WFH - “Work from home,” as in: COVID-era policies of (mostly tech jobs) being administered outside of a central office building.
I was entirely in favor of WFH and the struggle of office workers up until recently. Although my career is functionally incompatible with the idea, I had sympathy for members of my class and supported them fighting against an archaic and unnecessarily authoritative policy of office attendance.
BUT.
WFH-ers and West/East Coast refugees have decimated historically low income communities by flooding to parts of the Southeast and Midwest with salaries that were meant to be competitive in an urban environment, where COL is always going to be higher, and pricing out/displacing local (oftentimes minority) populations. Anecdotally, I’ve seen rental prices more than triple in my hometown within the past four years, with no real wage increases for local groups in what can only be called gentrification.
This isn’t my wording, see:
VICE | Digital Nomads Are the New Gentrifiers
You can’t have your cake and eat it, too, as the saying goes, and I just can’t defend the people who have destroyed local economies. Even if that animosity goes against class solidarity, which I do agree with, the damage WFH has done is too direct and too severe for me to support it.
Edit: I’ve spent the past hour thinking about this post and have thought of a more succinct way to express my argument:
If I want the best for historically low-income communities, and the following are both true:
A) Gentrification is bad for historically low-income communities, and
B) WFH policies have facilitated gentrification, then
it logicially follows that WFH is bad for historically low-income communities and that I should be opposed to WFH policies.
This is the process rationale behind my argument.
You’re against policies that allow them to live where they want working for a company they enjoy. The policies work in favor of them, it’s clear you’re just resentful that they are doing alright and found a way to live comfortably.
I’ll switch this around. A hypothetical. You have a nice lake next to your town. Randomly tomorrow it’s featured on “Boating Monthly”, a blog for rich kids who own boats. The come in, buy the land around the lake, and do the exact same thing. The cost of land goes up, it becomes a tourist stop overnight where rich tourists come and stay, they buy property and start charging exorbitant amounts for rent. Small grocery stores and dollar stores can’t stay open and are replaces with Trader Joes, Whole Foods, and Amazon Go stores so food and goods go up in cost. Cost of living as a normal person is suddenly 3 or 4 times as high.
Is this not the same argument your making, that people who came in drove up the cost of living? You just don’t have your scapegoat of WFH policies this time. So I say again - is there a policy you want to blame while being envious of those people - or are misplacing the blame that should be put on local politicians, landlords, and others in charge locally who should be putting in place protections?
That is where I want you to really think about your views.