We compared the 200 biggest U.S. cities based on 20 remote worker-friendliness factors, such as internet quality, cost of living, and access to coworking spaces. We even considered financial bonuses that local and state governments offer prospective telecommuting incomers.
Here are some trends in the rankings:
Live your best remote life in Plano, Texas, our 2023 gold medalist. Plano displaces fellow Dallas suburb Frisco, our former top city for telecommuters, as well as Austin, Arlington, and Dallas, which were also ahead last year…
Eight of our top 10 cities are all located in the South. This region is known for its general budget-friendliness (including no state income tax for some) and sprawling spaces, and our data maintains that reputation…
What gives? The real question is, what doesn’t California’s biggest cities give? The answer is a lot: generous square footage and affordable goods and services. There are exceptions in each category, of course, but they’re few and far between.
This list seems to roughly overlap with other lists of best places to live: there are certain factors and locations that offer opportunities in ways that others do not.
At the same time, this list and the best places to live lists tend to be skewed toward certain kinds of jobs or industries. This list depends on the kinds of jobs or sectors where people can work from home. The best places to live lists often rank highly places with lots of well-paying white collar jobs.
Does it matter that the so-called best places to live are similar to the places named as best for remote workers? Such rankings can reinforce each other and lead to population growth in some places – and not others that could also be good places for people to live.
At the swearing-in this month for her third term as the District of Columbia’s mayor, Muriel Bowser delivered a surprising inaugural-address ultimatum of sorts to the federal government: Get your employees back to in-person work — or else vacate your lifeless downtown office buildings so we can fill the city with people again…
There are days when downtowns in other American towns can almost look like they did before 2020. In the 9-to-5 core of Washington, though, there’s no mistaking the 2023 reality with the pre-Covid world. Streets are noticeably emptier and businesses scarcer. Crime has ticked up. The city’s remarkable quarter-century run of population growth and economic dynamism and robust tax revenues seems in danger…
According to census data, Washington has the highest work-from-home rate in the country. Week-to-week numbers from the security firm Kastle Systems back this up: The company, whose key fobs are used in office buildings around the country (including the one that houses POLITICO), compiles real-time occupancy data based on card swipes in its 10 largest markets. D.C. is perennially dead last…
To people who depend on commuters’ lunch-hour spending or transit fees, the change is less welcome. According to John Falcicchio, the city’s economic-development boss and Bowser’s chief of staff, the federal government’s 200,000 D.C. jobs represent roughly a quarter of the total employment base; the government also occupies a third of Washington office space — not just the cabinet departments whose ornate headquarters dot Federal Triangle, but plenty of the faceless privately held buildings in the canyons around Farragut Square, too.
On one hand, Washington D.C. is in a unique situation. One employer, the federal government, is responsible for a sizable portion of the local workforce.
On the other hand, this is an issue facing many downtowns. Can asking companies to have workers return or applying threats be successful? Or, is it better to try to offer amenities and encouragements so workers want to return? As a third option, is it time to transition from the decades-long emphasis on commercial downtown space to residences and other uses?
This could be an inflection point for a number of downtowns or it could end up being a version of the same old approach. However, it would not surprise me if the conversation between local politicians and business leaders heats up around this issue.
A distinct growth sector of the suburban office market, coworking has become a bastion of those downsizing from corporate space, fleeing the congestion of the city, or escaping the domestic distractions of working from home…
He said the New Jersey site opened at that Bell Works in March 2016 with 2,800 square feet. But as the popularity and future trending of coworking became clear, construction began on a 25,000-square-foot version elsewhere in the building — just before the pandemic.
Previously, the concept had been based on a desire in the market for flexibility and a better work-life balance. But the pandemic really hit the gas pedal for coworking…
While coworking sites already make up 7% of total office space, that amount is projected to reach 30% by 2030, she said.
Hauser, whose sister firm Workplace Studio also designs coworking spaces for others, said there are five elements that define coworking: flexible desks, meeting rooms, a sense of community, a community manager, and a source for economic development.
