Remote Isn’t Working, City of Yes, Ryan Puzycki, April 2, 2026
This is an interesting piece—pair with the second piece below—because there’s a bit of a divide among urbanists over remote work. Some see it as a way to enliven the places people actually live in, i.e. suburbia, and maybe also orient cities likewise around residents over commuters.
Others argue that the commuters, offices, small stores and lunch spots, etc. are necessary parts of the modern urban economy, and that remote work is taking that away from them and starving them of income, foot traffic, etc.
But Ryan’s piece is interesting because it’s not about that tension, as much as what remote work means for the country at a more fundamental level.
Having worked remotely in various capacities over the years, I know the freedom and mobility it offers, too.
And yet, what looks like a triumph over place-bound work isn’t one: the remote work lifestyle depends entirely on people who cannot be remote at all….The freedom to be untethered from a specific place rests on a layer of people who remain very much tethered to it.
Now I don’t find that in and of itself particularly convincing as an argument against remote work. It’s a kind of fairness argument, but now that we fully understand the optionality of doing knowledge work in-person, requiring it just because some other people have to do it turns the office from a workplace into a punishment. Part of this is just the way once a choice exists, the old default can never be default again. We see this everywhere.
However, that isn’t really his argument. It’s more that remote work writ large is doing something like spending down the nation’s social capital. This I find very interesting and much more convincing:
In 2016, many people in dense, prosperous cities like New York, where I lived at the time, were genuinely shocked by the election results….And yet, just weeks earlier, a visit to my in-laws in Northern Maryland had offered a very different view: in the working-class neighborhoods surrounding their gated community, Trump signs were everywhere. If you stayed within the confines of Manhattan, Brownstone Brooklyn, or other “gated” communities, you wouldn’t have seen much that challenged the prevailing view—you’d have had to go to Staten Island for that.
For coastal elitists like myself, entire categories of the American experience had been filtered out of view. Our picture of what America looked like was riddled with blind spots, and many of us missed the real divides emerging in our national life.
That divide mapped closely onto economic mobility. Some people could move toward opportunity, participating in a global economy that rewarded flexibility and abstraction, obtaining the best jobs and the best homes in the best cities. Many others were stuck in place, tied to a job, an underwater mortgage, or a town whose best days were long behind it.
The pandemic only accelerated this divide.
And more:
For knowledge workers, remote work has produced a kind of digital suburbia. The original suburbs offered an escape from the frictions of city life—crowding, noise, disorder—by separating daily life into zones connected by car. The digital version goes further. In digital suburbia, whether at the top of a penthouse or in a suburban subdivision, the home is the center of all aspects of daily life. Work, food, services, and entertainment are all mediated through and delivered to the home, minimizing the need to engage with the outside world at all. But this convenience still depends on a fully place-bound workforce to keep it running. The difference now is that, instead of you having to go to it, everything comes to you.
I’ll leave you the rest. Read the whole thing. It’s very thoughtful and a different angle on this question than I’ve seen before.
Europe Is Built for Working Remotely, Without A Path, Joe Baur, April 23, 2026
Pair this with Ryan’s piece above:
Because I live in Europe, I could just hop on a train and work remotely. Easy peasy.
I talk a lot about freedom on this page and the freedoms I’ve gained since moving to Europe from the United States about 10 years ago. The freedom of movement, transportation, and the freedom from many of the hazards of life in the United States, like gun violence, car crashes, and the general unease of being a pedestrian or cyclist in car-oriented infrastructure.
But there’s another freedom out there that living in Europe has allowed me to fully unlock thanks in large part to these other freedoms and just the way European cities and towns are generally built. I’m talking about the freedom to work remotely with relative ease.
Specifically, it’s an interesting observation that trains permit easy work during travel, which un-segments work and non-work time a bit:
Most trains have WiFi these days. Sometimes it’s spotty, but for writing and research, it works. Worst case, I download what I need offline. All I really need is a comfortable seat. And train seats are almost always more comfortable than a plane, bus, or car seat, which almost always seemed to be developed by someone with a vendetta against ergonomics.
Seriously, I can really lock in when it comes to working on a train. Recently, a strike canceled my flight from Copenhagen to Berlin. So I ended up taking the train from Copenhagen to Hamburg, transferred, and finished up with the high-speed train to Berlin. The entire journey was about eight-and-a-half hours. That’s essentially a work day.
In a car, that would be torture. I’ve done 8 - 12-hour days in a car. It’s brutal. Your body just feels awful afterwards and you’re exhausted, even though you ostensibly haven’t done anything. Now because of Europe, my tolerance for driving is gone. Three hours feels like a torturous eternity.
This, too:
To recap, in Europe, you’re mostly free to work wherever and whenever you please—and while on the move. In the U.S., you’re mostly limited to driving yourself. And if you have core working hours, you can’t drive during those times—forcing you onto the traffic-clogged highways during rush hour. But in Europe, I can travel during off-peak hours without missing a beat.
