TechCrunch's How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting Anarchists (or SF's Housing Crisis Explained) is a long and rambling article on why housing has gotten so hard to find and pay for in San Francisco.
The part of the article I found most interesting covers the shift in jobs to cities. San Francisco is an obvious example, but as the article points out cities all over the country (and world) are seeing employers moving in.
They are moving to cities because increasingly that's where the talent is located.
A key reason for this is jobs are no longer secure, so employees want to work in places where the next job is relatively easy to find. Key quote from the article:
The concept of lifetime employment also faded. Today, San Francisco’s younger workers derive their job security not from any single employer but instead from a large network of weak ties that lasts from one company to the next. The density of cities favors this job-hopping behavior more than the relative isolation of suburbia.
We often hear this in our research interviews. People want to work not just near their current job, but close to where their next job is likely located.
This is a huge cultural and social shift brought on by the growth of economic uncertainty.
With job security limited, people are taking action to protect themselves. In addition to living in places with job hopping options, they are adding side gigs and 2nd jobs.
Economic uncertainty is not going away and its impacts are not yet fully understood. We'll be covering this topic in more detail in the future.
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