By itself, no, it will not solve the problem, but it does help because it distributes the housing pressure over a larger area.
Forget the superhero approach. If you’re looking for one solution to fix everything, you’ll live life as a very disappointed person. There are no magical fixes to big problems - it’s one small step at a time, until their compounding effect starts to chip away at the problem.
Slack and Teams are tiny, I think, when compared to other cloud services - my company could easily migrate from slack to something else (some pain involved, but very doable). Even a sudden disconnect, there’s still email and other tools to get everything on the same page.
Migrating our products and data from Azure, if that got cut out of the blue? We’d probably be out of business before that was achieved.
The barrier to entry is prohibitive. So many people are living paycheck to paycheck, a down payment on a home within walking/cycling distance of their workplace is a pipedream.
Even if they could, with how large cities are, it’s unlikely it’ll be close to where they work.
The solution is always mass transit: even a simple bus, as long as it’s comfortable, reasonably fast and timely will do wonders. Trains and subway, even better.
It’s a step, and I’m glad your company’s taking it.
Just saying that there’s still some big hurdles ahead, but you’re right, gotta start somewhere.