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Friday, June 30th, 2023

The Places Most Affected by Remote Workers’ Moves Around the Country

Author:     Emily Badger, Robert Gebeloff and Josh Katz
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     Jun 17, 2023
 Link: The Places Most Affected by Remote Workers’ Moves Around the Country
Stephan:  

Remote work is transforming the way our economy works, as this article describes. This is a very big deal, and I think this is just beginning. When we get to projected holograms, which is where we are headed, remote work will be the norm. In my view the empty office buildings these workers leave behind should be turned into housing for the homeless, the elderly, and poor families. The big visual takeaway when you travel around in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Is the number of homeless people living on the street. It is much more expensive for a city to have homeless people than to have people housed.

In prepandemic times, the few Americans who worked from home appeared relatively settled there.

They were less likely to move than other workers. And they probably had less reason to: If you were sitting in a rare job in 2018 that enabled regular work from home — and your life was adjusted to that good fortune — why move somewhere new?

The abrupt rise and shifting nature of remote work over the last few years has upended this pattern, according to an Upshot analysis of census migration data. During the pandemic, people who worked from home became significantly more likely to move — and more likely to do so than all other workers:

This rising mobility was driven by remote workers who sought new housing in their same metro areas, but also by a wave of remote workers decamping to other parts of the country. In the first two years of the pandemic, one in four workers who moved long-distance was working remotely in a new home — a previously unheard-of scale of remote migration.

In the two years leading […]

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