https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/poverty/4246551-us-employees-spend-51-daily-when-they-work-full-time-in-office-study-says/
Work from home was such a blessing for me because it set in simultaneously with my elderly dog's health decline (medication 3x a day, seizures that cause urination, laundry etc). The only reason she got to live out her last two years was because someone was home with her around the clock. We would have had to put her down if we were spending 50 hours a week each away from home. She passed, and then our other dog got old somehow. Now my schedule is partial wfh, and those 10 hour days in office wreak havoc on my desire to keep dog beds clean. Love having to weigh my family's life in one hand, and my job in the other
If it includes parking and lunch then it's probably pretty accurate for big cities dealing with new density and poor transportation infrastructure.
As I hear it, NYC in particular considers people who commute to the city to be evading taxes by not living there but using all their infrastructure and services when deciding their tolls.
Train to work and back is 20 bucks for me + bus is 6 bucks
If I had to buy lunch at work that's another 20 bucks
If I had a car, gas would be like 10, parking would be 15, and then the amortized cost of car payments, car insurance, and maintenance + lunch still if I had to buy it
So working from home essentially achieves a similar effect as a general strike.
This is the real estate and therefore property taxes and therefore city hall angle. This is why cities and states were so easily convinced to pull back COVID protections. The City (TM) has been built up around the assumption that everyone needs to get to work (often by car), often eat lunch out, have a latte, go out after work for a drink, etc. City Hall has built itself on taxing property values (and sometimes corporate profits) driven by those activities, i.e. the concentration of office workers and service workers to make the lattes and lunches and drinks.
Work from home undermines those property values and colocated service businesses.
This is also a big part of why the real estate bubble is threatening to pop.
The useful part of this analysis for organizing is that any socialist in office needs to work on decoupling municipal income from property values and explain it in these terms. It's one of the major ways in which the chamber of commerce dictates local politics so that even the few progressives will reluctantly oppose your agenda. If you are involved in creating capital investment projects via initiatives or petitions etc, you want to design the tax to pay for it to be decoupled from property values.
Don't have pets that are too large for you to manage two of them so they aren't alone during the day. That's my solution at least.
For me it was like $20 transit + however much i ended up spending on lunch, usually another $15 - $25 depending on which gentrified to shit restaurant i went to
