Remote Work Is Poised to Devastate America’s Cities

[Peter1469]

If there are enough immigrants. Immigrants from many parts of the world (including Europe) are accustomed to apartment living, so they would be happy to live in an urban environment.

Agree. Maybe Little Italy will become big Italy in NYC. That would be worth another trip for me.

But infrastructure will start to fall apart. A modern urban center needs lots of $$$ for maintenance and servicing it.

[2cent]

A little beside the point, but I found it interesting that they used cell phone tracking to gather their data.

Columbus has had a tremendous recovery. Would Ohio be one of the states people flew to, when escaping high-tax states like New York? And couldn't some of New York's lack of recovery be due to people leaving the state, rather than just the city? (To stay home to work, I mean.) Or did their mobile phone tracking include people who were sitting at desks in their own homes?

Or have the data collectors simply been counting the number of calls going through cell towers, in general?

Really. I've no idea (obviously) how that works.

[Dr. Who]

Agree. Maybe Little Italy will become big Italy in NYC. That would be worth another trip for me.

But infrastructure will start to fall apart. A modern urban center needs lots of $$$ for maintenance and servicing it.

Robotics? Also, it may implicate changes in state and federal business taxes. Businesses that currently pay big bucks for renting expensive real estate may have to pay some kind of equivalent amount in state income or other tax based on the number of stay at home workers they have and where they live. It's hard to say. Currently business deducts the cost of leasing office space from their taxes but the real estate owners pay the property taxes. Somehow there will have to be a realignment. However, do these major businesses even need to be located in major urban centers anymore or can they now have an HQ address in some small town or will they even need a physical address at all? The entire financial services industry exists mostly in the form of electronic records already. I guess their HQ becomes wherever their server farm is located but do they continue to have their own server farms or do they move everything to the cloud? For that matter, computer hardware technology is getting smaller and smaller, so a an entire server farm could be reduced to the size of a small speaker.

So much will be changing. We are talking about a total paradigm shift in progress. Advancements in robotics means that things like street cleaning, garbage pickup and snow removal could already be replaced by robotics. The current technology is sufficiently advanced that there is no reason why you need any people digging holes in streets to access pipes or underground cables. A machine could easily accomplish that task and repair the hole. A machine could easily take care of pot holes with zero human intervention and do it faster and more efficiently than a public works crew. So it's likely that the cost of infrastructure maintenance will become cheaper by virtue of replacing much of the human labor component with machines.

[Peter1469]

Robotics? Also, it may implicate changes in state and federal business taxes. Businesses that currently pay big bucks for renting expensive real estate may have to pay some kind of equivalent amount in state income or other tax based on the number of stay at home workers they have and where they live. It's hard to say. Currently business deducts the cost of leasing office space from their taxes but the real estate owners pay the property taxes. Somehow there will have to be a realignment. However, do these major businesses even need to be located in major urban centers anymore or can they now have an HQ address in some small town or will they even need a physical address at all? The entire financial services industry exists mostly in the form of electronic records already. I guess their HQ becomes wherever their server farm is located but do they continue to have their own server farms or do they move everything to the cloud? For that matter, computer hardware technology is getting smaller and smaller, so a an entire server farm could be reduced to the size of a small speaker.

So much will be changing. We are talking about a total paradigm shift in progress. Advancements in robotics means that things like street cleaning, garbage pickup and snow removal could already be replaced by robotics. The current technology is sufficiently advanced that there is no reason why you need any people digging holes in streets to access pipes or underground cables. A machine could easily accomplish that task and repair the hole. A machine could easily take care of pot holes with zero human intervention and do it faster and more efficiently than a public works crew. So it's likely that the cost of infrastructure maintenance will become cheaper by virtue of replacing much of the human labor component with machines.

That is likely what will have to happen.

[donttread]

This is what happens when you don’t have to make a profit

Or stick to a real budget