
Remote Workers Should Move to College Towns - realbarack
https://blog.zachwf.com/2020/05/hey-you-with-remote-jobwant-to-live-in.html
======
whateveracct
I don't want to live near college kids -_-

~~~
AtlasBarfed
The restaurants per capita are so much better in a town like, say, Bloomington
Indiana than an equivalent community in population without a large university.

You aren't moving there for the students, you're moving there for the
professors and grad students and associated intellectual staff.

------
n4r9
> American office-workers now work completely from home; this policy will last
> until the end of 2020 for many and will likely shift millions of office jobs
> to fully-remote workers.

Justifying the word "likely" is key here, surely?

~~~
realbarack
Fair criticism. I don't have a confident estimate for the number of new remote
employees, but here's a hand-wavy one: one third of the 130M US jobs can be
done remotely [0]. 20% of CFOs expect about 20% of their workforce to be
remote in the future [1]. Assuming a uniform distribution across company sizes
and no other remote jobs outside of those 20%, we'd expect 1/3 * 130M * 1/5 *
1/5 = 1.75M new remote jobs.

The assumptions here are obviously strong and wrong but it does seem like "low
millions" is probably the right order of magnitude.

Moreover we can expect highly-regarded companies like Facebook and Twitter to
be bellwethers for the rest of industry. If their remote work experiments
succeed, I suspect expansion will follow rapidly (I expect the reverse if they
fail).

[0] [https://news.uchicago.edu/story/much-us-staying-home-how-
man...](https://news.uchicago.edu/story/much-us-staying-home-how-many-jobs-
can-be-done-remotely) [1]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/ezequielminaya/2020/04/03/cfos-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ezequielminaya/2020/04/03/cfos-
plan-to-permanently-shift-significant-numbers-of-employees-to-work-remotely---
survey/#1a7448d9575b)

~~~
n4r9
Thanks for the response. I wonder how many of the 1/3 in the first article can
be done _fully_ remote, i.e. without needing to come in once or twice a week,
which might make moving out of the city less attractive. The uniform
distribution seems strong too... at $50m revenue it feels like you're looking
at big businesses which have a lot more leeway for offering remote positions.
How many of the 130m jobs belong to such big businesses? It all seems pretty
hard to predict.

------
mohamedhayibor
Nope. A good rule of thumb: where people go to retire + good internet. There
are other factors but this one gets you far.

------
xhkkffbf
Nice idea. Too bad the retirees didn't figure it out twenty years ago when
they started bidding up the price of real estate in these little shangri las.
The best parts of Hanover NH (Dartmouth) rival Palo Alto in price. And gosh,
Palo Alto IS a college town first. The same for Cambridge, MA.

------
zeruch
Why? To drive up the COL for students more?

------
lol_jono
And drive up the rent in the area such that college kids can't afford to rent
anything?

~~~
jhayward
"college kids" have more disposable income than just about any other segment
of society outside the top couple of %.

~~~
thomasmeeks
Source? Top percent cutoff is about ~700k/yr, top 5% cutoff is ~300k/yr, and
top 10% is ~100k/yr. This is for the entire US.
([https://www.epi.org/blog/top-1-0-percent-reaches-highest-
wag...](https://www.epi.org/blog/top-1-0-percent-reaches-highest-wages-ever-
up-157-percent-since-1979/))

TBH I can see an argument for a college student living at home with low
expenses, a job, and/or plenty of loans having more disposable income than 90%
of the population. But I’d hesitate to call that the average student
experience. The average student income seems to be around $25k/yr as best as I
can find on a quick search.

I don’t see how the math works out for your average student to have more
disposable income than someone making 300k/yr. How does that work?

~~~
legerdemain
I think the claim, as it's typically presented, is that college students don't
pay their own rent, so they are not sensitive to the expense. Affluent parents
driving the demand for dilapidated student housing leads to local inflation.

Taken to extremes, this is an absurd claim. Lots of college students pay for
their own expenses and are obviously very sensitive to cost. But you generally
do see higher rents and worse housing in college towns.

~~~
megameter
It's an aggregate of parents, scholarships and loans, not just any one of
those things. Plenty of students spend an unwise chunk of their loan money on
consumer goods and housing, since they want those experiences _now_. At the
same time there are also thrifty students and homeless students who are just
barely getting by. A lot of different types of people go through large
universities, and I think the appeal and the cost is much like big cities in
that respect.

