LogFAQs > #960361626

adjl posted...

I'm not so much thinking of the ultra-wealthy (they'll continue to live wherever they want; remote work becoming more common has no impact on them because they could already decide to do it whenever they wanted to) as I am the upper-middle class/lower end of rich: Those that are comfortably able to afford high prices for decent housing in cities, but could still see some improvements to their quality of life by moving somewhere where they could get the same sort of home for cheaper. They're going to be inclined to move to places where housing costs have been relatively low because of a lack of high-paying local jobs, if they can continue to work in their high-paying job remotely. That, in turn, drives those housing prices up (not necessarily as high as the cities these people are leaving, since that would kill the demand, but still higher than they were), which is a problem for locals for whom there simply aren't local jobs that pay well enough to afford that housing.

You're not generally going to see people moving to the middle of nowhere (though small coastal towns may see some of it) or anywhere that's otherwise undesirable to live in, but nice places that just don't have the kind of high-paying jobs moderately wealthy people are occupying will attract those that are no longer limited by that.

Unfortunately I think that is true. The sad reality is that most people won't even consider trying to move to the fly-over states even if their job is 100% remote and they can get housing for cheap and such. On the plus side this won't disrupt the local 'ecology' of people, but on the down side all it really means is that we'll see the problems of places like San Fran and LA move out to other towns.