remote work

Feudal Future Podcast — Challenges and Solutions for California's Economy

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 18:57:00 -0500

Is California losing its status as a global innovation powerhouse? Join us for a compelling conversation with Dr. Ken Murphy as we explore the shifting dynamics of California’s economic landscape. We question whether the iconic tech hub is maintaining its edge or if it’s at risk of devolving into a neo-feudalist economy. While Silicon Valley continues to thrive, other regions like Los Angeles and Sacramento face significant hurdles. Dive deep into the challenges of remote work, high operational costs, and regulatory burdens that could threaten California’s standing in high-tech industries.

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The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.

Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.

For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.

Tweet thoughts: @joelkotkin, @mtoplansky, #FeudalFuture #BeyondFeudalism

Learn more about Joel’s book ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism‘

This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.

Largest San Francisco Shopping Center Sheds Value, Tenants

Wendell Cox — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 13:13:59 -0500

A San Francisco Chronicle article (“S.F.’s biggest mall lost nearly $1 billion in property value after retail exodus”) indicates that the San Francisco Centre, the city’s largest shopping center, has been appraised at a value of $290 million, down from $1.2 billion in 2016. The Centre now has a vacancy rate of about 50%, having seen recent store closings such as Nordstrom’s (a 35 year tenant).

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Austin Leads Working at Home Commute Share: 2022

Wendell Cox — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:49:45 -0400

The just released American Community Survey indicates that 28.0% of the commuters in the Austin metropolitan area work from home, which is the highest figure among the 56 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population). Austin displaces last year’s leader, San Francisco.

The table below lists the 10 major metropolitan areas with the largest work from home shares in 2022. Each of these metropolitan areas has been rated as a tech hub by industry publications.

WORK FROM HOME MARKET SHARE: 2022
Major Metropolitan Area	Work from Home
Austin, TX	28.0%
San Francisco, CA	27.0%
Raleigh, NC	26.1%
Washington, DC-A-MD-WV	25.4%
Seattle, WA	25.4%
San Jose, CA	24.4%
Denver, CO	23.7%
Portland, OR-WA	23.3%
Charlotte, NC-SC	22.3%
Phoenix, AZ	21.7%
Source: American Community Survey: 2022

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Feudal Future Podcast: The Future of Work

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 17:56:10 -0400

On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by American writer, Michael Lind, to discuss the future of work.

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Latest Research: From Chapman’s Center of Demographics & Policy, Joel Kotkin & Marshall Toplansky co-author the new report on Nurturing California Industries.

If you haven’t downloaded the report, see it here

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Support Our Work

The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.

For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.

Tweet thoughts: @joelkotkin, @mtoplansky, #FeudalFuture #BeyondFeudalism

Learn more about Joel’s book ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism‘

Chicago is One Kind of Town

Tim W. Ferguson — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 11:41:24 -0400

The geographical resorting of America continues apace–the separation of peoples based broadly on ideology. You see this population movement on both coasts, accentuated by the pandemic and remote work.

It’s about other things, of course–costs, space, weather–but it’s a lot about politics. And after Tuesday’s mayoral election result in Chicago (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/us/elections/chicago-mayor-election-brandon-johnson.html), we can expect more resorting in the middle of the country. A majority of the closely-divided city electorate chose a higher-tax, less-policing candidate backed by most of the powerful public-employee unions. On top of the immediate worries that conservative Chicagoans might have, there’s the ongoing pensions deficit that the city, Cook County and the state of Illinois (also dominated by Democrats of the left) are running, which is a lien on taxpayers who hang around.

Unless attempts succeed to garnish the higher income of fleeing residents (moves under consideration in a few states), or a bailout from Washington is forthcoming, Illinoisans-in-place are squarely under this cloud. So the movement into “two Americas” can expect another rush. I don’t know whether this pace and degree of separation is unprecedented (obviously blacks had reason to escape the Antebellum and Jim Crow South) or necessarily harmful on balance in such an already-sundered society, but it is happening nonetheless.

This piece first appeared on Tim W. Ferguson blog.

Tim W. Ferguson, the former editor of Forbes’s Asia edition, writes about business, economics and society.

