Remote workers are moving out of big cities — but not to the Midwest

Remote work is doing a lot of labor.

People hope it will temper gender imbalances by giving women with children more flexibility and keeping them in the workforce. Others think it could help cut down on commuting time and, by extension, greenhouse gas emissions. Employers see it as a way to save money on expensive office space, while employees want to be able to take advantage of cheaper housing outside large metro areas.

Some have suggested that remote workers, newly untethered from their offices in big cities, could move to and revitalize beleaguered cities and towns in the heartland, bringing with them their big paychecks and big spending. That, however, isn’t likely to happen, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. People aren’t moving from coastal cities to the Midwest in any meaningful way. That said, remote workers will have major effects on cities and the areas outside them, from service job losses to urban sprawl.

We talked with one of the report’s authors, senior fellow and policy director Mark Muro, about what remote work can and can’t do.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Rani Molla

Lots of people are excited by the idea that remote work could help revitalize beleaguered parts of the country. What are people hoping will happen?

Mark Muro

The idea is that talented, well-educated, often techie people will arrive in all kinds of places, bringing their human capital, bringing their high-paid jobs, and just bringing new energy into places that are not only losing population in many cases but really struggling economically.

Rani Molla

And what places are we talking about here?

Mark Muro

We think of the non-coastal, non-superstar metro areas. You can think of really interior states, and you can think of what’s known as the eastern heartland, sweeping down from the upper Midwest into the south, or the western heartland.

Rani Molla

Okay, but what does the data show? Are people actually saying, “Hey, I have this remote job so now I’m going to move to Cleveland”?

Mark Muro

Lots is happening. People are moving around, but it’s not exactly the movements that maybe people are hoping for or expecting. In the big coastal cities, there’s certainly movement and there’s outflow, but we’re talking especially about the Bay Area and New York City. Elsewhere, there isn’t a massive uptick in movement from last year.

Rani Molla

So people are leaving some of the biggest metros. Where are they moving to?

Mark Muro

Interestingly, they’re mostly moving to the suburbs. They’re not moving, for the most part, to Wichita to save the heartland. They’re moving either farther out within the metro or into nearby counties. So nearby counties around the New York area or in the Bay Area, moving to Alameda County, and so on. And they’re mostly shorter moves.

In the end, the volume of moves in most places isn’t really that much more than a usual year with the exception of New York City, the New York region, and the Bay Area. It’s a movement out to the suburbs or even the exurbs, but it’s still tethered to the big metros.

Rani Molla

So people from these big cities are moving outward, creating this sort of doughnut effect from the center of big cities, but they’re not necessarily moving to the Midwest or to some beleaguered area of the country in a meaningful way.

Mark Muro

A smattering of them are. We looked at it closely in the Bay Area: 700,000 moves out of the Bay Area, only 12,000 into 19 classic heartland states. It’s not the main thing happening, let’s put it that way.

Rani Molla

As for the smaller moves outside of cities, is that just a matter of uncertainty surrounding the future of work? Like, “My boss might change her mind next year and make me come back to the office, I can’t go too far away”?

Mark Muro

I think that’s a big factor — or hybrid work, meaning you’ve got to come in two days a week. That’s gonna limit where you can move. The other thing that’s happening is that remote work is declining. It was about 57 percent of professional workers were working remotely a year ago in May. This May it was 30 percent. I think it will go down further. It won’t go all the way down. But even remote work may not be as massive a trend as expected.

Rani Molla

What are the economic effects of having a large group of people working from home some of the time and making these smaller moves outside of the city?

Mark Muro

On the upside, maybe it could benefit participation in the labor force, maybe it does improve conditions of work for people. On the negative, I think it’s a sprawl driver. I think it’s not great for global warming. And the impacts near and within metros are going to be substantial. Movement out of the central office area — what happens to all of the lunches and services provided in the downtown? We’re going to see hubs of urbanism in the suburbs. And I think we’re gonna see sprawl and movement into the exurbs.

Rani Molla

So remote work isn’t going to save the heartland. What will revitalize those places?