According to an Atlantic article last week, “Cities are freaking out!” The article focused on reasons Americans might be moving on from a five-day work week, and the implications this would have long-term on office work. One of the implications that was predicted was emptier downtowns.

If office occupancy never recovers, downtown areas will experience an extended ice age. Emptier offices will mean fewer lunches at downtown restaurants, fewer happy hours, fewer window shoppers, fewer subway and bus trips, and less work for cleaning, security, and maintenance services. This means weaker downtown economies and less taxable income for cities.

When thinking about the way white collar work has moved home, cities should be concerned about this impact. Right now, in many downtown areas in the US, office work is what has kept white collar workers engaged with their downtown communities. Although they work downtown, few of them actually live near downtown. And now, as people head home to work, neighborhood amenities like school districts will control where white collar families spend their time and money more than ever before.

Combined with people working from home and record low-public school enrollment, cities will need to consider ways to draw families back to these spaces and jumpstart job growth.  If not, families who cannot afford to move away from areas of low-performing schools, will be left behind with very few options. Just look at how healthy food follows higher income communities.

But if school quality financially stratifies communities, what would happen if somehow we could remove district lines so families didn’t feel their children were threatened by their neighborhood’s school assignment? What if families who lived in struggling, lower-income communities had access to high-quality education? How long would those neighborhoods stay undesirable?

Cities can freak out about remote workers, but we’ve got an answer worth considering.