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It has been a lot according to the pandemic-era exodus to Lake Tahoe, Martha’s Vineyard or Aspen. White-collar workers, freed from the confines of the office, went last year to get more climate-friendly skiing and hiking — the pandemic Zoom villages. The citizens were angry. The labor market was reorganized. American life changed unchanged. Or so the story goes.
Recent data suggests that Zoom Town USA has a much larger appearance in Alameda County, California, across the bay from San Francisco. Last year, 18% of those who moved out of San Francisco landed there, just by subway, bus or ferry. The same goes for the smaller cities around Boston: Natick, Worcester and Weymouth.
According to data from the Postal Service received by the real estate company CBRE, those who were bet during the pandemic were less likely to go inland than to go to the few dense cities nearby, farther from the downtown hill. A CityLab analysis they found that between March 2020 and February 2021, 84 percent of the people who moved outside the country’s 50 largest cities were in the same area. An additional 7.5 percent remained in the same situation.
An analysis the University of Chicago, published last week, suggests that these office exiles will continue to work from home. Using a survey of 30,000 working-age Americans, researchers estimate that 20% of post-pandemic workdays will occur at home, 5% before the virus.
This suggests that a legacy of the virus could be a downside for smaller cities and dormitory communities. Maybe more people will stick to their household money — and spend money on it. According to the same Chicago study, moving from home to work in the long run will reduce spending on urban centers by 5-10 percent. But people will spend it somewhere.
“People who work from home still want to take to the streets, during the day or after work, and still want to spend money on interesting things and interesting places,” says Bill Fulton, who runs Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. . “If you’re moving from San Francisco, you don’t want to spend all your money on Applebee, do you?”
Brookings Institution member Tracy Hadden Loh, who studies real estate development, says in another way: “I think annoying people with laptops will be everywhere. They’ll come to your favorite place.”
The changes have allowed elected officials, city planners and developers to think about how to plan for this foggy future and have asked many questions. Who will live here? Who will work here? Who will drive or take transportation here, and when? Basically: What types of housing should we build and for what kind of people?
MassINC, a Massachusetts think tank that focuses on economic development for the middle class in the state. this month has suggested employers looking at a “hybrid” work model — a mix of office and home work — may think of placing satellite offices in smaller cities in the state, many of which have empty shop windows. The think tank says it’s a win-win situation: Businesses get more office space without rent in Boston, and smaller places get more tax revenue from commercial tenants and money that employees spend while hanging out a few days a week.
“It’s a chance for these smaller cities to relocate and capture the growth of people who don’t want to live in the center of the city anymore,” says Andre Leroux, who leads the group’s Oriented Development Program. . Places like Lowell, Springfield and Worcester don’t necessarily have to be smaller branches in Boston, he says. “They can secure historic sites as their regional site.”
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