I think it's a hold-over from the age of factories and paper offices, when people had to be in one place to do the work. White collar work can now be mostly distributed, but light and heavy industry still needs groups of people working on site. Very different locations though, you don't see much manufacturing happening downtown.

I trace my American heritage to the Midwest and have plenty of industrial electricians, iron workers, farmers, etc in the family line. Traveling around the big Midwestern cities, there’s a part of me that longs for the old industrial downtown. Loud with machines, busy on the streets with laborers, dirty and dynamic. Now? It’s mostly cars, a few pedestrians, and a bunch of people who barely leave their desks (me included). Plenty of reasons why the times now are better, but there is some kind of a loss there.

For professions or companies where in-person collaboration is still needed, bigger concentration of business helps focus infrastructure investment into areas where it is most impactful. For instance, it's easier to make a subway line go through an area with lots of offices than it would be to have multiple separate lines passing through satellite hubs.

This stuff is mostly not centrally planned. People are free to open up offices wherever zoning allows (which is generally a lot more places than the few ultra-concentrated areas like downtown Manhattan), yet they tend to concentrate. Perhaps highly concentrating workers and businesses creates the best conditions for free movement of workers between businesses, allowing the best companies to more easily find the best workers.

It's true that these aren't centrally planned, but good infrastructure provides a feedback loop. People want to work at an office that's easy to commute to, so offices open near good transit. The extra offices require more transit, so more investment goes to the same area. Repeat ad infinitum.

Fair point if WFH is and remains the primary means of working.

On the other hand, if we believe the offices have value, as in people working together in one place has value, having offices in centralized locations because it is more of a known quantity for commuting.

Once you settle down roots, you don't want to have to upend your life if you lose your job or just want to find another job. And from the perspective of the company, you have more of a talent pool because you can recruit from all the other companies in the area with the benefit of not asking someone to move or change their routines.

I am in the camp of believing there being some benefit to people coming together to work on projects. Maybe not 5 days a week, but even if it is hybrid or occasional, there is still benefit for me to be central. I have worked 5 different jobs within 2 mile of each other and have never had to reconsider locations or commutes. I also benefit from being able to get lunch/drinks with old coworkers, attend impromptu 'meetups' and still make it home for dinner with my family because I can walk everywhere.

From a city planning point of view, there is a network effect to cities. Businesses move to cities because that is where there are services. Services are built because there is economy of scale to density.

Decentralized office locations means less density which means public transportation makes less sense, and dense services make less sense. Then you end up with Los Angeles (and Orange County). Which has lots of scattered office parks with little to nothing to do around them and that are only accessible by cars.

This is all a very American point of view. If instead we looked at European cities that were not built around cars and have good trains even for small hamlets, then absolutely, decentralized offices would make sense to me. It would satisfy my main concern of reliable transportation and ease of finding new jobs/networking.

So with many US city planning problems, the issue is our car centric culture.

> This is all a very American point of view. If instead we looked at European cities that were not built around cars and have good trains even for small hamlets, then absolutely, decentralized offices would make sense to me.

I think you're looking at Europe too much through rose-tinted glasses here. There might be more "hamlets" with "good trains" than in the US, but they're still not the norm, and compared to city centres those decentralised office and light industry business parks are mostly still a pain to get to on public transport, unless you happen to live in the right direction (which is where your "Once you settle down roots, you don't want to have to upend your life if you lose your job or just want to find another job." problem comes in).

Because at one point, we designed, built and sold stuff and so you would need everything local. Now that most of that is offshored and most jobs are paper pushing, it's really not needed.