One of my favorite youtubers did an hour long video on the trucker convoy from California to DC and it was a peak into another world. The thing I thought about after watching it was wondering what it looks like when that group has mass unemployment in 10 years.
Truck driving employs 1% of the US population and if those jobs are lost to automation, there's no chance of them coming back like they did throughout other recessions. It won't just be the drivers, it'll be their friends, families and children that will be unemployed, unhappy, and very motivated.
I'm going to submit that some of these COVID protests are not COVID protests. They are inequality protests, but seriously talking about inequality has been pushed out of the Overton window across much of the American political landscape. As a result the anger "sublimates" out about other issues.
The right does a good job guiding the anger of the working class toward issues that have nothing to do with inequality like COVID, race, immigrants, trans people, etc. Meanwhile the left offers up a totally out of touch message that doesn't resonate at all, or offers them welfare without understanding that these people consider welfare to be something to be ashamed about. They want productive work.
You know... we have a housing crisis in this country. A lot of these people could find work building adequate housing for the US population, but that would threaten high real estate valuations...
We also have a lot of infrastructure that needs building, but we may have to wait for the generation that was brainwashed to believe that infrastructure (except more roads) is communism to retire.
There are plenty of jobs but we won't create them. We'd better get on it.
I have a suspicion that housing will stop being a crisis due to a combination of:
1) the main expense is the land, the houses themselves are cheap, so anything that causes existing-but-undesirable houses to now be in a commuter zone increases useful supply
2) self-driving vehicles will allow people to commute while asleep or doing their hobbies (this is a terrible idea with current tech, people already get in trouble for doing both in existing self-driving cars)
3) remote working (we already have a lot of digital entertainment and socialising)
If I’m wrong, I expect it to be because all this makes meatspace location into an even bigger status symbol than it is already.
> self-driving vehicles will allow people to commute while asleep or doing their hobbies
This doesn't eliminate the traffic issues and energy consumption associated with long commutes. Self-driving cars are a substitute for the efficiency benefits of density.
If anything, the expansion of remote work has just pushed the housing crisis into more housing markets.
> pushed the housing crisis into more housing markets.
FWIW I prefer density but isn’t this good? The reality of yesterday was too few zip codes with too much demand and not enough good will to increase supply.
Instead we now have a lot more zip codes that can make decentralized decisions about building more housing. Hopefully they vote for more development and use it as a way to stimulate jobs in their local construction industry.
The new zipcodes face the same economic incentives to restrict supply. Property owners want to see their holdings increase in value and generally have more political power. I don't see any reason why the new hot markets are going to do anything different from the old hot markets. Perhaps some will, but renters and potential homeowners will get priced out of more markets
Because the long term benefit of density ends up lifting the local economy a lot more than the property prices go down in the short term. Especially with remote work, the extra income brought in adds to the local coffee, haircut and food scene, and increased overall property taxes on the same land make the city money.
People just don't think in that long a timeframe but there are localities which do and hopefully it works for them and we all get to learn the timeframe for benefits (or the lack of benefits) from such a change.
My point is that communities that cam think long term seem rare based on the available evidence. Thus most of the communities where the housing crises is being exported will just face the same problem.
This why why I am making the point that we shouldn't rely on remote work (of self driving cars) to solve our housing crises. The only good solution is increasing density, (and I suspect we agree on that.)
It's great if people want to take advantage of remote work to live I'm new housing markets, but they should realize the consequences of those choices and work to mitigate them.
There is a limit to how long a commute can grow before it becomes untenable a part of a daily routine. Being able to do other things while commuting increases acceptable commute time, but does not elimant this limit.
Traffic can greatly extend commuting times and thus is directly relevant.
That just extends the limit, the limit still exists. Because of that limit, traffic reduces the range you can commute within that limit.
I don't think "self-driving" rv's do anything to revolutionize the housing market. What they do is revolutionize travel (it's like having a private luxery train car that can go almost anywhere.) Parking an RV can be an expensive and competive in and around urban areas (speaking from vanlife experience.) Having a self-driving RV driving around all night while you sleep also isn't cost effective and won't scale.
What I see as a revolution in the rv/housing market would be affordable, all eletric RVs with sufficient solar capacity to recharge their range over the course days. Combine this with starlink and/or 5g and you create cheaply location flexible housing.
> That just extends the limit, the limit still exists. Because of that limit, traffic reduces the range you can commute within that limit.
Yeah and? The limit is in the order of 250 miles. Have you seen how cheap houses get 250 miles away from cities? London to Bradford is about that distance, and the average property prices in those two are £629,400 [0] and £58,673 [1] respectively, nearly a factor of 11.
Or, if you prefer American reference points, SanFran to the edge of Nevada; or the White House to anywhere in Delaware and Maryland, most of Virginia and New Jersey, and half of each of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia; or Boston to the Canadian border; or LA to Ensenada, Mexico.
Don’t tell me there’s nowhere affordable in all that. Especially not in the large number of tiny places that aren’t important enough to be labelled on the map when it’s zoomed out to 250 miles.
House costs are mostly the land cost. More range = more land = more supply => cheaper houses.
Human psychology is, unfortunately, more complicated than that.
There was an attempt in 2016 to prepare a program to retrain coal miners in center Pennsylvania and other traditional mining regions, as the general market, automation, and decrease in available coal from mining had made that a high-unemployment space. Job retraining was on the table.
People handily rejected it. They didn't want to do something else; they wanted to mine.
The children of professional drivers may find something else to do, but professional drivers are going to, on average, be most comfortable driving, and if there's no driving to be done we're on our way to system shock.
What if I told you to quit your job and I'll get you training for another role. If you trusted me you might go with it, but it you knew from previous experience that I was an incompetent buffoon you would likely say no.
It's like a guy in a clown outfit saying the nobody wants open heart surgery beacuse everyone turns him down when he asks.
I think your assessment is good. Unfortunately, none of the clowns have taken off their clownsuits so the system shock is still the most probable outcome.
Truck driving employs 1% of the US population and if those jobs are lost to automation, there's no chance of them coming back like they did throughout other recessions. It won't just be the drivers, it'll be their friends, families and children that will be unemployed, unhappy, and very motivated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKcJrBRVZn4