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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Many young and educated people in a relatively small number of cities until they decide to start a family and then historically they moved out. One also wonders what affect more remote/hybrid work will have. My cohort in the late 80s basically didn’t live in the city unless that’s where their job was which it wasn’t in the case of the computer industry. There’s nothing inevitable about young professionals wanting to live in cities and certainly not staying there.

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> until they decide to start a family and then historically they moved out

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.

Remote work is also giving professional workers more leisure time, and many are putting more thought into where they live as not just a place where they sleep, but also where they work and socialize. Also, for the people who prefer living in cities, there may be shifts in which cities are desired. Many mid-sized cities in the US existed because of the physical proximity required for the jobs there.

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.

Or they might decide NYC is an incredible luxury if they don’t have a job in finance there.

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.

> There’s nothing inevitable about young professionals wanting to live in cities

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.

And the fact is that those good schools, for example, are in the orbit of some of the more elite cities much of the time. SF’s geographical constraints I think sometimes mislead people into thinking towns near expensive cities are all equally expensive.

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.

> There’s nothing inevitable about young professionals wanting to live in cities and certainly not staying there.

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.

Young people will never be able to afford a home by working, no matter how much they produce for the economy. It is commonplace now that young people at the workplace produce 5x as much as their older colleagues. But they are never rewarded for it.

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.

Lol this is the myth isn't it.

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.

My example is in the cases that young workers get any help at all. Some families do it old school and actually help their children without requiring pregnancy, but it's much rarer. And as you said, many families won't help at all.

>It is commonplace now that young people at the workplace produce 5x as much as their older colleagues.

Is this commonplace? This doesn't match my experience, not in tech but in finance departments.

In low margin or high intensity industries, you're not going to have anybody who doesn't pull their own weight, whether young or old. But for normal jobs, it's more or less the norm that a huge number of your long-time workers are doing hardly anything at all.

> It is commonplace now that young people at the workplace produce 5x as much as their older colleagues.

This does not sound connected to any reality I have seen, and seems facially ageist.

Call it what you want. I see it all the time. And not many new slacker type jobs are being made, for young people to do the same. Every generation probably has the same percentage of people who don't do anything. The difference is that such a person who is young is a "neet" on unemployment, while such a person who is old collects a nice paycheck from a job.

I don't think that is true for older workers living today, but it was true on the 50s. The GDP per capita went up by more than 4x and yet it is those 50s people who have had an easy time owning a home.

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