The most important effect of the pandemic on America's urban areas will be how it accelerated a transition to remote work. Say what you want about future pandemics or the "amenity value" of locked-down cities, the high land rents that drive further urban densification and redevelopment cannot be maintained if even a sizeable minority of managers/workers maintain a preference for remote work. The entire justification for the existence of cities (i.e, agglomeration) diminishes the more and more digital networks replace physical ones.
In my view, there are two ways that remote work could transform settlement patterns. (Even though I'm framing this as an either/or, in reality we'll get some mixture of the two.) In one scenario, people stop going to the office altogether. This would lead them to move to places that are seen as desirable but don't currently have much in the way of employment opportunities; in particular, we'd see (and we have already begun to see) migration toward mountains and toward the coast. In the other scenario, employers move to a model where employees spend two days in the office and the other three at home. In that case, we'd expect to see heavy growth in the exurbs. A commute of an hour and a half each way is intolerable if you have to do it every single day, but you can probably suck it up twice a week if it means you get to buy a house with a yard.
Crucially, in neither case do mid-sized cities at the confluence of two rivers or the like benefit. The idea that remote work would lead to a revitalization of places like Peoria, which lack both geographic desirability and cultural amenities, seems to me to be a pipe dream. Settlement in the future will be driven far more by aesthetic suitability and far less by geographic function.
