in Europe. Each country is different but every large city is more or less the same. Sure you can’t compare London with Copenhagen for example but even in the latter case suburban life is much calmer.
> If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office.
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.
I’m 20min by public transport and still much prefer my 3 days at home than my 2 in the office.
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.
It's because there's a lot of overlap between people thinking "those damn lazy workers better get back to the office so they don't slack off" and people thinking "a woman's role is in the household, raising children and cooking".
Enabling women to be with their children during their early years is a good thing. Mothers are not replaceable by fathers or by strangers. You can do it, sometimes you must, but it's sub-optimal for young children. Being able to live on a single income during those years is fantastic, but when it isn't possible, WFH can be a big improvement.
(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.)
OP never said that. They said the venn diagram of attitudes promoting RTO coincidentally seems to largely overlap the regressive "women should be homemakers" attitudes.
Why? The data supports it. Women were more likely to leave during RTO efforts than men. WFH being a massive boon for workers with childcare responsibilities or medical issues is widely recognized; there’s a reason why there was a baby boom during the pandemic. A lot of the backlash against WFH workers was blatantly sexist; remember all the rage against those “day in the life of a remote worker” type TikToks? Note how they got way, way more hate than the objectively worse ‘working’ several jobs or modern hustle culture scam stuff?
I don’t think it’s the be-all end-all explanation, but the shoe fits.
Women being more likely to leave than men because of a policy does not inherently make that policy sexist. You could say the same thing about a policy that requires police officers in full patrol kit be able to scale an 8' wall or drag a certain amount of weight a certain distance in a given time frame - that instituting that policy in a department that didn't have it previously would result in more women leaving than men doesn't make the policy sexist unless it's both actually unnecessary for the job and implementation with sexist intent.
Those meme-level DITL and older hustle culture stuff are two completely different things, targeting different audiences, and using different methods, so it makes sense that people would have two different reactions to them, even if you think both of them are stupid?
Are there any reports of someone moving their company from WFH to full RTO in order to get women writ large to leave their company? I think it's much more likely that capital owners just want their building full so they don't lose their investments, business owners and executives don't like WFH for various reasons including the extremely overblown risk of overemployment, managers on average want to micromanage and find it easier in-office, and there's no public health backstop to justify WFH like there was 5 years ago.
Separately but related, I don't think there's anything wrong with a factory worker getting paid $18/hr watching someone spread 2 hours of work over 7 hours in the office with two catered meals plus snacks and making jokes about "email jobs" not being real. I probably watched all the DITL things that went truly viral and the comments were never any more sexist than any other viral video on the internet.
It's a return to form, a reinforcement of the status-quo, and in that since it's inherently socially conservative.
You know what else is socially conservative?
RTO makes relationships outside of the traditional nuclear family more difficult. It discourages career building which, because of the patriarchy and our history, is going to primarily affect women.
Sexism and misogyny is actually very complicated. It's built-in to just about every system that exists in America. It's not the sort of simple "woman bad" some people think. It's the choices we make when we design structures. It's part of our DNA, it's not a symptom.
I have been thinking that this is a reason why the megacities are winning. In the largest cities, a couple can cohabitate and both find jobs. In smaller cities, you have to get lucky, and if one partner's job falls through (which may be unavoidable) then you might have to move! In a one-income household you can live in a city with one industry. Two is a coordination problem. The eleven largest cities have reached escape velocity. Detroit is hovering right on the edge. Seattle has favorable climate and a port. Other cities are boom and bust.
I associate it with cool summers which are rare in the US. The rain and dark won't be everyone's cup of tea, but other places with similarly cool summers either have very harsh winters or rhyme with "Nabisco".
It seems like this comment boils down to "relationships require compromise and sacrifice and this scales with more people" which is almost tautological.
Sort of. I was arguing that I see WFH as the superior model for people in relationships, because it eliminates the need for sacrifice and compromise on one dimension: Career beneficial location.
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.
Sure, depends on the field. Some fields can't realistically WFH to begin with. Some easily can though. If you have a doctor and a programmer, the doctor can work at a hospital that provides the best career opportunity for them, while the programmer can work at the place that provides the best opportunity for them, given WFH.
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 live ~30 minutes from the city center, and the office locations I've had for the past ten years or so.
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.
Time to chill out and read was definitely my favorite part about commuting by train (SEPTA). Unfortunately it also ate a lot of my time, but it was time I could spend reading so I didn't really mind that too much.
> 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.
Mass Transit isn't the solution on its own. It needs to be Mass Transit PLUS people living around mass transit stops.
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.
Trolleys and Regional Rail work great in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the state actually gives SEPTA funding so they can keep their vehicles up to date and pay their workers fairly
Through circumstance I went from a fully remote working arrangement to working for a place that's 5 miles down a single surface street from where I live (which, during commute hours pushes up to 15 minutes). I go in twice a week, but since we have kids it's mostly a wash. I still vastly prefer the 3 days per week that I work from home. The office gets very busy and very loud, especially in the afternoons.
> If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office.
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.
You do realize the vast majority of jobs are not in industrial hubs but urban cities right? Urban cities tend to have more than one employer too. Before I moved across the country, there were maybe a dozen or so companies that were hiring devs where I lived; now after moving there are around 800 companies that hire devs.
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.
This is it; cost and quality of living is proportional to distance to employment, especially in services and tech. I made a tradeoff, I could buy a reasonably comfortable and -priced house, but access to public transit and / or time spent commuting increased by at least half an hour.
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.
Companies could also do this the way they used to - satellite offices and similar.
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.
This would be ideal, I live right next to an industrial / office estate with plenty of flexible office space available.
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.
Unfortunately, much of the US, and elsewhere, has been taken in by decades of successful American propaganda promoting and romanticizing the suburb after the War. The taste for the suburb, like the taste for cars, is very entrenched in many people's minds. In our vapid consumerist culture, they have become elevated to virtual rites of passage: buying a car and buying a suburban house are marks of manhood and adulthood.
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.
> increase their demand, and to make housing overall more unaffordable?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.