Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bombthecat | Hacker News Reader

Everyone still wants to live in cities. Firms want to settle in cities. If shops close, it wont change much.

If the shops close, do people still want to live in cities? Isn't that part of the point of living in a city - that you have all these businesses easily within reach?

It's the jobs. People didn't migrate from rural to urban in the last several hundred years because they wanted the shops, they went where the highest concentration of jobs were. Moving to a rural area won't help people find jobs.

You mean the jobs that are likely to be at least somewhat less location-dependent coming out of this? (Not arguing for 100% remote or anything like this but still a fairly major shift. I certainly know plenty of people who have already moved out of cities to quite rural locations.)

I think this is another case of knowledge worker myopia. With the exception of Amazon, you can't really work retail remote. Those workers who can work remotely now can leave at any time, that's right, and there has been a bigger shift for them, but we can't pretend that the majority of workers are remote workers. The people who had to come to the city for work, people who worked in retail or in industry, those types jobs aren't moving back rural. You can't work a factory where one isn't and you can't open up retail locations in the middle of nowhere.

Certainly, I'm specifically talking about the highly-paid knowledge workers in cities. But if they move out to any large degree that cascades. You don't need the higher-end luncheon spots and other amenities those workers use at that point. There aren't generally factories or distribution centers in cities.

It may even be a positive for some of those workers to the degree prices go down, albeit with fewer high-end restaurants and so forth and fewer co-workers.

You could see commercial real-estate be converted to residential.

How much does that cost, and is anyone going to pay that cost when residential rents are also falling? Commercial property is so different from living quarters that I wouldn't be surprised if "conversion" isn't actually possible, short of just razing it and building from scratch.

I've seen that conversion in Silicon Valley.

There is the Valco mall in Cupertino being demolished for mixed use residential, retail and office space. That mall was dying for a decade.

https://revitalizevallco.com/

Then there is Santana Row in San Jose. Used to be a strip mall as I recall. Now its high end shopping and residential.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santana_Row

In practice unfortunately most attempts seem to get aborted as zoning requirements differ too much to be economical. For one the plumbing tends to come with per resident requirements for the units they wish to sell for health code reasons of wanting a shower, toliet, and bath.

Going more "dorm" style could work for low end if there wasn't a pandemic and even then it would carry plenty of risks that would scare people away from such an arrangement let alone the consumer desires.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com