Comment by hibikir
1 year ago
Extremely unlikely.
The main reason most companies used to have offices in large metros is not because they were expensive, but because they offer great access to workers. This became even more important as women's labor participation went up, as moving for one job is stressful, but moving when you have two earners is a real problem.
The main advantage for a company of WFH is opening up the pool of workers even more: I've worked at teams that might as well been UN sumits if you look at just nationalities and locations.
Small, localized offices in lower cost areas do not provide any significant social advantage over home if you don't find at least a handful of people you work with in said office. But if the company is very distributed, this isn't going to happen. So then you have to try to hire people living hear those, lower cost of living offices, which shrinks the available pool again. And if those places had a lot of highly paid workers, they stop being low cost of living anyway.
The only road to shorter commutes (once having an office is taken as mandatory) is massive density and public transport. It doesn't guarantee it, but then there are more people that are technically close enough to the office so that if they worked there, they'd have a short commute. Compare, say, LA and Madrid. LA is bigger, but the number of people that can get to a random point in downtown LA in 30 minutes is far lower than in Madrid.
I always thought that as women's labour force participation went up, working hours should have fallen. If you have double the workforce, surely people can reduce their hours?
My main reason is that it is better for families, and it would be kids spend more time with their parents (in the UK it is now common for kids to have breakfast at school, and be picked from after school childcare every day).
With regard to this problem, it would also make commuting a lot easier. The biggest problem I have found with commuting is the crowding at peak times: it makes things slower and less comfortable, and means you cannot get work done on a train, etc. If you had shorter and more flexible working hours people could avoid peak times.