One other factor hinted at in the experiences described in the article is this: a cool factor. The ability to access space in an interesting setting – such as the revamped Bell Works site in Hoffman Estates – with on-campus amenities is fun. Setting up coworking space in a quiet strip mall in a sleepy community would be less attractive. Being around energy and excitement helps make the the flexible workspace experience interesting.
I would be interested to know how much coworking space might emerge compared to the corporate office downsizing that might happen in the next few years. What percent will coworking occupy compared to the loss of traditional office space?
Here is data on how people in the United States got to work in 2021:
Over two-thirds of workers drove alone. This is the case even with some Americans working from home.
The percent of Americans either driving with someone or taking mass transit is low. Estimating from this data, fewer than 11% travel to work among others.
Commuting is primarily a solo task in the United States. This has all sorts of implications ranging from traffic and congestion on roads, environmental concerns, time use, land use, social interactions, and more.
Suburban developers and retailers are working to provide ways to escape home, be around others, and, most importantly, spend newfound time and money…
Neighborhood retailers are eyeing the money she and others are saving on the commute, in addition to the thousands of dollars that office workers typically spend annually in restaurants, bars, clothing stores, entertainment venues and other businesses. In many cases, coffee breaks, haircuts and happy hours that used to happen near downtown offices have moved to the suburbs…
In the Washington region and nationally, the trend is most striking in higher-income inner suburbs, where more residents have computer-centric jobs suited to remote work and money to spare…
The new weekday demand, developers say, has helped suburban shopping centers and entertainment districts reach and, in some cases, surpass 2019 sales. The pandemic also accelerated long-standing pre-pandemic trends toward walkable suburban developments and the “third place” — public gathering spots like coffee shops and bookstores, where people can connect beyond home and work.
I want to expand on one of the ideas suggested above: this may already be happening in wealthier and denser inner-ring suburbs. These communities already have residents with more money to spend and already have a denser streetscape from a founding before postwar automobile suburbia.
Imagine then an even more bifurcated suburbia where wealthier suburbs have vibrant entertainment and shopping options while other suburbs do not. The suburban work from home crowd is not evenly distributed and neither are the communities and amenities they might prefer.
One of the consequences of urbanization is the physical and social separation of work and home. People live further from where they labor and land uses are often separated. Yet, the pandemic may have helped many Americans reunite these two realms that were once joined more closely. Here is a summary of a survey specifically looking at working from home:
While there has been a widespread recognition that the remote work rate surged during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, there is disagreement about the extent of this change. To address this limitation, we field a new, nationally-representative survey instrument called the Remote Life Survey (LFS) in October 2020. We find that in October, 2020, 31.6% of the workforce always worked from home and 22.8% sometimes or rarely worked from home, totaling 53.6%. We compare our results with alternative measurement approaches, focusing on five factors: (a) differences in the selection of respondents among mail versus web -based surveys, (b) differences in the inclusion of self-employed workers, (c) ambiguity that arises from the forced classification of remote versus non-remote work into discrete categories, (d) the industry mix of the sample, and (e) the exclusion of people who were already remote pre-pandemic. We find that explanation (e) explains the bulk of the difference in estimates between the Current Population Survey (CPS) and other measures of remote work, underestimating the remote work rate by 33 percentage points. Overall, we estimate that about half of the US workforce currently works remotely at least some days each week.
For those who wanted to reunite work and home, is it good that a pandemic brought this about for a good number of workers? What I mean is this: metropolitan regions did not become denser, employees were not economically more able to reside closer to where they worked, and companies and organizations did not necessarily allow this because they wanted to. People worked at home more because of a health risk, not because they aimed to create more holistic lives.
But, here we are with more people working from home. Does this then transform both the communities where they live and the communities where they work? Does it enable more integrated social networks and communities or has too much changed since urbanization (such as the Internet and social media)?
It is hard to predict what exactly might happen if work from home trends continue. As the researchers suggest above, having better data should allow us to better understand what is going on. Figuring out what this all leads to will require more work and interpretation.
If drivers have been reluctant to limit their car use and reduce mileage in the past, they now have two headline-making reasons to reconsider: painful prices at the pump and a sobering recent report on climate change.
