Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Yeah, and I'm not saying what you're conveying is untrue, but I don't think it's representative, nor do I think they'll completely abandon metropolitan living if they remain with their jobs.
The schools issue is unfixable. The social and amenities issues are important to most. I could see some movement to upscale suburban environments, potentially, but backwoods living, year-round, sounds pretty implausible. The mountainous areas north of the City have harsh winters. And I don't see how someone who preferred urbanity three months ago, suddenly decided to go to the complete opposite extreme.
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The only thing that may persist from this is part-time working from home. People who live in Westchester/Greenwich or Surrey might not take the train into Grand Central or Waterloo every day, but work from home once or twice a week, or during school holidays if they aren’t travelling, etc.
It won’t lead to permanent, full-time remote work, which most companies are realising is sub-optimal as relationships atrophy, and thus won’t obviate the need to live somewhere vaguely commutable. Perhaps some people will be ok with a longer commute if it’s 3 days per week rather than 5 (I’m not one of them).
As you say, it won’t change people’s
preferences about where they live, though, so unless someone has been just dying to move 90 minutes north and now they can justify it as a slightly less frequent commute, nothing changes.
In terms of the commercial space - an employee that is in the office 3 days a week still needs a desk, and if anything CV19 will kill the whole “hot-desking” thing for a while, so I don’t see much if any reduced demand medium-term.