What we are seeing is that with the proliferation of broadband internet, information workers don't need close proximity to one another. Cities are now largely obsolete, unfortunately. They're a choice whereas before they were a necessity, and arguments about how much someone loves the diversity of a city to the contrary, the emptiness of these office buildings speaks for itself.
I personally don't want to forcibly stagnate development to protect what amounts to unrealized losses becoming realized. The numbers are big, and so the impact is big, but fundamentally all this is is nonviable business models failing. If your pension relies on office buildings being full, if your city based it's investment plan on information workers requiring proximity to something physical, it was not viable, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that. I won't be forced into a life I don't want to save a city budget or someone's pension plan. Am I cheering? Sure, a little, but mostly I'm just looking at the situation pragmatically and realistically and seeing what's in front of me. If your retirement necessitates me paying thousands in rent to overlook deadlocked traffic, commuting for an hour or corporations paying for floor space as what amounts to a frivolous amenity, you backed the wrong horse and will take a financial hit, whether I cheer or not won't change that fact one iota.
> Cities are now largely obsolete, unfortunately. They're a choice whereas before they were a necessity, and arguments about how much someone loves the diversity of a city to the contrary, the emptiness of these office buildings speaks for itself.
There are still plenty of physical-only things that cities exist for, and other benefits besides working. And when people talk about how much they love cities, office buildings are not the first thing that come to mind.
And all those benefits cease to exist if people don't have to be there all day just to pay their bills. You don't go to the city to eat deep dish pizza, you go there to work and get paid, the deep dish pizza is just there so you can enjoy your life while you're there and spend some of that money you made. The choice people appear to be making is that they'd rather pay for their own home office and cook their own deep dish pizza.
Cities aren't entirely nonviable, just nonviable in their current iteration from the current paradigm. Their main attraction is that you have to go there to make good money. If cities are to survive into the future, they have to change from that to being attractive to live in regardless of your source of income. The only viable jobs in a city are ones that require workers to be present for practical reasons, such as dockworkers and service workers, and cities have evolved into service economies that cater to information workers, which is nonviable in an age of global connectivity. To survive, housing has to be the largest market for real estate development. Cities have to be made more walkable alongside this transition. Most cities cannot afford to make such a transition because their tax bases would dry up and they'd go insolvent. Those that can, some of them won't make the hard choices before it is too late. I expect at some point some cities will do it and survive, albeit very changed and different.
What we are seeing is that with the proliferation of broadband internet, information workers don't need close proximity to one another. Cities are now largely obsolete, unfortunately. They're a choice whereas before they were a necessity, and arguments about how much someone loves the diversity of a city to the contrary, the emptiness of these office buildings speaks for itself.
I personally don't want to forcibly stagnate development to protect what amounts to unrealized losses becoming realized. The numbers are big, and so the impact is big, but fundamentally all this is is nonviable business models failing. If your pension relies on office buildings being full, if your city based it's investment plan on information workers requiring proximity to something physical, it was not viable, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that. I won't be forced into a life I don't want to save a city budget or someone's pension plan. Am I cheering? Sure, a little, but mostly I'm just looking at the situation pragmatically and realistically and seeing what's in front of me. If your retirement necessitates me paying thousands in rent to overlook deadlocked traffic, commuting for an hour or corporations paying for floor space as what amounts to a frivolous amenity, you backed the wrong horse and will take a financial hit, whether I cheer or not won't change that fact one iota.