Meeting both challenges means committing to conservation as individuals — and as a society…
Minimizing driving and maximizing the efficiency of our cars are vital tools in the battles to lower gas bills and protect our planet.
The Daily Herald covers news in the suburbs of Chicago and is based in Arlington Heights, a suburb with a denser downtown roughly 25 miles northwest of Chicago. In other words, they serve an area built on cars and driving. Their headquarters is primarily accessible by cars and is next to a major interstate.
In both cases, suburbanites might not be able to give up cars all together but a household might be able to go from two to one car with less driving. That would reduce pollution, traffic, and parking needs.
However, both of these shifts are significant ones. Denser suburban areas are not necessarily ones with single-family homes on big lots. Denser areas put people in closer proximity to each other. Working from home might be technologically feasible but might not be desirable by corporations and organizations or by communities who relied on commuters and workers. These might be options more available in some communities or some residents rather than to all suburbanites.
Economists believe agglomeration — like the clustering of tech in the Bay Area — has historically been the result of two main forces. The first is what they call “human capital spillovers” — a fancy way of saying that people get smarter and more creative when they’re around other smart and creative people. Think informal conversations, or “serendipitous interactions,” over coffee in the break room or beers at the bar. These interactions, the theory says, are crucial to generating great ideas, and they encourage the incubation and development of brainiac clusters. The other force is the power of “matching” opportunities. When lots of tech firms, workers and investors clustered in Silicon Valley, there were lots more opportunities for productive marriages between them. As a result, companies that wanted to recruit, grow or get acquired often gravitated to places like the Bay Area.
However, remote work could actually improve certain matching possibilities. Companies can hire smart people anywhere in the world when they drop the requirement that they physically be in a central office. Not only that, they can pay them less. Moreover, killing the office can significantly lower costs for companies, which no longer have to pay for expensive real estate.
So, in this theory, the future of work and the economic geography of America really hinges on whether companies can create those “human capital spillovers” through computer screens or in offices in cheaper locations.
This is a phenomenon with a pretty broad reach as cities could be viewed as clusters of firms and organizations. What has been interesting to me in this field in recent years is how places like this come to develop and what it means for the character of the place.
Take Silicon Valley as an example. This is the home of the tech industry and, as the article notes, the big firms have committed to physically being there with large headquarters (including Google, Apple, and Facebook). These headquarters and office parks are themselves interesting and often a post-World War Two phenomena as highways and suburbanization brought many companies out of downtowns to more sprawling campuses. At the same time, the impact of all of this on the communities nearby is also important. What happens when the interests of the big tech company and the community collide (see a recent example of a Facebook mixed-use proposal)? What did these communities used to be like and what are they?
This is bigger than just the idea of employees working from home. This potential shift away from clustering would affect places themselves and how they are experienced. If thousands of workers are no longer in Silicon Valley, what does this do to those communities and the communities in which more workers are now at home? Silicon Valley became something unique with this tech activity but it could be a very different kind of place in several decades if there is new activity and new residents.
The same could be said for many other communities. What is New York City if Wall Street and the finance industry clusters elsewhere or disperses across the globe? What happens to Los Angeles if Hollywood disperses? And so on. The character of places depends in part on these clusters, their size, and their history. If the agglomerations shift, so will the character of communities.
Such gangbusters growth is unlikely to continue, with the pandemic easing. But the rush to the country that underpins it is less an anomaly than a speeding up of a long-tern trend, as more people – notably millennials yearning to become homeowners – look to adopt quasi-rural lifestyles. Being priced out of urban living is one driving factor; interest in healthier and more sustainable diets, including homegrown vegetables and home-harvested eggs, is another. Whatever is motivating them, Tractor Supply sees an opportunity in these “ruralpolitans” – and the COVID-driven shift toward remote work will help sustain their numbers.
Lawton, who became CEO in early 2020 after two years as the No. 2 at Macy’s, says millennials’ willingness to move farther from city centers is a “game changer”: “We seeing a new kind of shopper in our stores,” he tells Fortune. Now Tractor Supply is adapting to cater to both its established customer base and these younger space-seekers, following a strategic road map with the folksy title “Life Out Here.”…
The fast-growing cohort that Tractor Supply is cultivating, she says, are “beginning to learn how to garden. They have this passion for poultry.” Call them the “country suburban” customers.
