From the Work-at-Home Revolution to Revolutionary Road
I will never forget Dan Savage's piece "The Urban Archipelago," mostly because he said the liberals' quiet parts loud back in 2004. Among the politer passages:
It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America.
That framing was possibly shaped by Richard Florida's writing about the "creative class." Back in 1992, Florida had defined the creative class as a sort of Venn diagram between "cool jobs" and "cool locales," and he noted:
I caught a lot of flak for proposing that diversity—an openness to all kinds of people, no matter their gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or just plain geekiness—was not just a private virtue but an economic necessity. I earned a certain measure of notoriety for suggesting that a visible gay presence in a city can be seen as a leading indicator for rising housing values and high tech.
The notion of a creative class, moving from island to island in America's urban archipelago is a likely forebear to the last decade's reportage around "superstar cities." Cited as one of the engines powering the U.S.'s increasing stratification, superstar cities are those which generate more jobs and more income, thus widening the gap between the places that have an abundance of jobs, income and people, and places that do not. As of the 2016 presidential election, one of the narratives through policy reporting centered around the increasing gulfs between the superstar cities' performances in the national economy relative to the remaining vast acreage of the U.S. For example, after the election, one analysis found that "the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America's economic activity in 2015." The 2018 midterms also reinforced this notion, with CNBC tagging Democrat districts as "the growing modern economy" while Republican districts were left behind
Superstar cities are not affordable cities and thus contain the seeds of their own demise. They lose cultural vibrancy, economic diversity, or the circumstances which allow new cultural or commercial movements to bubble up and transform our lives. A counternarrative that was building steam before 2020 was this: Remote working can, and should, untether people from places. Talent can move to where the cost of living is more affordable and thus eliminate one of the primary benefits of superstar cities -- the so-called "agglomeration benefits" of a disproportionate aggregation of talented people, useful social networks and abundant professional opportunities.
I've been slightly skeptical of the "remote work will depopulate pricey cities" argument for two reasons: First, the assumption baked into this argument is that people will move to low cost of living areas and still snag jobs where the wages are calibrated for high cost of living areas. Decoupling the scale of compensation from an employer's location works in the employee's favor only so long as the employee retains the job.
This brings me to my second point: Let's say someone moves from a superstar city where there's an abundance of jobs in their field to a locale where their industry is scant to non-existent. What happens when they lose or leave that remote job? There are no strong social safety nets in the U.S. -- everything from health care to the ability to enjoy a roof over one's head in one's dotage is predicated on winning the lottery in employer benefits. Moving from an area with ample employment opportunities and social networks to one with few is tremendously risky for most Americans. This is why fewer Americans are moving than at any other time in history.
In theory, one could tap into one's professional network and find another remote-working job (or two or three part-time gigs) -- but that presupposes an abundance of employers who are open to remote work as a cultural norm within their company and not a last resort. Yes, a lot of white-collar workers get to Zoom in from home right now -- but it's too soon to tell whether remote working will remain a permanent option for American employees or be discarded as a relic of sheltering in place.
It is entirely too early to see what cultural norms are going to shift in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, an early prediction seems to be that a month or three of sheltering in place will be nigh unto insufferable for city dwellers (particularly those with children) and -- presuming that employers are going to decide that remote working is swell in the future -- these city dwellers will retreat to the plush comforts of spacious suburban or rural houses where abundant rooms and rolling lawns will ensure that people can work uninterrupted and take in nature without breathing the neighbor's coronavirus.
Predictions like this seem weirdly oblivious to the class elements of urban life: in superstar cities like San Francisco and New York, plenty of residents already have spacious suburban or rural houses. They just don't live in them on the weekdays. Yes, they're living in them now -- to the dismay of the small village economies that were not planning on tourist season coming several months early and do not have the infrastructure necessary to handle increased demands on Internet connectivity, grocery stores or hospitals. How temporary residents will endure a town not set up for their convenience remains to be seen.
Infrastructure, not employers, is going to be what makes or breaks a superstar city's gradual flare-out via exodus to the burbs. It's tempting for employers to want to shift to more remote work: Operation costs go down because employers aren't footing the bill for maintaining a physical office or the unified communications infrastructure required to do business. Real estate costs are the employee's problem. So is office equipment and high-speed internet connectivity.
As we head into a phenomenal economic downturn, there will be the question of whether people can pay for a retreat from the office or a retreat from the superstar cities -- or if anyone's accurately gauged the costs of trying to escape the winner-take-all economy.
FURTHER READING
Aaron Renn -- I've been reading his work on the midwest and urban revitalization wherever I can and his blog has a lot of excellent background reading on why some cities break out as superstars and others do not.
"Microsoft’s CTO wants to spread tech’s wealth beyond the coasts," (Fast Company, April 6, 2020) -- “I really don’t think that it’s a great thing to say that all novel, innovative things have to be created within these coastal urban innovation centers, and then the folks who live everywhere else are consumers of those things.”
"The Coronavirus Class Divide in Cities," (Citylab, April 7, 2020) -- "The coronavirus is exposing a longstanding class divide in the way Americans work – between the low-paid front-line workers and the stay-at-home professionals with more job security and benefits."
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On the advice of some very wise friends who listened to me moan about my writers' block, then gently asked, "Do you want us to listen or do you want advice?" ... I'm just writing my way out of a block and toward whatever big writing goal will emerge after I've just kept writing for a while. As always, any feedback, questions or suggestions welcome either via email (reply to this) or via Twitter (@lschmeiser).