Wall Street Journal Gets US Commute Times Wrong

Wendell Cox — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 18:27:31 -0500

A March 1, 2023 article entitled As Americans Work From Home, Europeans and Asians Head Back to the Office appeared as the lead in the Wall Street Journal’s “In Today’s Paper” internet newsletter. The article noted:

“Suburban sprawl means many Americans have longer, more tedious commutes plagued by worsening traffic jams—another reason to stay home. While a number of European cities also have long average commutes, New York and Chicago are unmatched, according to mobility-services company Moovit Inc. Public-transit systems in Europe and Asia are often more reliable and less prone to delays, making it easier to get to work.”

I submitted a comment to The Wall Street Journal disputing this paragraph, which was about the 505th on the list.

“On the contrary, US commuting times are generally lower than elsewhere in the world, unlike indicated in this article. See for example: https://www.newgeography.com/content/002217-the-transportation-politics-envy-the-united-states-europe. The article only cites transit commuting times, when in most major urban areas a sizeable share of commuting is by car, which is generally faster than transit. The keys to the shorter commute times in the US are greater use of cars and dispersed employment. Lower densities (pejoratively referred to as sprawl) do not increase commute times, they reduce them (https://fcpp.org/files/1/PS135_Transit_MY15F3.pdf, table 8).

US Work Trip Access in 2021 (Journey to Work Data)

Wendell Cox — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 15:17:23 -0500

The following table provides US work access data for the 56 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population). A previous article highlighted the huge increase telework access (working from home).

Teleworking tripled from pre-pandemic 2019 to 2021 to 17.9 percent. The 2019 figure had been the highest ever recorded (5.7 percent). At the same time, transit use fell by approximately one-half, to 2.5 percent, the lowest ever recorded.

There was also a record decline in auto use, principally because commuters were telecommuting in much larger numbers.

Photo: Las Vegas Urban Area, with 71% of Nevada’s population, it is the 5th densest major urban area in the United States as of 2020 (following San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, New York and Honolulu. Credit: Stan Shebs, downtown Las Vegas, Nevada via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

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SIlicon Valley VC Firm Moves Headquarters to Cloud

Wendell Cox — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 17:44:53 -0400

The latest California corporate headquarters move is to the cloud. Venture capital firm Andreeson Horowitz made the July 21 announcement, which was also reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the Journal: “…its new headquarters would be in the cloud after a pandemic driven shift to remote work changed the need to be concentrated in one geographic region.”

In the announcement, co-founder Ben Horowitz noted that “Silicon Valley became the place that attracted most of the great national and international talent,” but that the adoption of remote work during the pandemic proved have substantial advantages:

“It turns out that running a technology company remotely works pretty darned well. It’s not perfect, but mitigating the cultural issues associated with remote work turns out to be easier than mitigating the employee satisfaction issues associated with forcing everyone into the office 5 days/week. As a result, nearly every technology company has moved to a remote or hybrid approach to work and this change is profoundly weakening the Silicon Valley network effect.”

For Andreeson Horowitz, the answer is principally a remote work model:

“Concentrating all of those companies into one or two geographies cuts off great opportunities from anyone who can contribute, but cannot easily move. Remote work is opening up many new locations for entrepreneurs and technology workers. We embrace that by changing our own operating model.”

Horowitz added: “headquarters will be in the cloud and we will continue to create physical offices globally where needed to support our teams and partners.”

Hudson Yards Developer Builds Units for Hybrid Schedule Top Executives

Wendell Cox — Thu, 19 May 2022 13:33:38 -0400

Related Companies, developer of Hudson Yards in New York, the largest private real estate development in the nation’s history has announced a 270 housing units geared toward the needs of top management executives working hybrid schedules. This would provide such executives housing nearby their offices when they work in the city, splitting their work schedules with remote work from home or elsewhere at other times. Peter Grant describes the project in a Wall Street Journal article that also summarizes similar high-amenity executive products under offer by other companies. The full article is here.

Downtown San Francisco Happy Hours; Thursday is the New Friday

Wendell Cox — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 15:05:16 -0400

Chase DiFeliciantonio reports in the March 28, 2020 San Francisco Chronicle that efforts to attract office workers back to downtown San Francisco, and consequently to restore the busy “happy hours” at bars are faltering. “Monday and especially Fridays are seeing less foot traffic downtown, which makes midweek after-work happy hours more likely. Some people still working from home are also choosing neighborhood saloons closer to home rather than venturing to other parts of town.”

A financial district bar owner characterized the phenomenon of a packed bar after work is “not dead, but in a coma.”

A bartender aid that “Thursday is the new Friday.”

The article also referred to research findings predicting that workers will use “three midweek days for in-office work, while working remotely on Mondays and Fridays.”