This is a bit of a more subtle point, and I think it is one of the stronger points in favor of remote work as a life enhancement and maybe even as good for the economy. There is an obvious tension here, and again, it’s much harder to return to the rush hour commute/five 9-5 days in an office once you have realized it is optional. The knowledge that it is optional makes it much harder to bear.
Read the whole thing as well and see what you think of both of them.
Walking New Jersey (and Staten Island), Chris Arnade Walks the World, Chris Arnade, December 17, 2025
Well, he doesn’t start off well—“I never liked New Jersey”—but let’s keep reading.
I knew that was unfair [so he repents], but still I never walked New Jersey, despite having walked almost the entirety of New York City (excluding Staten Island, of course), because it didn’t seem to offer anything other than a more logistically challenging, and lesser, version of the Bronx, Queens, or Brooklyn. It was another borough, but empty of poetry, with a different (and lesser) metro system, and disjointed.
That disjointedness was the biggest obstacle. Urban New Jersey is carved up into a jumble of segments by inlets, rivers, industrial zones, expressways. Getting from one to the other is often impossible for pedestrians, or so Google Maps says. I’d thought of long routes before, but all seemed too complicated, until motivated by being stuck here at home, I looked closer and realized I could now walk across the Goethals and Bayonne bridges, which meant I could get from Passaic to Fort Lee, via Newark and Elizabeth. Forty-five or so miles, over three days.
That is absolutely true. There’s Newark, Trenton, Camden, Paterson, and Jersey City, some of which are much, much better off than two or three decades ago, but New Jersey is full of these small-to-mid-sized cities while lacking one single large city or coherently urbanized area. It actually is a very interesting landscape, but it’s true that nowadays it makes little sense without the ability to drive.
It’s a fun piece and it’s not a walk almost anyone else has probably ever done. Give it a read!
Toys R Us Is Opening 120 New Stores: Why None Will Be In Its Original Big Box Real Estate, Repurposed and redeveloped commercial real estate, Jason Miller, September 20, 2026
This is interesting, and I bet it’s a question a lot of people have thought of with these stories about the Toys ‘R’ Us comeback: are any of them opening in actual former Toys ‘R’ Us stores? The answer, apparently, is no:
That is partly because the post-bankruptcy Toys R Us under new owner WHP Global has a different business model and merchandise offering than the original company.
But also because the majority of the Toys R Us Big Box real estate has long since been re-tenanted or repurposed for other uses.
The first point is pretty important: the new stores are much smaller and are, for now, more like rebranded boutique toy stores with the addition of calendars and low-grade toys. They may evolve into something a little more like the old stores, but that very much remains to be seen. Not to mention that the toy market itself has changed, and after nearly a decade without a big-box toy chain, it might be impossible to wrest back enough market share to make a store of that size and scale work now.
But anyway, this is the more important point for Miller:
Toys R Us failed to keep up with shifting consumer preferences and changes in technology.
And it took on loads of debt in a 2005 leveraged buyout.
The end result?
Bankruptcy, liquidation, mass store closures—and 30 MM+ square feet of vacant real estate.
But nothing was wrong with the Toys R Us real estate.
In fact it turned out to be in high demand.
Back in 2018, when Toys ‘R’ Us was closing down, I wrote a piece about it and included this bit:
If the success of Toys “R” Us has its origins in the post-war years, so, in a twisted and indirect way, does its demise. A company called Vornado Realty Trust acquired a large share of Toys “R” Us in 2005, with apparently mixed motives: there was an element of Bain Capital-style investment—that didn’t work out so well—but also an interest in the real estate on which the stores sat, which may yet work out for them.
Vornado Realty Trust has its origins, like Toys “R” Us itself, in American midcentury retail. As I documented here, Vornado was a small appliance manufacturer in the post-war years (I have a Vornado blender from 1972 at home).
In 1959, Vornado was acquired by the New Jersey-based discount department store chain Two Guys. By the late 1970s, the Two Guys stores were aging and declining in profitability—though still turning a profit. The company, renamed Vornado, took a look at the real estate values of the plots where the stores were located (having been part of the first wave of suburban development, Two Guys owned nearly all of its real estate).
Vornado discovered that the land was worth much more than the actual stores, and liquidated and shuttered the company, finally renaming itself Vornado Realty Trust. To this day Vornado owns and rents out most of the shopping plazas and plots of land where Two Guys stores once stood. Vornado has continued to occasionally identify and purchase struggling retailers, generally with an eye towards the real estate. Toys “R” Us was one of these.
In other words, the real estate was probably understood as being pretty good for a long time, and that was likely a factor in the chain’s eventual demise.
Most if not virtually all of the new Toys ‘R’ Us stores are in malls, outlet malls, and shopping centers, not freestanding stores, and almost all of them are therefore leased rather than owned, as many of the old stores were.
Related Reading:
Thanks for the highlight and comments!
Learning that US has a lot of racist Nazis was bad but what does it have to do with remote work?