Study: Many Americans no longer live where they work
In 2020, Virginia Martin lived 2 ½ miles from her office. Today, the distance between her work and home is 156 miles.
Martin, 37, used to live in Durham, North Carolina, and drove about 10 minutes to her job as a librarian at Duke University. After the onset of remote work, Martin got her boss’s blessing to return to her hometown, Richmond, Virginia, in March 2022, so she could raise her two young children with help from family.
As an ’80s-born “child of AIM,” Martin said of AOL instant messaging, it hadn’t been hard for her to maintain co-worker friendships online. She drives back to the office several times a year for events, most recently for the December holiday party.
Martin is part of today’s growing ZIP code shift: She is one of the millions who, thanks to remote and hybrid work, no longer lives close to where she works.
Many Americans now live twice as far from their offices as they did pre-pandemic. That’s according to a new study from economists at Stanford and Gusto, a payroll provider, using data from Gusto. The economists studied employee and employer address data from nearly 6,000 employers across the U.S. and found that the average distance between people’s homes and workplaces rose to 27 miles in 2023 from 10 miles in 2019, more than doubling.
The share of people who live 50 or more miles from where they work rose sevenfold during the pandemic, climbing to 5.5% in 2023 from 0.8% in 2019. These trends have proved resilient even as employees return to the office, according to the researchers.
This phenomenon — expanding the distance between work and home — has been driven primarily by white-collar workers whose jobs can be done remotely, according to the study. It is one largely concentrated among people who earn more than $100,000 and work in jobs like tech, finance, law, marketing and accounting. Workers who earn under $50,000 a year, and those who work in jobs that cannot be done remotely like retail, health care and manufacturing — the majority of the workforce — have barely budged in their average distance from work.
The workers moving away from city centers are often people in their 30s and 40s, who have young children and may want larger homes, rather than those in their 20s and 60s. The group also includes a significant number of workers who were newly hired during the pandemic — which means employers most likely expanded their hiring radius as they embraced hybrid work.
Urban scholars argue that the new data illustrates a long-standing American tradition of high-income earners leaving urban housing markets in pursuit of bigger homes in the suburbs.
“We like big houses, and we like big cars,” said Richard Florida, an expert on cities and author of “The
New Urban Crisis.” “It’s part of our post-World War II DNA.”
But remote and hybrid work has supercharged this trend.
A small portion of the workforce (around 12% now, compared with roughly 50% at the peak of COVID-19 lockdowns) is still able to work entirely remotely. Some chose to leave pricey housing markets like San Francisco or New York in favor of new hometowns, sometimes called “Zoom towns.”
Others who are working in hybrid environments, in which they have to go to the office only two or three days a week, moved and accepted “super commutes” in exchange for cheaper housing and more space.
But the effects of this shift on cities have been troubling, many economists argue, as urban leaders struggle to revive the downtown areas sapped of some workers who used to eat, drink and shop there.
But many argue that city leaders are up to the challenge of reimagining urban business centers in response to these demographic changes. Florida, for example, advises city leaders to make their downtown areas into tourist destinations, or even destinations for people who work at home and then socialize in the city.