The zip code shift: why many Americans no longer live where they work

In 2020, Virginia Martin lived two and a half miles from her office. Nowadays the distance between her work and home is 156.

Ms. Martin, 37, lived in Durham, N.C., and drove about 10 minutes to her job as a librarian at Duke. After beginning remote work, Ms. Martin received her boss’s blessing to return to her hometown of Richmond, Virginia, in March 2022 so she could raise her two young children with help from family.

As a “child of AIM” born in the 1980s, Ms. Martin said of AOL instant messaging, it had not been difficult for her to maintain online friendships with colleagues. She drives back to the office several times a year for events, most recently for the Christmas party in December.

Ms. Martin is part of today’s growing zip code shift: She is one of millions of Americans who, thanks to remote and hybrid work, no longer live close to where she works.

Many Americans now live about twice as far from their offices as they did before the pandemic. This is evident from a new one study, which will be released this week, by economists at Stanford and Gusto, a payroll firm, based on data from Gusto. The economists studied employee and employer address data from nearly 6,000 employers across the country and found that the average distance between people’s homes and workplaces rose from 10 miles in 2019 to 27 miles in 2023, more than doubling.

The share of people living 50 miles or more from work increased sevenfold during the pandemic, from 0.8 percent in 2019 to 5.5 percent in 2023. These trends have proven resilient even as workers return to the office, according to the researchers.

According to the research, this phenomenon – increasing the distance between work and home – is mainly caused by white-collar workers whose work can be done remotely. It is largely concentrated among people who make more than $100,000 and work in jobs such as technology, finance, law, marketing and accounting. Workers who earn less than $50,000 per year, and those who work in jobs that cannot be done remotely, such as retail, healthcare, and manufacturing (the majority of the workforce), have seen little change in their average distance from their work.

The workers moving away from city centers are often in their thirties and forties, who have young children and may want larger homes, rather than those in their twenties and sixties. The group also includes a significant number of workers who were newly hired during the pandemic – meaning 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 the urban housing market in search of larger homes in the suburbs.

“We like big houses, and we like big cars,” says 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 working has given this trend a boost.

A small part of the working population (approx 12 percent now, compared to around 50 percent at the height of the Covid lockdowns) can still work fully remotely. Some chose to leave expensive housing markets like San Francisco or New York in favor of new hometowns, known as “Zoom cities.” Others who work in hybrid environments, where they only have to go to the office two or three days a week, have moved and accepted longer “super-commutes” in exchange for cheaper housing and more space.

Verna Coleman is one of those super commuters. Ms. Coleman, 41, works for a media company in New York. Before the pandemic, she lived in Brooklyn and went to the office five days a week. In 2020, after she started working remotely, she bought a house in Cincinnati, where she grew up and plans to raise her two children.

Now Ms. Coleman commutes to her Manhattan office three days every other week and rents a small apartment in Harlem.

“It’s only an hour and a half flight, so I often tell people it’s a shorter flight than driving over the George Washington Bridge and sitting in traffic for two and a half hours,” she said. “I take a 6 a.m. flight from Cincinnati, and I’m normally at my desk before 9 a.m.”

However, some days are more challenging, including last week when foggy skies caused flight delays. “We create the opportunities we have for our children and to sustain our careers,” she added.

But the consequences of this shift for cities are troubling, many economists argue, as city leaders struggle to revitalize downtown areas stripped of some of the workers who once ate, drank and shopped there.

And business leaders are grappling with both the harms and blessings of their newly dispersed workforce.

A video game company in Boulder, Colorado, called Serenity Forge, implemented a hybrid policy in 2021. The company’s founder, Zhenghua Yang, is feeling nostalgic for pre-pandemic days when people hung out in the office with potlucks and ping pong — but also notes that his employees now seem to have a healthier balance between family and work lives.

Noah Lang, CEO of a benefits platform called Stride, used remote work as a reason to terminate the lease on his company’s San Francisco office and move his own family out of town to a home in Marin County.

The ability to hire workers in cities across the country has been helpful for his company, he said, because Stride benefits gig workers across America and needs to understand customer experiences well beyond the Bay Area.

“We’re trying to help people who are hard-working, low- to middle-income Americans who, in many cases, are not in the technology sector,” Mr. Lang said. “They’re not in this bubble of San Francisco.”

The flow of workers, like Mr. Lang, leaving cities for suburbs has raised fears among economists about the possibility of a doomsday scenario: fewer workers commuting to downtowns, which means less business for stores and a reduced sense of security, which means there are even fewer people. want to commute to the center. According to a US newspaper, average weekly pedestrian traffic in the city center is still three-quarters of what it was before the pandemic analysis of mobile device activity in city centers by researchers at the University of Toronto.

But many argue that city leaders are rising to the challenge of reimagining urban business centers in response to these demographic changes. For example, Mr. Florida advises city leaders to turn their downtowns into tourist destinations, or even destinations for people who work from home and then socialize in the city. A study of 26 U.S. city centers published last year found that visitors accounted for an average of 61 percent of pedestrian traffic in city centers and residents only 11 percent.

“The future of the city center lies much more in becoming an entertainment, culture, amenities and sports centre,” Mr Florida said.

And in the outlying areas where office workers have established new roots, urban planners hope economic activity will follow.

“People are social animals,” says Dan Luscher, leader of the 15 Minute City project, which is researching the concept of a city where all amenities are within a 15-minute walk. “The person who moves to Tahoe is going to look for a community there. They’re going to make that place more alive. The activity will shift, but it will not disappear.”