To think people will leave big cities?

[GoldfishParade]

Do you think in the post Covid future people will be "fleeing" major cities? Don't get me wrong, London and Manchester etc will always attract people and lots of people will always live there. But AIBU to think that maybe a lot more people will now be leaving? Reasons:

1. You can now work from home. I have a friend who has been in London for years who is now moving to Scotland with her boyfriend because they can WFH now.
2. A new way of socialising:

Cities have grown ridiculously bloated since the industrial revolution.
I do believe that this trend will reverse slowly as work from home becomes more of an option.

Big centers will remain, but they will become less big as their pull factor decreases (and the push factor remains: polluted, crowded, expensive, higher criminality...)
The main reasons most people move to big cities is for work (always has been). The social/cultural opportunities are a nice bonus, but they have never been the main reason.

*HAS passed

Some people will leave but your view on this depends on your demographic. I'm very early 30s living in London, with a good career. Literally nobody I know wants to leave London. Yes, they want more space and want to be closer to a park so they are looking at how to get that but nobody is even contemplating leaving London.

As a young woman with a good career, I don't want to be isolated in the countryside. I want to be close to bars, to restaurants, to my friends, to the airport/transport hubs. That's the life I want. I didn't grow up in the countryside and have no qualms about raising my kids in an apartment. Everyone I know also wants back to the office at least for a few days a week.

Working remotely is shit, especially if you're starting out and video doesn't replace face to face meetings.

DGRosetti I think you're a bit more optimistic about planning than I am.

You have no idea what a pisspoor opinion I have of the English way of doing things.

Cities have grown ridiculously bloated since the industrial revolution.

Is one point of view. Another is they've only really just got back to the size they were before the dark ages. Ancient Rome had over a million inhabitants - it took until the early 1800s for London to achieve that again.

(I realise this is a terribly Eurocentric view, and I can only excuse that by saying it's my history).

@WhereamI88 London is also huge. there are options for suburban living. The Home Counties are not exactly cheap either and you get to add a hefty season ticket on top of it. And they haven't changed season tickets, so if you even go to office 3 X a week, its as expensive as going in everyday.

I was comparing a house in East Finchley zone 3 vs Beaconsfield. Granted beaconsfield is very expensive but if i do move out, I want to move to somewhere as nice as where I live in london. the 2 bed house in east finchley (with small home office) is 775k, the cottage in beaconsfield is 625k. if you add up the cost of 2 annual season tickets, you save a grand total of ... £95 per month living in beaconsfield except you get a 1.5 hour commute on the days you go in. Where i live now, i can walk to hampstead heath and highgate woods so its not like there are no green spaces. So for me, its not worth it moving out of London because the places outside London are too expensive.

Also in London with the wide range of supermarkets, its easier to save money in many ways when a bus is £1.50 and you can go to Aldi to buy basics. If you lived more rurally, you may not do that. Also if you move to the countryside, you are locked into paying high national rail costs for the rest of your working life unless you are 100% sure you and your partner would get wfh jobs forever.

@WhereamI88 I am agreeing with you in case thats not clear :)

I am in similar demographic and people i know who rent simply moved to larger properties in London that are more suited to homeworking

Not me. I can completely understand that a lot of people find rural living appealing, but not my bag in the slightest. I like being able to walk to shops, restaurants, cinema etc. Like having people around.

Agree on having people around, being able to travel around on foot, better health (because not getting in a car at your front door), more amenities and shops, especially food shops.

AND, life in a city has a far lower carbon footprint than life in the countryside, a fact that lots of bunny huggers seem to conveniently forget.

I think you’re right OP for specific demographics.

I know several families who have moved out of London to the country or market towns since lockdown. Being able to WFH most of the time is a game changer. Agree it doesn’t work well for juniors but these people are senior.

Also suspect a lot of downsizer generation (boomers) currently in family sized houses in cities will be upping sticks and moving somewhere else - less covid risk, the cultural attractions aren’t open anyway, if you have to isolate better to have more space and maybe more engaged neighbours.

Many of these moves may have happened anyway but covid has brought them forward a few years

Until companies are mandated to offer clerical workers home-working contracts for environmental reasons, no I don't think so.

I wouldn't move to the wilds of Scotland on the basis of what my current CEO allows. If a new chief starts, and he dislikes wfh, I might be stuck with no work and no alternatives.

Some will and some smaller cities and larger towns might grow where they're already close to the countryside with suitable for some transport links.

I'm in a small city and what I've noticed is houses are selling pretty quickly, but also so many seem to be selling off their HMO businesses, but are still hopeful they can make a fuckton of cash from them (for this area, I know the numbers will seem tiny compared to London and similar). Those properties look like they're lingering at a glacial pace if looking at the 'date added' on any propery search site.

