So here’s the thing: our cities suck. For over seventy years now, we’ve been building and rebuilding our cities for cars, not people. There’s some other not car related problems, but a lot of the issues with our cities that make them terrible have at least one foot in car dependency. On top of that, they tend to be wildly expensive (the reasons for this vary, but generally trace back to too much demand for housing and not enough supply). Used to be, people put up with it for the sake of job opportunities, but remork work kind of blew that whole equation to hell. So, if the city sucks to live in, it’s unaffordable, and you don’t have to be there for your job, what would keep you there? Most people did that calculus and figured they’d be better off packing their bags for Star’s Hollow or Mayberry, where at least the houses are affordable.

In some cases, you’ve got cities like San Francisco that have hitched their fortunes to being business centers first and places where people live second. Technology was always going to eat these places’ lunch in the long run, it just happened a lot faster than anyone expected because of COVID. So now, with these business cities lacking their daily bread and butter of hordes of commuters and visitors, businesses that depended on / supported those people are floundering. So far, the plan I’ve seen from San Francisco is “white-knuckle it and hope [magic] causes things to go back to normal”. In some cases, businesses got fat tax breaks on their campuses in exchange for the business that their workers would bring to the area, so cities are leaning on those businesses to end WFH, but that’s a band-aid of a fix if I ever saw one.

Where do they go from here? If cities want to win people over, they have to realize that they no longer have a captive populace, and they have to make themselves into places that people actually want to live in. They need to remake themselves into environments that are built for humans instead of cars, provide affordable housing, allow for much smaller or more personal commerce (I’m thinking of Japan’s micro-shops and restaurants that line their alleys and streets), and hitch themselves to the needs of people before the needs of commercial real estate. I think it’s going to happen whether they like it or not due to market forces, the only question is whether they realize it now or flounder on for another two decades before they take the right actions.