Love your vision here. But why haven't real estate entrepreneurs been more incentivized to build for customers? Why is the competitive behavior so clustered around "generic suburbia" or "generic yuppie condo complex"?
I'm a fan of remote work, but I still think it's too soon to say that it has won the American labor market.
I have seen how companies are working in "hybrid" arrangements, and comp changes based on cost of living. I think the labor market effects of location and the draw of big cities will still be strong for a long time especially for non-superstar talent. "Weak ties" (Granovetter) still matter, and many of those still seem location dependent.
We'll know labor market and weak ties have been more evenly distributed once rich parents stop putting their kids in fancy urban prep schools!
Part of my theory is that for several reasons real estate development is especially prone to memetic imitation. I need to do a post developing this in more detail.
Because there’s such huge amounts of leverage, there is a lot of risk in trying anything new or unique. It’s almost like municipal incentives: there is no upside to trying anything new (they get paid the same either way usually, as a % of project cost) and huge downside to trying anything new - bankruptcy. I don’t know how much truth there is, but it feels right since developers tend to do the same type of project over and over if it works. I think an answer here is also the fact that due to restrictions on zoning and building, there will just always be less new housing built than people demand, so in some sense they can't really lose no matter what they build - people will buy whatever is available.
I definitely agree that remote work is not going to be a permanent phenomenon for a majority of people, at least not any time soon. Nor will it suddenly displace any of the major superstar cities - the agglomeration effects are too powerful for networks other than labor markets. But I think its transformative power lies in the fact that it makes new forms of weak ties possible. Even 5 years ago it would have been impossible for 1,000 people to form an online group and move to a new community that better fit their lifestyle while still maintaining a reasonable standard of living and income. Now those weak ties can develop or be maintained across distance and then coalesce into a physical location, either temporarily or permanently.
So I think it’s less about it transforming the entire labor force and more about the somewhat niche but interesting things it unlocks at the margins. It allows people to optimize for metrics other than just “availability of jobs”, whereas that was really the only metric that could be considered before.
It also seems like it would heighten competition between cities, which I think naturally leads to thinking about them in terms of Startup Cities. I know Balaji Srinivasan has talked about this, but I think mostly at the scale of nations. People can move to new places, which doesn’t always mean they will, but it means the option is there if someone is able to provide a more compelling value proposition than what currently exists.
Love your vision here. But why haven't real estate entrepreneurs been more incentivized to build for customers? Why is the competitive behavior so clustered around "generic suburbia" or "generic yuppie condo complex"?
I'm a fan of remote work, but I still think it's too soon to say that it has won the American labor market.
I have seen how companies are working in "hybrid" arrangements, and comp changes based on cost of living. I think the labor market effects of location and the draw of big cities will still be strong for a long time especially for non-superstar talent. "Weak ties" (Granovetter) still matter, and many of those still seem location dependent.
We'll know labor market and weak ties have been more evenly distributed once rich parents stop putting their kids in fancy urban prep schools!
Part of my theory is that for several reasons real estate development is especially prone to memetic imitation. I need to do a post developing this in more detail.
Because there’s such huge amounts of leverage, there is a lot of risk in trying anything new or unique. It’s almost like municipal incentives: there is no upside to trying anything new (they get paid the same either way usually, as a % of project cost) and huge downside to trying anything new - bankruptcy. I don’t know how much truth there is, but it feels right since developers tend to do the same type of project over and over if it works. I think an answer here is also the fact that due to restrictions on zoning and building, there will just always be less new housing built than people demand, so in some sense they can't really lose no matter what they build - people will buy whatever is available.
I definitely agree that remote work is not going to be a permanent phenomenon for a majority of people, at least not any time soon. Nor will it suddenly displace any of the major superstar cities - the agglomeration effects are too powerful for networks other than labor markets. But I think its transformative power lies in the fact that it makes new forms of weak ties possible. Even 5 years ago it would have been impossible for 1,000 people to form an online group and move to a new community that better fit their lifestyle while still maintaining a reasonable standard of living and income. Now those weak ties can develop or be maintained across distance and then coalesce into a physical location, either temporarily or permanently.
So I think it’s less about it transforming the entire labor force and more about the somewhat niche but interesting things it unlocks at the margins. It allows people to optimize for metrics other than just “availability of jobs”, whereas that was really the only metric that could be considered before.
It also seems like it would heighten competition between cities, which I think naturally leads to thinking about them in terms of Startup Cities. I know Balaji Srinivasan has talked about this, but I think mostly at the scale of nations. People can move to new places, which doesn’t always mean they will, but it means the option is there if someone is able to provide a more compelling value proposition than what currently exists.