Will the Lack of Affordable Housing Force Large Companies to Rethink Relocating?

At the height of COVID-19, working from home was a great alternative for millions of workers in office situations. With the freedom of not having to fight traffic every day, paying for daycare, and being able to spend more time with the family, many decided that living within driving distance of the office wasn’t necessary. 

Welcome to the exodus from overcrowded cities with the sky-high cost of living to country life sometimes hundreds or even a thousand miles from the office and the world of working from home.

However, things have recently happened that are making the entire work-from-home option not so good. First, many companies have begun telling their employees to return to work in the office as evidenced by Elon Musk announcing he wanted his office employees back at their desks. 

The other thing that happened is something almost nobody expected. Companies began leaving states with high taxes and wages and moving to other areas that offered better benefits to them. Good, sound business decisions. Now those new areas are rapidly becoming very expensive for their employees’ housing needs as both the exodus to new areas was massive and now rising costs of home prices and the new interest rates are hurting the average office worker and middle manager.

Amazon’s HQ2 new headquarters in Crystal City just outside DC could become a prime (pardon the pun) example of bringing too much to an area. It is estimated that Amazon will employ 25,000 within 8 years. The problem is it will drive up rents and housing costs and make it difficult for lower-income residents to afford to stay in the county unless thousands of new units are added to alleviate the pressure on the market, which requires more subsidized housing units while the existing affordable housing will be used by Amazon workers.

The bottom line is where will the displaced people, forced to move out of their homes by rapidly increasing rents, go? The jobs many hold now will not be what big companies like Amazon will need. They are going to bring in a lot of employees with IT and technology skills that can afford to pay those higher rents while the people displaced have to live further away from their current jobs.

Only a fraction of new housing in Arlington County, VA is geared for ‘workforce’ budgets. Analysts have estimated the county’s shortage of affordable housing at tens of thousands of homes, condominiums, or apartments as Amazon will require other tech companies to relocate to Crystal City to service it.

This is happening in just about every city. It’s time for drastic measures to help create enough affordable as well for sheltering the homeless. We’re the USA and we can do it. The questions are when will we begin doing it and who will do it?