The corona virus and predictions that work from home will continue for a long time in Western countries have led to a great demand for buying and renting residential spaces in smaller cities.
In America, Great Britain and Australia, requests to relocate to smaller cities are breaking all records.
At least so that they could get through the ongoing corona virus pandemic with as little risk as possible, and most of all, so that they could change their lives and get out of the vicious circle: house-transportation-work.
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"They gave us a joker"
Rosa Rankin Gee, 34-year-old writer, grew up in London, lived in Paris. More precisely, she remembers, she lived on websites for finding apartments.
For a long time, she followed the growing difference in the relationship between prices and quality, and in 2019 she surprised herself when she made an unexpected decision to move from a megalopolis to a small town.
She chose the small port town of Ramsgate in the English county of Kent. There she wrote a book about herself and representatives of her generation, which she called Dreamland.
The book will be published in the fall of 2021, and an excerpt from the book was published in Vogue magazine.
Rankin Gi tells the stories of people who were born between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.
This generation, as she says, has one common feature, which is that it grew up in the conditions of global crises that followed one after the other, with fewer opportunities for career development than their parents had.
"Millennials were given used ammunition to shoot at financial goals, and we wild cards - fast internet," states the writer.
Millennials have also decided to leave the big cities.
This process, of course, did not start in 2020. Even before that, young people took their laptops and went to work online.
First of all, for financial reasons: the monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is about 3,5 thousand US dollars.
A small studio apartment in the business center of London, Canary Wharf, can be bought for a little less than half a million pounds, and in Sydney, the same one costs half a million Australian dollars.
Having settled in small towns, millennials realized that they continue to do what they love, and their accumulated debts in megalopolises, thousands of dollars, euros or pounds, begin to decrease.
In 2020, the corona virus came, and relocation from big cities, their crowded shopping centers and crowded public transport became an increasingly massive phenomenon.
The simple need to be in nature
"Real estate buyers and those who rent them are running away from big cities", analysts of the British real estate website Rightmove came to that conclusion in mid-September 2020.
The number of requests for houses or apartments in cities with less than 10.000 inhabitants has doubled this year.
"What began at the beginning of the year as a desire to spend some time in nature has become a trend that is moving in the direction of moving permanently," Rightmove representative Tim Bannister told the BBC.
The demand for real estate in the counties of Kent, Dorset, Berkshire, Devon, Cambridge and Suffolk (all of which are located in the vicinity of London or on the south-east coast of Great Britain) has increased by 130 - 180 percent compared to the autumn of last year.
Tim Bannister says that there are two reasons for such a surge in demand: better conditions for achieving social distance in a natural environment, as well as remote work:
Many decide to move, counting on the fact that when the pandemic is over, they can continue to work part of the time from home, and use part of the time to go to London by commuter transport, without wasting much time on transport.
This is exactly what explains why people don't move too far: if they moved further away, they could save even more on rent, but they would have to spend another five to six hours a day just on transportation to and from work.
American outcome
The same tendency is equally represented in the USA. There was already the first wave of "covid" migration there, when in the period from March to May 2020, New York, a city of nine million inhabitants, temporarily left 450 thousand people (these are the data of the New York Times obtained from the location of mobile phone users).
Amanda Mull, a reporter for "The Atlantic" magazine who lives in Brooklyn, in an article about moving, says that on those spring days, only neighbors collecting things and delivery services could be seen on the streets.
In October, the American company for sociological research "The Harris Poll" presented a study with the conclusion that every third resident of a big city would like to move to less populated places because of the corona virus.
Those who are most ready to move are the age group from 18 to 34 years old, exactly the ones the British writer Rosa Retkin Gee writes about.
Sociologists from the company "The Harris Poll" confirm both her thoughts and the data of British analysts: the possibility of working from home makes you think about changing your place of residence, especially since living in nature is much better than living in a high-rise building overlooking a busy street.
At the same time, unemployed Americans do not want to move too far from their workplaces and prefer to look for accommodation on the outskirts or within a radius of about 100 km from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other big cities.
The New York Times cites a house in East Orange (a low-rise suburb of New York) as an example. It was put up for sale in August 2020 for $285.000.
In three days, it was viewed 97 times, and 24 customers were ready to pay immediately. As a result, it was sold for 21% more than the advertised value.
The Times magazine compares the scale of the exodus from the cities to the plague in the 16th century.
Value exchange
No analyst is yet ready to assess the extent and duration of this exodus of people from big cities.
This phenomenon is still not in full swing, and its dynamics will depend both on the situation with the corona virus and on the willingness of employers to see their employees less often or only through video conferences.
Forbes magazine, in its September text on migration within America, has already called on the authorities and businesses from small towns to pay attention to the unique opportunities that open up in connection with the relocation of people who can afford it, and whose wages and spending habits are greater than the needs of the local population.
In the study "Death of Cities", the publication Politiko talks about the fact that the pandemic has revealed the true value of modern methods of communication such as video conferences, document sharing and communication via messengers.
The value was so high that it began to threaten the existence of large cities in their current form. Especially huge office spaces that became deserted at one point.
Peter Clarke, a professor of the history of European urbanism at the University of Helsinki, told Politiko that if there was no second wave of the corona virus, all such talk could be considered speculation, but it seems that the second wave is certain, and if so, the existence of the modern model of a large city is threatened.
Peter Clark says that until the second half of the twentieth century, cities were centers of attraction for people because of the factories that were located here and offered higher wages.
In the XNUMXs, deindustrialization began, and as a result, cities became centers of service activities.
The transition to working from home by those who provide these services will change the very urban culture of the city.
In an analytical report for the public, Bank Kredit Suisse suggests to owners of office space not to worry about the short-term drop in prices, but because 15 percent of the employees in those offices will not return to work.
Cottage and co-working space
The first wave of temporary migration due to the corona virus has already passed in Russia: people left the cities for cottages or rented temporary accommodation in small settlements.
Now there is simply no accurate data on the desire of people to move to less populated places.
Usually, people left Moscow and regional centers to completely change their way of life. For example, to engage in agriculture.
But a pandemic is a different kind of challenge.
"We haven't come to any final conclusions yet, and we invite others to do the same. It is still not clear what percentage of those who have switched to working from home and who will continue to live like this, and who of them will return to a normal way of life," Aleksandar Puzanov, director general of the Moscow Foundation "Institute of City Economy", told the BBC.
According to him, there are discussions: "I belong to those who say that going to another place to work for a while is one thing.
But creating a business from scratch or reorganizing it into an online variant in the new reality is more complicated.
According to Alexander Puzanov, there are three reasons why there are no such requests for resettlement in Russia, including young people.
The first thing is that not everyone can afford to move to the suburbs and leave their main home indefinitely.
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Another thing is the "two-family house" that remained from Soviet times. The family has a small apartment in the city and a piece of land with a house outside the city. permanent place of residence.
And finally, the third thing is the quality of the internet connection. Outside of big cities, the internet quality may not meet the requirements of remote work.
"The number of people who will continue to work remotely will remain large, but the need for communication will not disappear anywhere," he predicts.
"In our conditions, the border between work and home will be thinner. For example, co-working as a compromise between work from home and office."
(Coworking could be interpreted as working in an office or specially arranged workspace shared by several independent individuals or teams, according to the site Infostud hab).
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