Remote work revolution in California.

How the remote work revolution could change California’s housing crisis

A year from now, what will your Monday morning look like?

After your umpteenth consecutive weekend hugging your mother, your friends and complete strangers in poorly ventilated spaces, do you picture yourself pouring coffee in your Thermos to begin your bleary- eyed commute into work? Or are you about to begin your bleary- eyed all-staff on the morning Zoom?

The answers to those questions will depend on your job, your income level, your employer and, if you’re lucky enough, your preference. They also will dictate whether the next decade of California’s housing affordability crisis looks radically different from the last.

Within a matter of months, the pandemic-necessitated rise in teleworking has inverted parts of the state’s real estate market in ways housing economists never imagined possible. The median rent in San Francisco has dropped nearly 25% since stay-at-home orders began in March. Oakland, Los Angeles and San Diego also have seen rents drop or at least taper, instantly flattening a decadelong spike.

As younger professionals flee overcrowded and overpriced apartments in urban cores, rents and home prices in many suburbs, exurbs and midsize cities have shot up significantly.

Fresno, Bakersfield and Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb, have seen some of the biggest postpandemic rent increases in the country. The median price of a single-family home in California set an all-time high of over $700,000 four months ago, with some of the steepest increases in the Inland Empire and Central

Valley.

With the prospect of widespread vaccination on the horizon, private employers, local governments, urban planners and state officials reluctantly are playing the role of housing crisis Nostradamus: Is what we’re seeing in 2020 an aberration or a new normal?

“The long- term piece, that’s the million- if not billion- dollar question,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

No one really knows the answer. But here are our best guesses.

OK, so just how prevalent will remote work be in the future? Are companies really going to let people do this forever?

Probably pretty prevalent. The number of days California workers can stay home in sweatpants likely will rise even after the water cooler is no longer a potential superspreader site.

Right now, an astounding 40% of the U. S. labor force is working remotely full time. Companies, nonprofits and even some government agencies generally have discovered productivity has not dipped and that workers, for the most part, prefer complaining about Slack and Zoom to complaining about their hourlong commutes.

Plus companies can save on office space and other expenses.

A national survey from the Federal Reserve Bank

of Atlanta found that employers expect the number of work-from-home days to triple after the pandemic. That shift is likely to be more acute in California than in other parts of the country because the state’s industry mix (e.g., tech and professional services) is generally more adaptable to remote work. Facebook and Google have said they plan to offer more flexible work from home arrangements through 2021 and beyond. Twitter said it will allow staffers to work from home permanently if they wish.

But although more and more California companies will compete for talent by offering work-from- home perks, it’s unlikely a huge chunk of the workforce will be completely untethered from the office. Google just bought more office space in several cities, and many companies believe some employee to employee interaction to be essential. Plus many office tenants are locked into long-term commercial leases.

“All of these tech companies have built these campuses to try to maximize interaction, and they expect to grow their employee head counts,” Bellisario said.

Other California- based companies have seized on remote working to simply relocate their headquarters out of state entirely. In the past nine months, Oracle, Hewlett Packard and perhaps most symbolically commercial real estate company CBRE have trumpeted plans to jump to Texas.

Companies that have helped fuel the jobs-hous

ing imbalance besetting California cities could have a much smaller California footprint post-pandemic

Won’t people just work from home more in cities once bars and restaurants and the other great things about cities open again?

Louis Mirante, legislative director for California YIMBY ( Yes In My Backyard), thinks so.

T hough he acknowledges there may be some marg inal outmigration from denser urban centers because of telecommuting, he argues Californians still will want to live in apartments in major cities because of the professional and social benefits conferred by urban life.

“If you use price as a signal as to where people want to live, it’s still in places like San Francisco or Oakland,” Mirante said. “If you look at where price is telling economists where folks want to live, it’s still dense, urban areas.”

Even after the post-pandemic price drop, at $2,377 a month for a two- bedroom, the median rent in San Francisco is still the most expensive of any major city in the country, according to Apartment List.

But although urbanists like Mirante remain confident that demand for denser housing environments will rebound once people aren’t scared to share apartment building elevators anymore, there is ev idence to suggest that the pandemic has unleashed a desire for more space that will outlast the virus.

The rise of remote work could forever expand what “suburb” really means. If

you only need to come to San Francisco once a week, Sacramento — a two-hourplus train and bus ride away — is a feasible and much cheaper place to call home. If you only need to reach downtown Los Angeles once a month, the thought of living in Bakersfield is more palatable. It’s not surprising home prices and rentals are spiking where affordable, singlefamily homes are within a long but ultimately doable drive of a major job center, as long as the drive is rare enough.

What about people who can’t work from home?

Workers in jobs that are more likely to offer telecommuting in the future skew higher income. Workers without that luxury tend to skew lower on the income ladder and are more likely to be Black or

Latino workers.

Despite the dramatic dip in median rent in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, experts say the rental market in lower-income communities has only softened slightly. Though rents may not be rising as much as they used to, the housing crisis for these households is in many ways more dire as the pandemic-induced recession has caused widespread job losses and wage reductions: Even if your rent drops 5%, you’re in bad shape if your income drops by 50%.

“Let’s keep in mind there’s a whole segment of the housing market that won’t see a big change in rent,” said Gloria Bruce, executive director of the East Bay Housing Organizations. “I don’t really think remote work does much for people who are overcrowded, where they were already spending 50% of their income on rent.”

Ironically, Bruce says it’s possible the rise of remote work could unleash a new wave of gentrification in the far-flung suburbs lower-income households have fled to over the past two decades. Places like Vallejo, or Palmdale and Lancaster, could see an acceleration of a prepandemic trend: an influx of higher-income remote workers searching for more space.

“People of color and poorer people keep being the ones who have to make room for the housing market desires of those who are higher up the income scale,” Bruce said. “It’s just another version of what we’ve been seeing in various ways for decades.”