

The sandwich board outside Hernandez Hardware has been there since 2015, weathered and warped, advertising $4.99 box nails that probably cost more now but nobody's changed the sign. Three blocks up, in the brick building with the blue awning that used to be a shoe repair shop, Lisa Chen runs a tax preparation service out of two rooms upstairs—she's been there eleven years. Between them, the coffee shop on the corner just changed hands for the second time in three years.

This is Maple Street in Riverside, or maybe it's Main. It doesn't matter. The point is the rhythm of it: the hardware store that opens at seven-thirty, the tax office where people wait with their receipts in manila envelopes, the café that cycles through owners like seasons. These places survived the first year of the pandemic, when half the storefronts on this block went dark. They survived the second year, when everyone said downtown was dead. What they're surviving now is something else entirely.

The conversation about remote work usually happens in a different language—productivity metrics, talent retention, hybrid schedules. Nobody at the hardware store talks that way. Elena Vargas, who runs Hernandez Hardware with her husband, doesn't have a remote work policy because there is no remote work at a hardware store. You cannot sell nails over Zoom.

Here's what I keep coming back to: the people who left downtown in March 2020 never really came back. They kept their jobs, they just stopped coming into the office. Meanwhile, everyone who makes their life function—the ones who fix their plumbing, ring up their groceries, deliver their packages—never stopped showing up. That's the part nobody wants to say out loud.

Remote work works great. For some people. The rest of us just keep the lights on.