For 15+ years I have noticed a certain set of people trying to make a claim that people are leaving or desire to leave "the cities" for the suburbs or rural areas in America. NYC growth has slowed since 2017, and certainly there will be a rush for cheaper housing as a result of COVID, but the physics that have driven people to urban centers hasn't changed at all.

I've noticed the same thing and especially in tech. I have a few friends who are engineers and have this idea that if everyone went completely remote, cities would clear out as everyone rushed to buy acres of land in the country. I always find it a bit funny that these friends are also the ones who seem to have the most city oriented lives. They are going out to bars and restaurants all the time. They get their coffee from local artisanal coffee roasters and their beer from the many local microbreweries. They don't seem to recognize that the cities they think people want to flee offer more than just career opportunities.

They are most likely also childless. When you have young children, your demand for fancy restaurants, artisanal coffee roasters and visiting local microbreweries diminishes, as there are now more things that occupy your time and attention, and are not very conducive for above-mentioned entertainment venues. The trend of delayed or foregone childbearing is also contributing to increase in interest in urban life.

With very few exceptions, most of my cohort who went to NYC after graduation to work in finance moved to a suburban bedroom community around the time they had kids--or at least by the time the kids were going to need school. The alternative as they saw it was to upgrade their expensive Manhattan apartment or condo and to enroll their kid in an expensive private school.

I think I know one couple who stayed in the city and they were very well off.

>>The alternative as they saw it was to upgrade their expensive Manhattan apartment or condo and to enroll their kid in an expensive private school.

Those that might have been thinking of enrolling their children in private schools can do so more affordably outside of NYC. As an example, most top tier private school base tuition in the city is around $55K/year/child (not including "suggested donations") while most great private schools outside of the city are sub-$30K/year/child.

>>I think I know one couple who stayed in the city and they were very well off.

Public school is an option too, as long as one can navigate the byzantine DOE processes. From a housing/apartment perspective, if more people flee the city then there is a delicate balance where prices may come down for families to once again find them more affordable.

Austin is the kind of city that families move to after having kids. A microbrewery in Austin most likely has minivan parking and stacks of kids' high chairs.

If kids really annoy you that much, you might be the perfect candidate for moving to a city where having kids is actually difficult or expensive.

While I share the sentiment that tech workers would likely leave tech hubs that doesn't mean they'd do it for homes in the country. There are plenty of other cities to choose from whose values may resonate stronger with them than SF/NYC/etc.

I can definitely see that happening more often. If you're not required to be in a certain office location, that opens up a lot of options for other cities.

I was disagreeing more with the extreme opinion that some have that remote work would cause these cities to become desolate. Would some tech workers leave? Definitely! Would they all leave? I doubt it.

That's a great point, however, bars, restaurants, and artisanal coffee shops are the exact types of city amenities that are being devastated by the pandemic!

The current exodus is people realizing that they don't need to pay city prices if they're not able to benefit from city living.

If the virus ends up being an issue that can be resolved in months (Which I highly doubt), I could see a comeback relatively soon. But every month this drags on, more and more businesses that make city living great will go bankrupt, making city living less desirable, and it'll create a negative feedback loop that will take years to recover from.

Most tech companies are allowing company-wide WFH for the rest of the year and in come cases permanently. That's tens of thousands of people who can be elsewhere for at least 6 months and possibly forever. That seems like a change in the "physics" of the magnetism that has drawn people to SF and the bay area for decades. A lot of people who had to stay in the area due to work but who have been considering a move are taking the opportunity to relocate to places with lower cost of living.

Add that to the thousands of layoffs at startups over the last few months (and a presumed hiring slowdown), as well as thousands of H1B holders who are reassessing life choices. There could be a serious shift in housing supply and demand in the bay area. Oh let's also not forget the huge impact the pandemic is having on the service and hospitality industries.

I think we could see a long-term reversal of the trend of 15% annual rent increase in SF.

I work for a small tech company and we've decided that we're going to be WFH permanently now. I can't imagine we're the only ones.

I work for a company with 400 devs that says we’ll be back on site in October. This is in the hinterlands though.

