Agreed. What has happened in the last 75 years is historically new:
1. The growth of information/knowledge (the Information Age) jobs, which are now the majority of all jobs in the U.S.
2. The growth of remote work tools (the jury is out on how productive people are remotely at the moment, but new tech will drive this soon so that you will be just as or almost as effective in your kitchen or local coffee shop)
3. The growth of global transportation (the Jet Age) that allows previously localized diseases to spread globally in hours, instead of months or years
These factors are new and together likely presage a historic shift in how and where people work.
Ironically, except for this market adjustment in larger cities, the ability for people to work productively in other locations will put continuing downward pressure on the cost of living in cities as people leave, and probably hit some sort of equilibrium at some point soon.
... all this to mean that you should sell your investment properties in the Tenderloin ;)
.. except there will probably be more pandemics within the next 50 years.
Given that we've had multiple localized epidemics or global pandemics in the last two decades alone (SARS, Ebola, Swine Flu/H1N1, etc), the likelihood of more seems increasingly high. Perhaps it doesn't even matter whether the next one will have a higher CFR; whether large cities prosper depends not only on whether people believe it will, but also on how well the cities do in many other respects, such as crime, taxes, pollution, trash, homelessness, etc. SF is not only suffering because of the pandemic: the pandemic just put an extra sense of urgency on the snowball effect that was already happening.
When cities are safe, healthy, clean and beautiful, they're great and everyone is happy to live there, but now? Not so much.
1. The growth of information/knowledge (the Information Age) jobs, which are now the majority of all jobs in the U.S.
2. The growth of remote work tools (the jury is out on how productive people are remotely at the moment, but new tech will drive this soon so that you will be just as or almost as effective in your kitchen or local coffee shop)
3. The growth of global transportation (the Jet Age) that allows previously localized diseases to spread globally in hours, instead of months or years
These factors are new and together likely presage a historic shift in how and where people work.
Ironically, except for this market adjustment in larger cities, the ability for people to work productively in other locations will put continuing downward pressure on the cost of living in cities as people leave, and probably hit some sort of equilibrium at some point soon.
... all this to mean that you should sell your investment properties in the Tenderloin ;)