Interesting discussion about telecommuting and impacts over on LinkedIn, the author was opining:
We live in an age of technology where most people can do their jobs from anywhere. A study by Cisco, reported by The Atlantic Cities this week, shows “that 60 percent of assigned desks or offices sit empty during the day.” That’s a lot of wasted office space.
Corporate leaders give plenty of lip service to telecommuting but they still seem to like face time. If we let more people work from wherever they wanted to live throughout the country, we could distribute talent, earnings, and especially education a bit more evenly.
Right now, highly educated and highly skilled people are concentrated in a small number of metro areas. Imagine what distributing our population could do in terms of improving our local schools, economy, civic life, not to mention how much easier it might be to zip around the streets of Washington, D.C.
But this has become a political and cultural discussion
There are many maps out there that show the demographic of blue for urban areas and red for rural, with sububs running the purple zone. Here is one for 2012 from Chris Howard. But this demographic also parallels the lament above - the urban areas are liberal. And many of the large employers are in that liberal area.
This leads to the conservative's dilemna:
One individual's comment was:
Which means that if you are an educated professional, but also a political and/or religious conservative, you are virtually forced to either be underemployed or live and work in a place where you feel like a fish out of water, and unless you keep absolutely quiet, will be treated like one as well. Is this the best we can do?
Here in Colorado, we have a tale of two cities.
Boulder Colorado is a metropolitan area of 97,000 - average age is 28.8 (skewed by Univ of Colorado) rated #1 Best US City for Teleworking - Small Metro by Sperling's - major employers are the university, high tech and the Denver metropolis, #7 green city and a 5.9% unemployment rate. It is also expensive - people want to live there and housing isn't cheap. High taxes but a phenomenal bike trail system, urban downtown with pedestrian mall filled with people. That is called demand
Colorado Springs is a metropolitan area of 416,000 - average age is 34.3 (skewed a little by three major military bases), rated #2 Best US City for Teleworking - major industries are military, defense and evangelical organizations, #17 most secure city to live in and an 8.7% unemployment rate. Housing is 1/4 of Boulder cost and housing is affordable. Incredibly low taxes, wanted to sell the city auditorium to developers, downtown is a auto based bar scene. That is called lack of demand.
Oh, had a major Intel production facility built in Colorado Springs in 2000 - the story was:
When Intel acquired the Garden of the Gods Road plant in 2000, the city, county and Colorado Springs School District 11 all agreed to rebate much of the personal property tax Intel paid on its manufacturing equipment. State law at the time required any rebates be offset by increased state aid. But in 2003, legislators reduced the reimbursements during a budget crisis.
The rebates depended on the state reimbursements to school districts. While the amount of the rebate wasn’t all that significant, the change eroded the “predictability and stability” of Colorado’s business climate and ultimately contributed to the company’s decision to shut down its Springs operation, said Danny Tomlinson, a longtime Denver lobbyist who worked for Intel when it operated the local plant.
When Intel Corp. announced last month that it plans to spend $8 billion upgrading and expanding plants in Oregon and Arizona, some in Colorado Springs wondered why those expansions weren’t coming here, where the company shut down a plant in 2007.
The semiconductor giant operated a 1,000-employee plant in Colorado Springs for nearly eight years before closing it three years ago after selling the line of chips and moving production to Taiwan
Read more: http://www.gazette.com/...
Colorado is Grover Norquist's crowning achievment for the TABOR Amendment (Taxpayer Bill of Rights) which placed anti-tax principles in the Colorado consitution. And this is a result.
And the comments about the cities:
Colorado Springs
re: considering moving to colorado springs - 10/2/ - 1/21/2012
In a word? No. with your description I would say no. Does have a lower cost of living than the other Colorado cities. Unemployment is higher here than the other cities as well (I think we're at 9.6% now). Haven't used day care in years, there are not many nannies according to my friends. People here are definitely more judgemental here than anywhere else I have ever lived, (I have traveled a lot with the military). I am agnostic, have my own frieds that have a wide range of beliefs but we don't feel open to expressing our views with many others. It's not a very tolerant town, especially to my LGBT friends. I raised mt kids here, it was a great place to live then. My kids have all moved out (all in their 20's), the rest of my family are leaving as soon as we can retire. The weather here and the physical surroundings ate beautiful, wish it hadn't change as far as acceptance. Try other CO towns? I'd like to move to Fort Collins, they are more expensive though. Good luck.
Boulder
Positives: Beautiful scenery, really nice university, lots of things to do-especially outdoors. Weather is relatively good with tons of sunshine year round. Decent shopping with the usual stores. Health conscious, fit people.
Negatives: Summers are hot and weather is extreme at times. One day it's 80 degrees, the next day 30 and snowing! Town has gotton really congested with bad traffic. People are extremely left here. If you mind a bunch of tree huggers and hippies, you definitely won't like BOulder. Also, VERY costly area. Housing prices and taxes are ridiculous.
COnclusion: Not a bad place to visit or live for a short time. Don't recommend settling down here for extended period.
The demographics are killing the conservatives and the red state lack of tax and invest is killing them economically. Now the whine is "I don't want to work with all those librls, can't you bring my job to me?"