At the end of the day, "talent" wants to live in big cities when they are in their 20s, but then want to move out of the cities and still keep their jobs in their 30s and 40s. Talent just wants literally as much freedom as possible to do what they want, when they want. The best approach is to be less concentrated and have offices in every major city. You want to move? We'll allow it but you have to find a new job based in that city, we aren't going to let you move when the rest of your team is still in your current city, it doesn't make sense from an efficiency standpoint.
The geographic population and wealth concentration problem isn't going to stop because of the pandemic. It may have temporarily slowed it down, but that's it. If you want to permanently slow down the trend UBI would go a long way. Giving everyone money would make it a lot more appealing to live in low cost of living areas.
People have been talking about the death of cities for a long time but we've continued to see cities doing well. We've had telecommuting for a long time and even suburbs for longer than that. Major cities have had ups and downs but they are still with us and we've seven seen suburbs become more city like with many building mixed use town centers. It's too early to say what COVID-19 will do to urbanism but I know from the architecture side that work has really picked up including high density projects. At the moment it still seems like there is a demand for urbanism.
A bit of a red state dream for megacities to decline... Commercial real estate will shift, but there will always be a demand for urban city life. It's why Houston's innerloop is growing more expensive and Austin's downtown is melting up. And that's Texas with its sprawl. People still want to live in California weather and its diverse cultural offerings even if Cost of Living is incredibly oppressive. The 18-40 crowd are marrying less and less and it's not because they want a peaceful home that's away from it all. The trend 10+ years ago was to tear down walls in order to let everyone co-mingle and share ideas. It's why Steve Jobs designed the floorplan in Apple to converge on food commons and resting areas. Proximity of like minded ambitious people is also why prestigious universities are fertile ground for ideas and innovation. It's also a benefit to cities in the sense that it's more efficient to fund niche interests when people congregate to them. I guess you can zoom in meetups for Russian Literature, but not the same as bouncing flashes of inspiration the next time you bump across a colleague at the coffee shop you frequent. That's still a digital work in progress as we don't have the means or tools to do that now. Personal anecdote, I haven't chatted with my co-workers since all of this went down. We're also going through a 2 month shitstorm of a release. So my personal belief is that working remotely can be gamed to look more productive but it shares the same pitfalls as before where the push for the final product is a disorganized dumpster fire. It's just that you don't bump into colleague from different department and pick each others brains in a casual non-confrontational setting. It's usually those small talk interactions that force people to look into assumptions or confirm that things underneath the meetings are working as intended. Or take WW84, a random question here or someone from outside the group asking why things went the other way would've probably made the movie tighter and sharper and not necessarily adding things but throwing out a lot of unneeded details. Just my theory on why it didn't come together...Every team brought a finished product while working remotely but didn't have enough human connections to make it all fit together in post production. *I make fun of Atlantic for throwing out artsy fartsy predictions that are more entertaining to think about than to bet for, but I doubt the writer ever lived in the bay or silly valley. There are tons of free meetups that openly share information just for the sake of it. You get drinks and some pizza while learning something new about a new and chaotic field. I think you can do that in austin about once or twice a month. At the bay, those things happen at least twice a week. It becomes a time/value constraint. That's only base level accessibility. If you have a working product, you can eventually make a pitch to people with more money than they know how to burn. Funny clickbaity heading....
