Large cities will also be impacted, with a delay, as this is where most young and educated people choose to live, for obvious reasons.
In my opinion the housing market is the real demographic dampener, more than anything else, and it means that the long term trend for both demography and housing should be a slow oscillation around equilibrium.
e.g. In 2001 a worker may have moved to Cincinnati or St Louis because they got a job there. In 2024 a remote worker might move to NYC or Austin because they want to live in those places.
As I say, we’ll have to see how it plays out. Obviously fully remote has become a decidedly minority mode (especially to the degree people worry their next job won’t be fully remote) contrary to what some expected during the pandemic.
That's a mid-to-late-20th century North American pattern based on zoning restrictions, mortgage policies, highway development policies, and racial conflict. There is nothing inevitable about it, and Japan has had a completely different experience.
I think it's more likely than not that young professionals with money will want to live in places where they can easily access a large variety of quality products, services, and entertainment. Places where they can meet and spend time with other young professionals. Once they get families they'll tend to prioritize places with good schools, childcare, and support systems (their parents, doctors, etc) but I don't think being able to work from home is going to make people want to live too far from cities while they are young.
Many cities that are themselves expensive have suburbs and exurbs, some of which are themselves very expensive, but others of which are much more moderate and often have decent school systems and may be within an hour for medical care or an evening’s entertainment.
What they will get rewarded for though is getting (somebody) pregnant. Then the parents of both the father and mother will rush in to help them get real estate and to escape the dead end of working.
In short, they can't afford to move out from the city until pregnancy opens the doors for them.
Reality is getting screamed at by a toddler while you single-handedly build a depression era shack in desert wasteland for 40k, while simultaneously working full time and somehow caring for your kids too. Spend your time tearing your hair out, essentially working 3 full-time jobs while paying for daycare, rent, and construction materials so despite all this work your financials go into a black hole.
My parents did send me a $100 Lowes gift card, so there is that. At least now I can do ghetto job of pretty much any building trade.
It's mostly that having a kid lites the fire under your ass, not so much others are helping because they usually don't.
Is this commonplace? This doesn't match my experience, not in tech but in finance departments.
This does not sound connected to any reality I have seen, and seems facially ageist.
Successful people wanting to live in cities at least until they retire has been the pattern for centuries. The postwar US weirdness of zoning and "white flight" is the aberration, this is a return to the norm.
I think it's simply a communication and logistics problem to match people from other areas to empty homes. If anything, Japan and such should explicitly incentivize and encourage migration to declining areas to ensure their own tax base.
As simple as it is, I never though of it this way. It makes more sense to me than the commonly accepted explanation that kids are a liability in modern life. Thanks!