If a company places it's headquarters in a HCOL area and requires everyone come in 5 days a week, then yes, they have a responsibility to pay a salary high enough that their employees can survive there.
If employers don't like the fact that COL is too high, THEY can go ahead and march on city hall to advocate for political action. Companies have a MUCH larger sway with local politicians than the average employee does. That, or they can increase the salary or change the attendance policies.
Google, for example, has been trying for over a decade to build some medium-density housing near its campus. This goes beyond just advocating for political action (which they're also doing) -- they're actually offering to finance the project and assume all risk -- all the city has to do is stop saying no.
But every time it comes up for approval, local residents show up to complain, and the city council finds some arbitrary reason to say no.
They don't want to do that because they've already spent a bunch of money on their fancy HQ and don't want to see it empty out.
There are plenty of employers with < 1000 employees, however, crowding these downtown areas. They have way more flexibility in being able to move out of these city centers and into more affordable locations for everyone. They don't because part of the reason for their offices in these downtown location is rich people showing off to other rich people. You gotta "look" successful.
If an office is moved to a less densely populated area, the average commute time of all employees collectively ends up increasing.
The way rich people actually show off to other rich people is by doing what's right for their companies, thereby increasing the value of their equity - which then allows them to buy luxury goods and impress other rich people that way.
Not necessarily. I've lived in rural areas and the number of miles you could travel per minute is significantly higher than the miles per minute in an urban area. My current commute time would be the equivalent of around 15 miles in the very much less urban area. Also when you factor in that property is cheaper for things like parking and factor in extremely easy door to door parking, commute times drop down even more. At one point I lived in a condo and had to walk 8 minutes from my condo door down the garage to my parking spot. I now have a house and my car is directly out my side door.
Population density relative to commute doesn't seem to be such a clear cut relationship. In theory in a dense area you have to travel less, in reality people work where they can and don't want to move constantly so commute times can get quite long.
It is almost like, in any context, centralization is bad. I am not sure why we has a civilization have to keep learning this lesson, over and over and over again
Anytime you centralize anything it results in bad outcomes.
Diversity, Diversification, Distributed Models, etc are ALWAYS preferable, I dont care if you are talking about Stocks, People, Housing, Power, Government, you name, Consolidation and centralization is always bad
Decentralization of cities - competition - sometimes helps even more, but the societies that never centralized never got as far. (And that decentralization can backfire sometimes too, e.g. military competition instead of economic.)
This is my problem with the studies on suburban sprawl is they do not factor in all of the things, they are generally only looking at one thing namely car and home pollution
Then you have Higher Crime, and a whole host of other matters that come with Dense Urban Centers that you do not get when people spread out.
On Balance I will take suburban sprawl over Urban Density every day, and twice on Sunday
Sometimes, it's clearly the right choice (where are program settings settings? `~/.config`).
It's also VERY simple. If all you want is client/server version control, and you don't mind the constraints, SVN's UX and learning curve beats git's by a long shot.
Decentralization buys you flexibility, but entails tons of complexity.
I can not envision any scenario in which I would choose SVN over git
No, they don't. The employee gets to decide if the salary is high enough to meet his needs. If it isn't, the employee can negotiate for more, or go elsewhere.
Nobody is obliged to work for a company they find unacceptable.
If an employer doesn't pay their employees enough, those employees should leave, their employer will eventually die, and that'll add another data point to tell the shareholders to either elect CEOs that will pay more or to stop backing companies in high-CoL areas.
And saying companies choose where the highest concentration of available talent resides is dishonest.
I don't see why employers can have efforts to address climate change and social justice problems, but cost of living for their local communities is too much.
Yup, there's a low supply of employees and a high demand for them. So guess what the absolute dumbest thing is an employer can do when employees start clamoring for COL adjustments?