The company is strategic about where it meets these customers. Its stores are almost all located in mid-size or small towns – communities that are often too small to support a Home Depot, Petco, or Walmart.
The economic impact of COVID-19 has hit some businesses very hard while others, like Tractor Supply, have found opportunities. From the sound of this article, they had locations in numerous places that received new residents during COVID-19 and had the right mix of products and service that appealed to them.
I wonder about the class dynamics of all of this. How do the new “ruralpolitans” who want to raise chickens or have a small farm and have moved from the city compare to the other shoppers at Tractor Supply or to long-term residents in the community?
Another question to ask is whether these newer residents with these interests in food and farming are in it for the long haul or not. On one hand, if remote work is more viable than ever, perhaps people will stay in smaller communities outside cities and pursue this. On the other hand, if companies ask more workers to return or if small-scale agriculture and animal husbandry is not appealing in the long run, this may be more of a flash in the pan. Industry-wide shifts in agriculture could have an impact as well.
Finally, the move to a more rural life has implications for private lives and community life. Many Americans say they like the idea of living in a small town but this is different than actually living in one. What is the tipping point where an influx of new residents changes the character of the community (or is change somewhat inevitable)? How involved will these new residents be in local organizations, religious congregations, local government, and in local social affairs?
Agencies in Boston, Cleveland, Las Vegas, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New Orleans are offering reduced fares or free rides, temporarily, to lure people back onto transit. Others are considering abolishing fares altogether. Los Angeles is exploring a 23-month pilot that would give students and low-income residents free rides. The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority scrapped fares in March 2020 and doesn’t plan to bring them back. “The return on investment for empathy, compassion, for social equity, far outweighs the return on investment for concrete and asphalt,” Robbie Makinen, the agency’s CEO, told Stateline last week.
Others are taking aim at an even more sacred cow: rush hour service…
Agencies are using the murky period of pandemic recovery to usher in schedule changes. In Los Angeles, officials for Metra, the local commuter rail, said this month they would test new schedules that “step away” from the pre-pandemic, rush hour norm, “in favor of a more balanced approach” that spaces trains more evenly throughout the day. In Boston, officials in April went ahead with pre-pandemic plans and began running more frequent commuter trains outside the schedules of the 9-to-5ers. It’s part of a bigger vision to transform the system into a more equitable regional rail network that serves more than the traditional office worker. Off-peak riders are more likely to be immigrants, women, people of color, and lower income. The pandemic, as the local advocacy group TransitMatters has observed, may have given the local agency the “political space” to make long-planned changes. There are fewer people now to complain that operators took away their specific train.
Just as the aftermath of COVID-19 offers an opportunity to think about housing, here is an opportunity to reconsider mass transit strategies. Why keep doing things the same old ways when the world has changed? If different cities and regions experiment with different tractics, they might find a few that work and that can be widely adopted.
At the same time, mass transit does not just face COVID-19 fallout. If given the choice, many Americans would prefer not to use mass transit. If needing to travel, they would prefer to drive unless this is really inconvenient. Driving offers more individual freedom to come and go and offers completely personal space (outside of seeing other drivers and passengers in nearby vehicles). American governments have spent a lot of money in the last century paying for roads and driving infrastructure while investments in mass transit have lagged or mass transit is often tied to driving (an emphasis on buses).
Additionally, if a post-COVID-19 world means that working from home is more of an option, more people simply will not need mass transit and/or will enjoy not having to use it. Mass transit could still be useful for going out but if it is not needed for work for as many people, this will mean losing a lot of regular riders.
More broadly, this gets at bigger questions in the United States about development, density, transportation, and thriving communities. An ongoing commitment to cars has consequences as would a shift toward a different kind of mass transit or constructing more dense places where mass transit makes more sense. If the best that can be done now is to prioritize transit-oriented development in denser pockets in urban areas, it will take a long time to swing trips toward mass transit compared to driving.
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