Most of those people fully plan on returning to SF once their offices open back up, because they feel that they need to be in the office in order to grow their career.
I think its a bit presumptuous that tech workers are perm leaving the city.
I think I know one couple who stayed in the city and they were very well off.
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.
I totally agree and I'm sure the data supports it but before covid every brewery in Austin was packed with families. I actually stopped visiting many during the weekends because there would be dozens of loud kids with tired and defeated parents drinking nearby. It was annoying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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
6 of my 9 direct reports have asked about permenantly relocating.
Others I know in the industry are just up and leaving for remote-first companies and then moving to where they’re most comfortable.
If I can make a competitive amount of money without living in California's armpit, I'm going to do it for sure
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.
Of course, this is my opinion, but it seems pretty obvious that in-person interaction is what builds relationships.
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.
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.