While Postal Service statistics do show some movement from densely populated cities to distant locations, the trend is “small relative to the within-metro movement from city centers to their suburbs,” Bloom wrote. His findings cast doubt on the theory, put forth by urbanist Richard Florida and economist Adam Ozimek, that habits of remote work would give rise to “Zoom towns,” communities such as Tulsa, Boulder, Colo., and Bozeman, Mont., remote from traditional business centers but inviting for workers who need only keep in touch with their bosses and colleagues digitally via the Zoom and Slack platforms. Postal Service change-of-address records and Zillow’s tracking of rent increases. Instead, Bloom found increased movement within metro areas, rather than between metros - a trend he terms the “donut effect,” signifying movement out of the central city and into suburbs or exurbs.īloom’s data are drawn from U.S. Goldman Sachs, Comcast, AT&T and others are quietly supporting attacks on abortion and voting rights. “But it does not allow an employee to move to another metro area entirely because they must still commute to work on some days.”īusiness Column: How Big Business lied about opposing rightwing attacks on democracy, abortion rights and voting rights This hybrid system “allows employees to move further from their place of work, such as from a city center to a surrounding suburb,” Bloom reckons. One is that most tech companies don’t plan to abandon office work entirely but expect their workers to commute to work two or three days a week. Muro’s research points to an evolutionary change in high-tech geography triggered by the pandemic, rather than “a wholesale decentralization of tech.” There may be several reasons why a large-scale flight from the big hubs hasn’t happened. “I’m skeptical that COVID-induced changes are driving an acceleration in an exodus of tech firms,” he says. Tech companies have been moving some operations away from their traditional headquarter locations or expanding elsewhere, Moretti says, but that was happening long before COVID. “High-tech clusters tend to be located in cities with high labor and real estate costs - cities like San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle - rather than in cities where costs are low,” Moretti observes, possibly because for creative intellectuals, intellectual productivity outweighs those costs. The allure of living and working in such a cluster outweighs the downsides of high living costs, taxes and congestion. There’s a notable cross-pollination effect: Inventors who move to a city with a large cluster of inventors in the same field experience “a sizable increase in the number and quality of patents produced,” according to UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti.

That’s how Boston and San Diego became biotech hubs and Silicon Valley and San Francisco centers of inventive approaches to computer hardware and software. As Nicholas Bloom of Stanford and colleagues pointed out in 2020, elite academic institutions attract highly skilled innovators and spin off their learning into new technologies and new industries their presence tends to attract others like them. The value of concentrated ecosystems in nurturing innovation has been document for decades. Early in the period we saw some exiting, especially from the Bay Area, but it turned out that much of it was within California, rather than to Kansas.” “That’s not to say there won’t be some movement. “The California metropolises really do retain their irreplaceable depth and strength,” Muro says. Business Column: California isn’t ‘hemorrhaging’ people, but there are reasons for concernĬalifornia remains a powerhouse, but demographic and economic data do raise some worries.

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