I was also looking to do alignment-focused work remotely, and then, while failing to find any appropriate^[1] opportunities, had a bit of a wake-up call which led to me changing my mind.

From the "inside", there are some pretty compelling considerations for avoiding remote work.

"Context is that which is scarce" - the less "shovel-ready" the work is, the more important it is to have very high bandwidth communication.  I liked remote work at my last job because I was working at a tech company where we had quarterly planning cycles and projects were structured in a way such that everyone working remotely barely made a difference, most of the time.  (There were a couple projects near the end where it was clearly a significant drag on our ability to make forward progress, due to the increasing number of stakeholders, and the difficulty of coordinating everything).

LessWrong is a three-person^[2] team, and if we spent basically all of our time developing features the way mature tech companies do, we could probably also be remote with maybe only a 30-40% performance penalty.  But in fact a good chunk of our effort goes into attempting to backchain from "solve the alignment problem/end the acute risk period" into "what should we actually be doing".  This often does involve working on LessWrong, but not 100% of the time.  As an example, we're currently in the middle of a two-week "alignment sprint", where we're spending most of our timing diving into object-level research.  To say that this style of work^[3] benefits from co-location would be understating things.

Now, I do think that LessWrong is on the far end of the spectrum here, but I think this is substantially true for most alignment orgs, given that they tend to be smaller and working in a domain that's both extremely high context and also fairly pre-paradigmatic.  In general, coordination and management capacity are severely constrained, and remote work is at its best when you need less coordination effort to achieve good outcomes.

1. ^{^}

   Ones where I had some reasonable model of their theory of change, and where I expected I would be happy with day-to-day work itself.

2. ^{^}

   Sort of.  It's complicated.

3. ^{^}

   Including the ability to pivot on relatively short notice.

Fwiw I live in London and have been to the Bay Area and I think that London is better across all 4 dimensions you mentioned. 

• Social scene: Don't know what exactly you are looking for but London is large and diverse.
• High cost of living: London is pretty expensive too but cheaper.
• Difficulty getting around: London has pretty good public transportation.
• Homeless problem: I think I see homeless people 10x less compared to when I was in the Bay.