> but the physics that have driven people to urban centers hasn't changed at all.

I'd actually argue that one thing that has changed is that companies are much more amenable to at least part-time work from home. I agree the economic forces that have concentrated wealth and opportunity in cities hasn't and isn't changing, but I do think it will be much more viable for people to work at jobs where they only go in to the office, say, twice a week. In that situation I think a lot of people would be much more willing to live further out because traffic (a punishing factor in most cities) then becomes much less of an issue.

Agree. I bought a house an hour (one way) from the city and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t know I could work 50-100% from home even if I switch jobs. That is - not all jobs allow that but enough of them do that I don’t need to worry about it.

If I work just every other day in the office then my commute time per day is 30 minutes one way effectively. In that sense, my suburb is moving closer to the city.

I also think there is a wider periodic trend of moving from cities and closer to nature and vice versa, which has (at least in Europe) been in the from-the-city phase for several years now.

I live near a commuter rail line but going into a city office still ends up being almost 90 minutes door to door. (Driving at rush hour is just as bad.)

I did it maybe half the time for about a year and a half but it really wasn't sustainable long term. I don't work out of an office today but I really wouldn't mind going into our downtown office once a week or so.

The physics, specifically, are high paying remote jobs. That's the thing that is specifically changing with Covid. As to the points being made about artisanal coffee shops not in rural areas? That's the exact thing that changes when you have urbanites moving to small towns. They start restaurants, bars and coffee shops.

except that has not materialized... like at all... yet

It takes more than just 4 months in a pandemic to start a trend of new businesses in a new town.

For ~60 years the "physics" that drive people into large urban centers has been changing, with the changes getting much faster at the last ~20 years.

I really don't think there's enough evidence to say the change is on the direction of people abandoning cities (but the largest ones already slowed down their growth to a minimum). But it's unreasonable to expect the COVID changes to be undone. Things change slowly because people resist changes; but once they change, people will resist reverting them.

The Millenial generation is the largest birth cohort in the USA at this point. Their shifting preferences due to age may be very impactful on real estate generally, since many people are generally going through the same phases of life at the same time. This is likely one of the things that made urban real estate so desirable over the past decade too.

> but the physics that have driven people to urban centers hasn't changed at all.

Other than being unable to do anything social and a large portion of restaurants/cultural opportunities are ceasing to exist?

I'm not paying $4000/month to get lukewarm food delivered at 20% markup.

Is it really so easy to move out in the few short months since the pandemic hit? I wonder if these people were living in a shared housing situation and didn't have a lease or a lot of physical possessions to worry about. I'm in downtown SF and have been considering moving somewhere in the Bay Area where I can step outside and not be in a literal and figurative cesspit, but it's really not easy. Or maybe I'm just getting old and have too much furniture. I certainly can't imagine just hopping out of town when the pandemic hit and then hopping back once it blows over.

I've probably always had too much stuff. It's admittedly easier these days to have more possessions be small and digital. But moving has always been a major operation for me. Certainly not something I was going to undertake casually for a few months.

If you're living somewhere with a third the cost of SF, is it necessary to further your career growth? Outside the city, people will realize there's more to life than high tech and lean into the "life" portion of work-life balance.

I think if you enjoy your job enough, then yeah. Some people just really like their job and org enough to dedicate extra time to it and that's fine (as long as their paid proportionally, don't work for free). I don't love my job and tech that much though

There is also more to life than big cheap houses. People to meet and things to do with them, for example. A pleasant and engaging public realm.

In the "big cheap house" world people host parties.

It's hard to generalize what everyone wants. Not everyone wants the same things in life.

There are salary adjustments when you leave urban areas like SF.

Depends on the company and circumstances.

Career growth slides up and down the priority stack for many as they go through life. For young folks just getting started, absolutely. For folks that are 15-20 years in, starting to plateau in comp, have a family, maybe have some parents that need care, etc, career growth can start to fall away as a major motivator.

> I think its a bit presumptuous that tech workers are perm leaving the city.

