Americans flee crowded cities amid COVID-19, consider permanent moves

[MannyGlocks]

rev,

Fresh asparagus...love the lingering fragrance.

 

[oneharmonic]

COVID is going to change a lot of workplace habits, including reducing the need for employees to work out of a centralized office.

That naturally means people will move to areas where cost of living is lower, further away from population centers.

That's a good thing. You'll see consumer spending and tax dollars spread out further into suburbs, exurbs, and rural communities.

Limitations will naturally be the availability of high-speed connectivity via cellular and hardline. 5G will help that to some degree, but so will municipalities creating public utilities for connectivity. Sandy has SandyNet, which gives people very low cost options for fast connections. I have to pay Comcast 3x as much for the same speed in the suburbs.

 

[The Heretic]

5G and/or Starlink will be needed by anybody wanting to work where I live. Right now, I have 6.5 mbps, when I have anything at all. It is long distance wifi - a planar antenna on my roof that points to my neighbor's antenna, which points down into the valley to a link to Comcast. Usually it works, but more often than not it doesn't, or is slower than molasses.

I can usually do work with Git since that is just text, and most of my work was writing code locally, but there were times when I needed more bandwidth. If I was doing this full time all the time, I would need better than what I have now.

I would gladly pay $1/mbps up to $100 if I could get it now, more if I was gainfully employed and working solely from home as I could do a tax deduction for that.

But there are still a LOT of employers who will want their workers in an office whether they need to be there or not. I would like to work part time, 10-50% at my discretion - maybe a week or two a month - to fix bugs, do small projects to fill in - but it is looking like that isn't going to be possible.

I had hoped that it would be once I retired (on my timeline) but Daimler had their own plans in mind and didn't care for mine, so there is little hope that I could go back there anytime in the next year or two, and by the time they might consider it, the project codebase probably would not benefit from me being available as it will have morphed so much that I would really have that much value like I would now.

It is estimated that 40%+ of unemployed won't have a job to go back to.

I am betting that people my age will probably never get another job - at least not like they had before.

 

[Jcon268]

Get me out of here! Americans flee crowded cities amid COVID-19, consider permanent moves

Nearly a third of Americans are considering moving to a less densely populated area in the wake of the pandemic.

www.usatoday.com

I think the value of my property just shot up.

I'm glad I at least live in the suburbs. I'm 35 years old. When I was in my 20's all I wanted was to live in the city. I lived there for 5 years and realized it wasn't in my blood. I quickly came back out to where I grew up and bought a house in a community where most of my neighbors are retirement age. I would have moved even further out from the city but my wife and I both had to be relatively close to where we worked. My oh my how quickly things are changing. I'm glad I bought the house when I did even in a bubble market.

 

[The Heretic]

I paid ~$350K for my property in 2012.

I have taken $120K (my income, it was ~twice that when you count what the logger got paid) in timber off the land - more than half the acreage.

I put about $25K in improvements into the property so far, not including my time and sweat/blood (which was not inconsequential).

Today the land, house and shop are worth $450K+

If/when I sell, I will have more or less lived here for free due to appreciation.

IMO it has been a good investment.