Richard Florida, who got famous for telling cities they needed to increase their densities to attract what he called the “creative class” of workers, now admits (in an article in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal) that the future of work is in a small town in Oregon. I happen to live near that town and pass through it several times a year. It is so small that, from the highway, you wouldn’t know you were in a town if it were not for the sign.
The Job Capital of America. Photo by Peggy Rowe-Snyder (Pegro62).
Yet that town today is the location of so many advertised jobs that it has been called “the job capital of America.” The town’s name is Remote, and apparently it is the only town in the country with that name. So whenever anyone advertises for “remote workers,” some job web sites assume they mean Remote, Oregon.
Richard Florida clearly isn’t referring specifically to this Oregon hamlet in his WSJ article about remote work, but he might as well be when considered in contrast to his previous support for density. He points out that, as rents are falling and vacancies rising in classically dense cities such as Boston, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, the opposite is happening in smaller, lower-density cities such as Albuquerque, Boise, Chesapeake, Fresno, Gilbert, and Greensboro. These aren’t as small as Remote, but Albuquerque and Fresno each have only about half a million people while the other four are about 200,000 to 250,000 people.
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While the headline to Florida’s article says that this is “reshaping America’s urban geography,” even he admits that it really just “accelerates a trend that has been under way for years.” That trend has been that people have preferred living in smaller, lower-density communities and have moved to such areas as soon as they had the opportunity. The increased remote work resulting from the pandemic makes it possible for more people to do so today.
Although Richard Florida has seen the handwriting on the urban-growth boundary, others have not. Some are still advocating for density, apparently for no other reason than that it is possible for cities to be denser than they already are. But even as Denver and Portland and San Diego and Seattle subsidized four- and five-story mixed-use developments, the majority of Millennials and every other generation (except people over 80) continued to settle in the suburbs. Even as Florida’s followers preached the virtues of vibrant inner cities, the Gallup poll found that 40 percent of the people living in big cities would rather live somewhere else while more people wanted to live in suburbs and rural areas than actually lived there.
Florida still gets a little moralistic at the end of his article. More telecommuters in smaller communities, he says, will mean more tax revenues for those communities, which “holds out the possibility of a better, more virtuous circle of economic development.” “Virtuous” is in the eye of the beholder, but it sounds like Florida is saying that communities that see increased telecommuting need to use their tax revenues for some “virtuous” purpose like, I don’t know, reducing auto driving or increasing public transit. Maybe I’m reading too much between the lines, but to me the only virtue is in letting more people live the way they want to live.
Up north in Greeley for my first Covid jab, I decided to drive another hour to Cheyenne. It looks like a pretty decent place to live. No expensive light rail but they do have bus service. From their website:
Fixed Route Service
The Cheyenne Transit Program (CTP) is the public transportation provider for the City of Cheyenne. Our goal is to provide the best possible transportation service to our customers.
CTP’s fixed route service operates Monday – Friday, 6 a.m. – 7 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
No service is provided on Sunday.
Fares $1.50
Students $1.25 (under 18)
5 & Under Free
Transfers Free
Cheyenne’s a nice town if you don’t mind some winter.
But it’s a dry cold, right?
Really, I’m not fond of either temperature extreme but hate humidity. Denver is just about the perfect climate for me. Albuquerque would also be fine weather-wise but they have an inexplicitly high crime rate. Well, not really inexplicitly: it has an almost complete one-party lock on all state and federal offices.
Or you can move to the high desert clime of Camp Sherman, where The Antiplanner lives. It’s dry, but close enough to wet and the ocean. You can also extol the virtues of diversity while living on a property valued at $503,000 to $611,000 in a 100% white community.
“Albuquerque would also be fine weather-wise but they have an inexplicitly high crime rate.”
What’s inexplicable about having a massive surplus of 80iq mestizo Mexicans, many of them illegals, that glorify gang “culture” and deal drugs?
You can also extol the virtues of diversity while living…in a 100% white community.
That sounds like Portland or Eugene. Isn’t Portland the whitest big city in the US?
I have a friend who lives in Bend and, indeed, the weather there is very nice. But unfortunately it too is being overrun by San Franciscans and New Yorkers fleeing their craphole states then voting for the exact same policies that made their old states crapholes in the first place.
Cheyenne got three feet of snow yesterday. It’s a natural barrier to many of those statists moving there.
Portland might be the whitest big city, but it’s no longer as white as it used to be. It was 98.1% white in 1940, and by 2019, that had fallen to 70.6% white. (Eugene is nearly identical in its percentages and shift.) This demographic shift correlates to massive social problems Portland’s now seeing.
Drove through Portland a week ago, and from the Columbia to downtown, every square inch of concrete wall along I-5 was covered in graffiti, and tents and make-shift shelters filled the hills along those walls the entire way. There were dozens of fires burning and trash strewn everywhere. It’s not the beautiful city I remember. It has become a third-world shithole on par with Tijuana; guess this is “progress” to the city’s “progressive” government and voters.
Bend is far whiter than Portland at 92.5% white. Yes, it’s pretty much Bend, California now. Yes, there are more liberals now, but Deschutes County is even whiter, and rural areas or small towns more conservative and even libertarian, which adds some balance. For now.
I hope all the transplants, especially progressives and those from the ghetto, pick up stakes and go back to their own shitholes. The weather is sucky in that it can frost any month of the year, but there’s a lot of sun, little rain, and the most beautiful rivers and mountains.
I can see Wyoming being a great place to go Galt. Someone I’ve interacted with on another libertarian site owns a bar there. Sounds like the COVID tyranny was minimal, especially compared to the People’s Republik of the Left Coast.
I prefer living in a city and Cheyenne’s the only one in Wyoming that qualifies, size-wize. And barely. But I have no illusions that it will remain unwoke forever. CO too was a true purple state when I moved here 40 years ago and it also had a very large libertarian contingent. That political balance is now gone and will never return. I just need Wyoming to hang on to their political independence another 30 years or so.