Let’s all give ourselves credit – those of us that survived COVID, we just lived through our World War II. An event so monumental, a moment in time so paradigm-shifting, that we will forever speak of a pre-COVID world, and a post-COVID world. Actually, it’s more like if WWII did it with the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution moved people from farms to cities, from cottages to tenements. Now, the fortunate among us are moving away from expensive cities and into bigger houses with office space and private home gyms – things we used to share. Things we used to go to one central place to use. Now a lot of us are in home bubbles. 

COVID has already changed how many people work. It is the opening bell for accelerating a revolution in where we work, transforming our cities, small towns, and rural communities. In my small sphere, half a dozen people have moved out of Portland, moving to a variety of places, but they do not have to live in Portland’s expensive housing market to work in Portland any more. 

My own work has shut down its office near downtown, and is moving to a smaller space far away. For us, working from home will be the new normal. The neighborhood near downtown where I worked just lost 900 customers with lots of money – no more office coffee, or lunches out, or browsing around the mall, or trips to the grocery store before getting on the commuter train. I’m hearing about lots of offices shutting down, and each one represents hundreds of bougie taxpayers who are not only no longer spending their money there, but aren’t invested politically or economically in downtown being a comfortable and accessible place. Across the nation, our downtowns will be gutted. And what happens to the value of expensive real estate no one wants any more? The wealth of many cities is locked up in its downtown real estate. What will it be worth when no one with disposable income works there?

COVID and distance will change how we relate to each other, in a world where us social animals connect virtually instead of seeing each other in person. We have suddenly, but also barely, begun to be transformed by COVID. My nieces already are in individual their devices 24/7 – two years ago, when their only screen was a TV, at least they were all watching the same TV show together. 

To say nothing of the post-COVID economy and labor market, which is still unfolding. I’m reminded of a description in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns about the Great Migration of Black people out of the South in the first half of the twentieth century – people made individual choices based on the circumstances they were living in, but those decisions were influenced by such consistent and widespread conditions that those personal choices amounted to a nationwide movement.

So we will see what our lives and our cities are like after COVID. We’ll see if we get further sucked into our devices and separated from actual human contact. We’ll see how civilization responds to a world operated over the internet. It’s a humanity-wide experiment, and there’s no control group. What’s the worst that could happen?