The Future of Work is the Future of Land Use

I wrote a brief article on the relationship between labor and land use for my company’s blog. So yes, in the exception that proves the rule, this one opinion is adjacent to that of my employer:

What this “consumer product” analysis of office space obscures is the relationship of different types of work to each other. Worker autonomy for the white-collar workers described in the Times article may lead directly to a loss of autonomy for the blue-collar workers whose livelihoods depend on dense central business districts. Parcel delivery, lunch-rush restaurants, and exercise facilities - as well as the workers who fulfill those services - would encounter piecework without the multitude of office workers who rely on them. One worker’s benefits become another’s precariousness.

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This is not to urge workers to get back to the office, and especially not to rush back to unsafe workplaces and to risky work conditions. It is to acknowledge that unsafe workplaces and risky work conditions are still the norm during the Covid-19 pandemic, and only certain classes of workers have been sheltered from it. People who have the privilege to bring their work safely to home also have the social obligation to bring with them the social engagement their work is wrapped up in. By reimagining land use in the Bay Area, a post-pandemic work environment has the potential to be a radically more equitable one.
Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only person to make the connection between labor rights, class, and land use.

In his Cornerside Yard blog, Pete Saunders developed a “blueprint for the next urbanism” that pretty emphatically focuses on labor and social welfare:

We need a national policy program for a rebirth of the middle class in America's cities. I definitely think the pandemic, our over-reliance on and lack of appreciation for our service class has exposed some real problems. Deeming the service class as essential workers in a time of crisis, without doing much more than offering our gratitude, is outrageous.

It’s time to re-create the American middle class, and expand the revitalization of cities in the process. Here are ten ideas on how we can do it.

And in Anne Helen Petersen’s recent newsletter, she makes the same connection in her characteristic style:

If we get flexibility for knowledge workers and call it good, it’ll be a moral failure.

The point of flexibility isn’t so that you can free up more time so that you can take on a side hustle or sign your kid up for her fifth sports league or just fill it with more work. The point is that you will have more time to 1) figure out who you when work is not longer the axis of your life and 2) to actually use that time to care about and for other people.

That means cultivating cross-industry worker solidarity, advocating for labor laws that actually address and protect workers laboring in the 2020s, and remaining vigilant to ways that shifts to remote work are affecting your community. That means creating networks of care and support, and helping to weave and reinforce a social safety net so strong that it can support all of us. That means de-coupling health care from work, re-imagining childcare, and re-embracing collectivism, just generally.

Otherwise, there’s an even darker dystopian scenario lurking around the corner, one in which the already privileged get a nice flexible schedule while the rest of the workforce gets even more constrained, more surveilled, more precarious.

In all the doo-rah “we’re all in it together/we’re all connected” language from the pandemic, it seems like there actually may be a genuine understanding bubbling up of what “in it together” really means from a solidarity perspective. Residential neighborhoods, as spaces of social relations, are key places to redfine “in it together” so that people are actually able to support one another economically through transparent economic relationships. I am optimistic that upcoming California housing elements and other smallish-scale land use plans can serve as opportunities start picking at the scab that’s been formed over how people understand economic geography in this country to present a better way forward.