The survey in OP suggests that they are, with two important caveats:

* This is obviously not even close to a representative sample of workers

* It's predicated on "if you had a choice", and we don't know how many people will actually have that choice

Anecdotal but:

6 of my 9 direct reports have asked about permenantly relocating.

Myself and half my team are looking at permanently relocating out of Chicago. The pattern holds across other teams where I work.

Others I know in the industry are just up and leaving for remote-first companies and then moving to where they’re most comfortable.

The most important caveat is that "they plan to". People fail to do all kinds of things that they plan to.

This article doesn’t provide a baseline to compare the latest survey against? What percent of tech workers were already on the fence with regards to moving out before the pandemic hit?

I agree that career grow will require living close to HQ, but some people don't care too much about career growth and prefer to live in a place they like. So I suspect that many people will never return.

I think people with that mentality were unlikely to live in SV in the first place

There are plenty of folks, especially on the technical side, that are here for the interesting work and high salaries. They could care less about climbing the managerial ladder. Also, millennials are starting to hit the mid-career phase, where it becomes clear that the 'ladder' gets really narrow, and things like children and mortgages start to weigh heavily on life choices. There will be plenty of folks who stick around, for sure. But by all indications (surveys, anecdotal reports, rent prices, etc...), there is plenty of interest in remote work.

I think people with that mentality were unlikely to even get a job in SV. The ridiculous interview process alone should be a barrier enough.

That's not true. Many people go to big cities and SV because of the jobs. If they had a choice, they would prefer to live somewhere else.

I’m aware of that - as that was the reason I moved to the Bay Area as well. But I’ve been here a few years, I could get a job elsewhere without the leetcode interview. It just wouldn’t pay as well or have the same career growth track.

I don't care about career growth, but I do care about adding an extra 50k/year to my net worth for the same work with the same standard of living (or living in a crappy little hole-in-the-wall apartment and saving even more)

If I can make a competitive amount of money without living in California's armpit, I'm going to do it for sure

If WFH becomes the new norm for a company, the concept of HQ would become irrelevant, companies I know are planning to fill physical work space with hotel seats, then you should be able to grow career via WFH no problem.

There will be a group of people who prefer not to WFH... and they will be in the office and therefore be much more involved/at the forefront of the company.

As a team lead in a group distributed team, we make sure we include everybody regardless of physical location. You Zoom with people enough, and over time you realize there is nothing extra than the office provided except easy distractions.

I'm rarely on a call of any size where everyone would normally be in the same office or often even in the same country. In some ways, I actually prefer the situation where everyone is on their own video chat rather than having a mix of a couple conference rooms and everyone else by themselves.

A couple teams I know even have a standing rule about everyone calling in individually on team calls even if a few people are in the same office.

I think a lot of people come at this from the perspective of small companies where everyone is co-located. But the reality at large companies if people are pretty scattered around even if they're not working from home.

I don't know how anyone can say that video calls and face-to-face time are equivalent with a straight face.

Of course, this is my opinion, but it seems pretty obvious that in-person interaction is what builds relationships.

Because we have statistics to prove it. The productivity of our whole eng organization has been great while being 100% remote. As a caveat to this, before the pandemic only half of us went to the office. I believe that helped us be prepared.

Also, haven’t you ever made friends online? Building relationships online is nothing new. In fact, many of the in person relationship building activities excluded different individuals. For example, going out for drinks with the team was never my idea of having fun. I am glad I don’t have to attend those anymore.

lol, care to share what kind of statistics you are looking at?

Anecdotal, but I was actively looking to get out of FAANG for a fully WFH position and managed to get one. About a month and a half later - with my lease coming due - I left San Jose. No need to pay the exorbitant rent and taxes and get peanuts in return.

I am really happy that people who always wanted to work remotely outside of crowded and overly expensive cities now have an opportunity to do that.

I also remember seeing in news some states mandating quarantine for people moving b/w states. I wonder if that is intended to deter people from making such move out of cities which can lead to the collapse of the cities businesses.

It's the more rural areas that are putting requirements on people coming into their states, not cities/states keeping people from leaving. (And the requirements I'm aware of may weekend getaways harder but they're not a real barrier for someone making a long-term move.)