Our local business journal syndicated a brief interview with Richard Florida regarding his optimism about the future of American cities:
https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2024/03/28/a-revolution-amid-the-reckoning.html
One thing that stuck out to me as rather jarring was his discussion of “return to office.” He (rightly, I hope) acknowledges that remote work is here to stay. But he doesn’t mention one of the biggest advantages to remote work: there’s no commute.
I don’t care how nice an office building is, or what amenities it has. Unless my employer plans on including my commute as part of my work day, remote work will be more attractive, as it allows me to devote fewer hours of my day to work. That’s compounded for workers with families. Most of us live in the same community where our kids go to school. For any child-related obligations (parent-teacher conferences, after school activities, doctor’s appointments, school assemblies), working in an office building away from the home extracts an additional toll on working parents, as they have to take time off work not only for the obligation itself, but also for the commute from work to school and back. That means that a twenty-minute parent-teacher conference often requires ninety minutes of time off work (instead of the thirty it requires if your school is a five-minute walk away). The same holds true if a parent wants to leave work early to watch their child’s soccer game: in addition to the time from work, they have to add in the additional time it takes to get from the office building back to their residential neighborhood.
I’ll follow up on some thoughts for what remote work could look like if we corrected our fixation on single-family-residential zoning.
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