Comment by seanmcdirmid
3 months ago
We really screwed the pooch on remote work, which would have made it less important to live in “the hot city” and would have let people live in Toledo or Buffalo if they wanted.
There are multiple categories of homeless people, with some (the most visible ones) choosing what cities they are unhoused in. Seattle (where I live) is never going to be able to house all of them: the more money we throw at the problem (and we spend a lot!), the worse it gets for obvious reasons. It is much easier to solve homeless problems in a city that isn’t a destination due to climate, social services spending, or drug availability. We do lots of tiny home villages here also, they cost around $100k/year/unit to run, which doesn’t make sense, but that’s what the non profits are charging and what the city/county are paying.
> We really screwed the pooch on remote work, which would have made it less important to live in “the hot city” and would have let people live in Toledo or Buffalo if they wanted.
Indeed.
The Great Reshuffle: Remote Work and Residential Sorting - https://fedinprint.org/item/fedpwp/102079/original | https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/FRBP/Assets/working-... [pdf] | https://doi.org/10.21799/frbp.wp.2025.36
> This paper studies the significance of migration in evaluating the welfare impacts of remote work. By analyzing individual location history data, we first document an increase in net migration towards suburbs and smaller cities in the US since 2020. We demonstrate that the migration wave has been disproportionately fueled by high-income individuals, who were more likely to move due to remote work. Consequently, regions with substantial in-migration observed the greatest rise in housing expenses. This also led to changes in local demand for services and associated employment. Employing a stylized welfare accounting framework, we show that migration mitigated the increase in housing cost burdens for both high- and low-income groups, with the advantages being greater for low-income individuals. Conversely, dispersed job growth, as a result of migration away from major urban centers, curtailed the increase in job accessibility, especially for high-income groups. Factoring in the spatial impacts of migration on housing costs and job accessibility, the welfare inequality surge related to remote work is considerably tempered.