Workers Are Fleeing Big Cities for Smaller Ones—and Taking Their Jobs With Them Places including Boise and Denver are growing fast, partly because of employees working remotely Workers are fueling a renaissance in American cities that lie outside the major job hubs. Here, a neighborhood in Idaho. Todd Meier for The Wall Street Journal By Ben Eisen September 7, 2019 Kelly Swift grew tired of the Los Angeles area a few years ago so she decided to leave—and take her job with her. Ms. Swift kept her role in health-care information-technology consulting, and her California salary, when she and her family settled in a suburb of Boise, Idaho. Her employer didn’t mind that she started working from home. Ms. Swift joined a group of workers fueling a renaissance in U.S. cities that lie outside the major job hubs. People who do their jobs from home, freelance or constantly travel for work are migrating away from expensive urban centers such as Los Angeles and San Francisco toward cheaper cities including Boise; Denver; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Ore., according to economists and local residents. That has brought a boom to these cities, and while the ultimate effects aren’t yet clear, the development comes with a few downsides. Many places are dealing with growing pains like fast-rising home prices and traffic congestion, but aren’t accruing all the economic benefits, such as the deep investments companies often make in the areas where they are based. “One of the bummers is that they are not necessarily joining the workforce,” said Sheila Smith, a real-estate agent in Boise. Many of the out-of-town arrivals she sells to work from home or commute to jobs in distant cities, she said. Kelly Swift, working from her home in Eagle, Idaho. Photo: Todd Meier for The Wall Street Journal Additionally, workers tend to spread out geographically during an economic cycle’s later stages, economists said, raising questions about how these cities will fare in a downturn. Workers are usually more confident—and employers more lenient—when the economy has been flourishing. Ms. Swift said she and her family were effectively living paycheck to paycheck in the Los Angeles area. But living in Boise is 35% less expensive than living in Los Angeles, according to personal-finance website Bankrate.com. She and her husband, who have two children, bought a house in the Boise area after renting in L.A. It is twice as big as their old place, but the monthly payments are half as much as their L.A. rent. There was also enough room for her mother to move in. “We all love it,” she said. “We have a much higher quality of life here.” Some regions see remote work as a promising way to lure people who otherwise wouldn’t consider the move. Vermont and the Shoals area of Alabama, among others, have introduced giveaways to draw telecommuters in the past few years. A program in Tulsa, Okla., hands some arriving remote workers $10,000 in cash. “You’re looking for something new,” says the website for the program, which is sponsored by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. “We’re looking for great people to join the Tulsa community.” The role of remote work has become increasingly important as migration paths emerge across the country. The biggest U.S. cities are still drawing more people than they are losing, but the rate is slowing, according to Jenny Ying, a data scientist at LinkedIn, the workplace networking website. Portland, Ore. New York Chicago Sacramento, Calif. Indianapolis San Francisco Las Vegas Nashville, Tenn. Raleigh, N.C. Charlotte, N.C. Los Angeles Austin, Texas Houston Orlando, Fla. Miami Source: LinkedIn Workers are moving from New York City to Charlotte, N.C., and Orlando, Fla., and from Chicago to Nashville, Tenn., and Indianapolis, according to an analysis for The Wall Street Journal by LinkedIn. They are also leaving Los Angeles for Las Vegas, San Francisco for Reno, Nev., and Seattle for Eugene, Ore. “The livability crises of certainly the West Coast and some of the East Coast are clearly a push factor,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. In 2017, some 5.3% of adults in metro areas of between 500,000 and three million people worked from home, a rough proxy for remote workers. That was up from 3.7% a decade earlier, according to an analysis of the latest Census Bureau data that Mr. Muro did for the Journal. The proportion of home workers in these metros—which includes Boise on the smaller side and Denver on the larger side—grew faster than in both smaller and larger regions. Among freelancers, nearly four-fifths choose to do so partly because it allows them to work from a location of their choosing, according to a survey by the freelance marketplace Upwork Inc. The survey also found that if freelancing keeps increasing in popularity, people are more likely to move out of urban job centers to places that cater to their lifestyles. In Boise, locals said that a lot of the new residents are attracted by the mix of city and small-town amenities as well as the abundant outdoor activities. “We just hit a lot of marks, so we attract a lot of people who have the ability to work anywhere,” Andrea Pettitt, a Boise real-estate agent, said. Share of workers working from home, by metro-area size More than 3,000,000 2017 5.4% 1.4 pct. pts. 2007 4.0% 500,000 – 3,000,000 5.3% 1.6 pct. pts. 3.7% Less than 500,000* 4.5% 0.6 pct. pt. 3.9% *Includes non-metro areas Source: Brookings Institution analysis of census data Kim and Matt Lutterloh in their home in Meridian, Idaho. Photo: Todd Meier for The Wall Street Journal Major migration paths to Boise, Idaho Seattle Spokane, Wash. Missoula, Mont. Eugene, Ore. Boise, Idaho Reno, Nev. Other cities with migration paths similar to Boise’s Sacramento, Calif. San Francisco Las Vegas Los Angeles Source: LinkedIn For each worker who left Boise over the past four years, 1.57 workers moved in, making the city the biggest magnet for new residents in the LinkedIn analysis. New Boise arrivals most often come from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. Many have skills tied to strategy, sales, business development and startups, all of which tend to translate well from one place to another. Some own small businesses. Kim and Matt Lutterloh, who are originally from Seattle, moved to the Boise suburb of Meridian two years ago after a stint in Scottsdale, Ariz. They considered moving back to Seattle, but decided against it because housing had gotten so expensive. Mr. Lutterloh works remotely for a litigation-support company and Mrs. Lutterloh works as a physical therapist, which made it easy for her to find work in a new city. A large share of their neighborhood telecommutes, Mr. Lutterloh said. The Lutterlohs, who plan to stay for the foreseeable future, enjoy the rich culture of the downtown area, which they said has a familiar vibe. “It feels like a little bit of Seattle 15 years ago,” he said. —Lauren Weber contributed to this article. https://www.wsj.com/articles/worker...shareToken=stba949583fa634e30ab0db0d8f46bfd98
An encouraging development. We can't fit ever more people into a few metropolis that push up real estate prices ever more. I am rushing to buy land in Canada (British Columbia countryside) because I truly believe most land won't be available at reasonable prices in 15-20 years anymore. Prices in Vancouver or other large cities are ever increasing and this can't go on forever when even Google tech workers can't afford life in or around SF anymore. The incoming stream of Chinese and Indians will only increase dramatically given how little progress their countries make in terms of environmental pollution and competition for educational institutions and competition for real estate.
Been to Boise recently on business. Not sure I'd want to live there, looks pretty dead. And a fund manager I met there said the Idaho income taxes are a killer. But I understand the dynamics of migration - I have been witnessing a slow but steady outflow of businesses and residents from NYC metro area through the years. The democrat controlled state government are chronic spenders pandering to public sector union demands and that will never, ever change.
Voting with their feet is becoming easier as the internet gets better and better and the world becomes more connected. This maybe is the biggest and most profound outcome of the internet age. City with business infrastructure may hold the business but they better have the right environment for the workers because workers now have options to live where the quality of life is better. The question for us traders is how do we take advantage of this trend and if this is a tradable event?
Interesting. This article seems in direct conflict to other articles I have read that stated that 96% of job created since 2017 have been in the nation's largest cities: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-cities-created-almost-all-of-u-s-job-growth-in-2017/
Not in conflict. It just said the workers now live far from the big cities where the jobs were created and telecommuted.
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