Working Remotely and Transferring The place Housing Is Inexpensive
What if the state helped workers move to where housing was cheaper instead of adding new housing to accommodate workers in one area? Decoupling the choice of housing from the workplace offers employees an immediate opportunity to reduce their housing costs. It can also offer the greatest opportunity to reduce the state’s carbon footprint by reducing the daily commute.
The experience of responding to the coronavirus has prompted companies to introduce or expand remote work in their operations. One estimate found that approximately 42 percent of the American workforce was working full-time from home during the pandemic. As a result, this has had a strong impact on many rental markets: Since March 2020, the median rent in San Francisco has fallen by almost 25 percent, and rents have also fallen or at least flattened in Oakland, Los Angeles and San Diego.
In a way, for the companies affected by stay-at-home orders, the pandemic was a forced pilot program to evaluate various network and communication technologies. The result of the experience is that companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Morgan Stanley will expand their previous program to permanently introduce a remote working arrangement for some employees. They do this because the new teleworking technologies generally offer businesses ways to save money. We can therefore assume that even after the end of the pandemic and the safe return to the office, companies will continue to use remote access work more widely and to decentralize their corporate structure.
Moving to affordable housing is just one benefit of working from home.
Another reason companies are likely to renew teleworking contracts is because they are popular with employees. A survey found that three quarters of employees would like to continue working from home for at least several days a week, and one third said they would like to work from home every day. In addition, in the same survey, around 28 percent of workers said that if they could work remotely indefinitely, it is at least somewhat likely that they would move to a new city or state.
Workers living in communities with high housing stocks can solve the housing problem by voting with their feet. More distant communities with lower housing costs could become alternatives for workers who do not have to commute on a daily basis. For example, according to Trulia, the average cost of housing for Santa Maria and Lompoc in 2019 is $ 388,000 and $ 350,000, respectively. In contrast, the cost of a home in Santa Barbara is $ 1,105,000 and in Goleta is $ 779,500. These parishes are approximately 1 hour apart (55-65 miles). More separate is New Cuyama, which is on the other side of the Santa Ynez Mountains from Santa Barbara, with driving times of about two hours or 120 miles apart. The average home cost there is $ 156,500, or nearly $ 1 million less than the cost of a home in Santa Barbara. To the extent that employees do not have to regularly count in an office but work from home and only occasionally go to the main office or a smaller remote office, they can live further away from the company, avoid commuting costs and have a wider reach of communities to live.
Is this a solution to the housing shortage that the state wants to promote? The state can begin by helping companies assess the benefits and challenges of working remotely for them. The state can offer tax credits or deductions to companies to help cover the cost of a restructuring plan to decentralize its workforce and office space. The state could also offer tax breaks for workers relocating within California, which may benefit some counties or cities more than others, where the region’s benefits – improving the imbalance between jobs and housing – are great.
While the state’s goal may be to control the impact of this communications technology force that motivates corporate management decisions, it does not want to guarantee the destruction of its cities. Cities will invariably be severely affected by worker brain drain. School districts are built to support a certain number of children, so reduced student numbers can result in the district closing schools. Cities plan the expected water, road and wastewater consumption based on the assumed number of inhabitants. In addition, it can be profitable for some companies to reduce their office space if they allow their employees to work from home. These decisions can have serious consequences for the local economy: undermining city tax revenues, reducing office construction, and reducing the profitability of nearby restaurants and shops.
The state can support cities in a variety of ways. It can help cities develop containment plans to make a transition less painful. While some migration can be beneficial for a city to reduce high rents and overcrowding, cities may consider repurposing empty office space and shopping malls and redesigning their inner city. These new climate protection plans could form the basis for a new partnership between the cities and the countryside. Finally, the state should adjust the cities’ obligations under state housing laws, which oblige cities and counties to plan to increase housing numbers.
The expansion of long-distance employment offers the state the possibility of lowering housing costs and expanding housing options without providing the residential areas with massive, high-density housing, which would significantly change the character of the community. It can help reduce CO2 emissions.
Stuart Kasdin is a member of the Goleta City Council and teaches Political Science at Santa Barbara City College. This article is part 5 of an on-going series on the road to affordable housing.
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