Whatever Happened to the Remote Work Revolution?

ChatGPT was released a few months ago by OpenAI, one of the country’s most influential artificial-intelligence research laboratories and since then we all have been reading about how the future of white collar employment will be changed forever. Goldman Sachs released their AI report on economic growth last week and they predict 300 million jobs will be lost to automation.

I doubt it will happen overnight. The current AI hype will die down and people will be pleasantly surprised by the extent to which AI doesn’t lead to them losing their job, then some years later there will be a recession and they’ll get laid off for general recession reasons and then there’s just no rehiring because AI will have replaced their job.

The CEO of ChatGPT is pushing Universal Basic Income as an alternative to people working jobs that AI has replaced. Very smart people are taking this seriously. This new vision of the future doesn’t look very optimistic. It sounds like a lot of disarray, unemployment and waiting for government to help catch up and help out. This vision does not spark joy.

The AI future replaced a previous, more optimistic vision that came out of the 2020 pandemic: The remote work future. White collar workers could choose to live wherever they wanted and design their own life. Cities, towns, rural areas in America would be transformed by this exodus out of high price coastal areas. Family formation could be easier. That Remote Work Future that never happened.

In this Newsletter I will cover:

1) The initial rush to zoom towns in 2020 and 2021

2) Why did this Remote Work experiment end in 2022 and 2023?

3) The essential problem with New American Urbanism. Why do American cities feel so strange compared to other cities?

Zoom Towns

When Covid hit America in March 2020, it whipped up the past 40 years of urban change on steroids. Zoom meant that people could literally just choose where they wanted to live. So that’s exactly what they did. Some people left the coastal cities and moved back home to be near their family. Others left and went to the interior of the United States.

People went to places like Bozeman, Bloomington, Moab, Missoula, etc

beautiful but far from the country’s traditional tech and finance hubs.

They boomed during the pandemic, offering remote knowledge workers small-town charms and a chance to make their paychecks go far. Or many relocated to “consumer cities,” drawn by the lifestyle rather than the job market. These cities tend to be smaller, with vibrant downtowns that are often connected to local colleges and universities. Like Bloomington Indiana. 

The possibilities were endless in 2020 and 2021. 50 percent of white collar workers went remote. This is a huge mass of people that could affect entire areas at scale. There is a devastating housing crisis and homes are extremely expensive. That is because those few areas are where the big jobs are. Remote unlocks geographic mobility.

New villages, towns, and small cities became way easier to imagine. Affordable places, with people with families who could live there. An intentional community who can decide on amenities, downtowns and stores.

America has done this recently, with the Villages in Florida. But that’s a retirement community. Or a Texas town called McKinney that tried to model itself after a Croatian village. But that was dreamed up by a developer who enjoyed going to Croatia on holiday. Not by a community of people who moved there en-masse and invested in a bottom-up process.

all the lower 48 states is covered in a gird of villages on about a 10 x 10 mile spacing. Sometimes closer. If I had to guess, most villages are not increasing or barely increasing in population. A totally forgotten world, many have no idea these 1000s and 1000s of places even exist.

Local service workers would migrate to these new towns. The demand for plumbers, manual labor, restaurants, and barbers would bring in skilled workers from other areas.

Layoffs and Return to the Office

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.