WFH - “Work from home,” as in: COVID-era policies of (mostly tech jobs) being administered outside of a central office building.
I was entirely in favor of WFH and the struggle of office workers up until recently. Although my career is functionally incompatible with the idea, I had sympathy for members of my class and supported them fighting against an archaic and unnecessarily authoritative policy of office attendance.
BUT.
WFH-ers and West/East Coast refugees have decimated historically low income communities by flooding to parts of the Southeast and Midwest with salaries that were meant to be competitive in an urban environment, where COL is always going to be higher, and pricing out/displacing local (oftentimes minority) populations. Anecdotally, I’ve seen rental prices more than triple in my hometown within the past four years, with no real wage increases for local groups in what can only be called gentrification.
This isn’t my wording, see:
VICE | Digital Nomads Are the New Gentrifiers
You can’t have your cake and eat it, too, as the saying goes, and I just can’t defend the people who have destroyed local economies. Even if that animosity goes against class solidarity, which I do agree with, the damage WFH has done is too direct and too severe for me to support it.
Edit: I’ve spent the past hour thinking about this post and have thought of a more succinct way to express my argument:
If I want the best for historically low-income communities, and the following are both true:
A) Gentrification is bad for historically low-income communities, and
B) WFH policies have facilitated gentrification, then
it logicially follows that WFH is bad for historically low-income communities and that I should be opposed to WFH policies.
This is the process rationale behind my argument.
You seem to attribute the housing affordability crisis the last few years to WFH-ers, but isn’t it more fair to say that there are multiple other factors contributing to it?
Not just the post COVID appreciation for housing, but things like historically high percentage of investor owned homes (including corporate and foreign buyers), and historically low building rates compared to projected need, to name a few.
So then the question becomes, which of these should we focus on? For me, that means what gives you the most positives, and least negatives.
Let’s look at three options:
- Banning corporate and foreign non-occupying homeowners from owning American residential real estate
- Rezoning low density areas (particularly single story commercial/retail in smaller cities and towns’ downtowns) into vertical dense mixed use residential and commercial/retail development
- Ending work from home
1 and 2 accomplish our primary goal of reducing home prices across the country, both by increasing supply (1 would too, since those investors would need to sell, increasing supply), and 1 would also reduce demand. 3 does not, because any price reductions in rural areas will be offset by higher rates in urban one
2 also gives us positive secondary benefit of encouraging walkable cities, which leads to health improvements, less traffic, and reduced climate impact. 1 would also increase business investment, encouraging long term growth, if the “money printer” option of buying US residential properties and collecting rent is not available.
3 gives us no positive secondary benefits, and since it does essentially the opposite of 2 in terms of walkability, it also is the only one with a high negative cost.
So pretty clearly that idea is the worst one for solving housing affordability. So why support it when their are other much better options available to accomplish your goal?
Why would you think I don’t support the other two already? Number one is a no-brainer. With option two, I think there needs to be consideration for historically/culturally significant building preservation, but I agree on the whole.
But, neither of those are relevant to rural/historically low-income communities, which are the main topic of my post and are only somewhat related to my overall message that WFH has created a pipeline of destabilization to these economies.
What data do you have to say neither of those options are relevant?
“Mid-priced homes are becoming more popular with investors, making up 32% of investor purchases in the fourth quarter, a record high. Low-priced homes are still most popular with investors, making up 37% of purchases.”
Low cost homes, exactly the ones in rural/historically low income area you described, are the most purchased category of residential real estate.
Also, the downtowns of those areas, which are almost all single story commercial/retail, are exactly the places most in need of walkable, dense development I’m describing, especially if there’s a housing shortage and most of the surrounding areas already have built up residential developments.
So both of those options are actually more relevant for your example then the US as a whole.
https://www.redfin.com/news/investor-home-purchases-q4-2021/
