Working from home the new normal?

The Googleplex. Perhaps there will be some downsizing or slower footprint growth if working from home
becomes more permanent. // photo by Steve Jurveston

With many tech jobs announcing extended work from home policies, what does it mean for the dynamic of housing in the future?

First of all, like I have mentioned before, people should be given the freedom to choose whether they would like to continue to shelter or not, and this is further proof that lifting shelter in place orders does not mean everyone would suddenly rush back to the office all at once. The notion some people have that if something is not enforced by the government, people will all rush in to do it, is simply false.

It's not limited to the tech space either. My office has announced that they will allow people to continue to work from home even when the order is lifted, should employees prefer to do so.

With many places continuing working from home, and some even seeing productivity gains by working from home, this may become a protracted new paradigm. How will people migrate? How will people decide to live and work? How would this free people?

I think this is a fantastic development, though the catalyst has unfortunately, been a deadly virus.

With the housing crisis still very much a thing, virtual workplaces makes the world much closer together. Imagine the surfer aficionado who works in Mountain View. He rents a one bedroom apartment close by the Google campus for $2500/mo. Now he moves to Santa Cruz to a similar apartment for $2000/mo, saving $6000 a year while improving his quality of life. His commute is actually shorter now, with a walk from his bed to his computer, instead of a 10 minute drive to work.

Or how about a young couple wanting to buy a house to start a family? They may have been considering a modest $2 million house built in the 1960s thirty minutes from work or a brand new fully loaded house an hour and a half away from work for $600,000. With working at home and maybe going into the office once a week or once every other week, that is suddenly much more feasible.

While previously, the solution to the housing crisis was looking for higher and higher densities, this paradigm shift may show that the opposite may happen. Sprawl. The four letter word of architecture and planning.

But if sprawl no longer means busier highways and increased car usage, it suddenly is not quite as bad as it has been previously. Instead of trying to bring housing into urban areas, the solution may really lie in bringing offices into residential areas.

Sure, the majority of jobs likely still need to go to a physical location. Sure, the jurisdictions will still enact terrible regulations to stifle housing stock increases. But even if only 10% of the roughly 800,000 tech jobs were to follow through with this, that's still around 160,000 fewer car trips every day. That's still a lot of households no longer needing to buy houses in a certain dense hotspot whose jurisdictions consistently beat back against housing, making it extremely costly to build.

Mechanisms that allow people to escape the jurisdictions that have made home ownership financially untenable can only help people struggling with living costs, even those that remain. It will be interesting to see where and how housing shifts in the upcoming years.