I’m in the UK and have been fully remote since before the pandemic. After the pandemic my family and I moved from London to Newcastle upon Tyne. What this move has made really clear is that not all cities are made equal.

London is huge and expensive. In order to live in a nice area close enough to the centre to make commuting easy you’re looking at over £1M for a family home. It is an incredibly busy and fairly dirty city that has a culture of sticking your head down and not interacting with those around you. It also is a cultural powerhouse with some of the best restaurants, theatre and museums in the world. When we decided to move we were quite anxious we would miss this even though we couldn’t afford to actually make use of it very much.

Newcastle has surpassed my expectations in every way. It is incredibly welcoming, people go out of their way to interact with you in the street. It is small enough that we can live in the city and have all the associated amenities yet not break the bank. I can cycle into town, pick something up from a shop and be back at my desk within an hour’s lunch break. Our cost of living is massively reduced and our quality of life has gone up tremendously. We have been to more theatre and museums since moving because we have more disposable income. And with the saved money we can afford to visit London and make use of its culture a few times a year.

What I’m trying to get at with this big rambling story is that I hope one of the results of the pandemic is that smaller, more accessible and more affordable cities become more popular.

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.