Workers Are Fleeing Big Cities for Small Ones—and Taking Their Jobs With Them
Workers Are Fleeing
Big Cities for Small 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 Sept. 7, 2019 5:30 am ET
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
American 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,
smaller cities including Boise; Denver; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Ore.;
according to economists and local residents.
That has brought a boom to these
midsize 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.
Additionally, workers tend to spread
out geographically during an economic cycle’s later stages, economists say,
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
last 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.
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 UpworkInc. 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 say 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,” said Andrea
Pettitt, a Boise real-estate agent.
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 say has a familiar
vibe.
“It feels like a little bit of Seattle 15 years ago,” he said.
—Lauren Weber contributed to this article.
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