I don't think they will shift until either all this is well behind us or they realize everyone else is doing the same thing, that there are dozens upon dozens of the things, and maybe try selling them as potential family homes at a realistic price for this area, cause what is actually a 2 bed, 2 reception room place with a weird attic 'bedroom' ain't gonna be seen as a 5 bed or sell for the 'offers over 165k' in the current climate where I am with actual 4 bed homes going for £135-£150k in the same area. Or they try going to auction as some are doing, but most here aren't getting much above the starting price if selling at all.

I agree with the pp that planning is awful in so many areas. It felt a bit out-dated pre-COVID, but some of the current preliminary planning near me to shove as much as possible on some of the brownfield holes just feels like a cash grab with no thought of people's lives have changed even in the last decade, let alone the last 6 months. I think we need more consideration for those towns and spaces we have now rather than trying to build more satellite towns.

London was dying in the 80s and people moved away. At the end of the 90s people started moving back.

As a Londoner born and bred, whose family has been here for several generations, I won't be moving. I think most of the people moving out are people who weren't from here in the first place. And even within London, there's been a bit of a movement of people moving from, say, zones 1-2 to zones 3-4 maybe. That's not really "moving out of London", that's just moving to a slightly-further-out suburb but you can still get the tube into town.

Also, we have lots of hospitals in London. No way would I want to live somewhere where I'd have to travel twenty miles to get to A&E. I do sometimes wonder what happens if you live in the middle of nowhere and you suddenly have a heart attack. I actually used to know someone with a disabled child who wouldn't have been disabled if the mum had been able to get to a specialist hospital in time.

I'm in a small city and what I've noticed is houses are selling pretty quickly, but also so many seem to be selling off their HMO businesses, but are still hopeful they can make a fuckton of cash from them (for this area, I know the numbers will seem tiny compared to London and similar). Those properties look like they're lingering at a glacial pace if looking at the 'date added' on any propery search site.

Hah! A lot of HMOs, especially student houses, are in a terrible state of repair, often because they're owned by terrible landlords who refuse to get repairs done. And now they're finding them difficult to sell, because guess what, they're in a terrible state of repair, so they either need spend money on renovating the place, or sell the place at a much lower price than they'd wanted. I feel like the situation is finally getting a bit of revenge on dodgy, greedy landlords who's spent years sitting on their arses gathering money while doing nothing to upkeep the property. Never did I anticipate this.

Tectonicplates, basically they die. Unless there’s an air ambulance available.

I guess it’s good that people feel they have more “choice” as to where they live. But I don’t believe for a single second that all those who move from an extremes urban area to an extremely isolated spot will still be there and happy in 2 years time.

If half the population of a city moved to “rural idyll” then the “rural idyll” will become small town... we won’t have any countryside left if we build houses (and infrastructure) and divide agricultural land up into leisure facilities (like 2-acre paddocks).

If half the population of a city moved to “rural idyll” then the “rural idyll” will become small town... we won’t have any countryside left if we build houses (and infrastructure) and divide agricultural land up into leisure facilities (like 2-acre paddocks).

I sometimes wonder how people felt in the 60s and 70s when they lived in a beautiful, quiet village in Buckinghamshire, then suddenly someone went and built Milton Keynes all around them.

I don't think fleeing, but not moving there in the first place.

Many futurists were predicting this pre-Covid because tech is enabling better home working and 5G was going to accelerate that.

Covid only pushes down harder on the gas.

I think there will be a fairly big readjustment of those who can wfh leaving, certainly London.

As mentioned up thread there are already signs.

I think many are like me, just waiting to see where home working settles down. It's not a question of will we move out of London (that's a yes), it's a question of how far away do we go. If we are in the office 3 days a week it'll be Home Counties commuter belt, if it's more like 1 day a week then it would be much further.

This year I've been even more grateful than usual for the fact that we moved to a more rural area. If we hadn't already, we'd certainly be doing it now.

Many futurists were predicting this pre-Covid because tech is enabling better home working and 5G was going to accelerate that.

The multiplicity of snouts in the HS2 trough means there will be an ongoing political counter offensive against it. Just think of how hard it will make gerrymandering in future. Will no one think of the corrupt ?

Nope. I live in a rural area. We're out of here next month. It's boring AF. Services are dire. You have to drive everywhere. And your teenagers will not thank you for it.

I think there will be people moving further out but once we are through Coronavirus I think people will be attracted to the cities again.

A city isn't just a workplace. They'll miss the on tap restaurants, bars, theatres, shops, museums, markets etc and the general buzz of a 24 hour environment.

Memories are short and when the fear of the virus has passed many people will want their city lives back. Particularly the younger people who aren't looking for family homes in nice rural neighbourhoods.