This past week, Twitter announced it was giving employees the option to work from home for good if they so choose. It would be required upon hiring to declare whether the employee would work from home or ever come into the office.
And if other large companies follow suit, what could happen? For this future, let’s assume the most significant companies in the prime real estate locations (aka cities) now allow work from home.
Workers would no longer need to flock to cities, spreading the population out over a wider area. This trend would drive real estate costs down as more people fled to the suburbs, not content with having no land area in case of another quarantine. This flight from cities could be this generation’s lesson, similar to the saving mindset of those who lived through the Great Depression.
Prices in the city would fall, and this would trickle down to housing costs in the suburbs.
Pockets of tech-employees could create their commune, complete with their private schools. With the spread of Amazon’s delivery capabilities, they would still be able to get everything they could want within two days. They wouldn’t even need to be near major retail, other than a grocery store.
BUT, if these pockets wanted to, they could set up their gardens and farms, funded by their tech jobs.
This scenario is the story world, but what about the story?
I think it could be two small boys, friends from two very different communities. Like “The Boy In The Striped Pajamas.” They meet at a local stream and become friends, but each goes back to very different circumstances. It could show the progression of their lives, with sections from different ages, highlighting the differences between growing up in two separate environments close to each other.
Lots of Americana involved, with similar situations to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, when the two children are young. These interactions could be book one, with a created monster in the form of alcoholism within both families and how they are treated differently.
Book two could be the friends finding themselves both in love with the same girl, someone homeschooled in a religious household, out of reach of both of them.
The third book could be a situation when the funding for the tech community dries up. The friend who grew up in the tech community learns to rely on the one less fortunate, and together they create a new town with themselves at the front.
OR this could be a single book, a Romeo and Juliet where the two lovers come from each of the different communities.
