WFH - “Work from home,” as in: COVID-era policies of (mostly tech jobs) being administered outside of a central office building.

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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

StudyFinds.org | Remote work fuels gentrification? How surge in digital nomads is pricing out local communities worldwide

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.

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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.