Zoom towns and the remote white flight
by Alberto Lusoli
When the first COVID-19 wave hit the world, several commentators and business leaders thought the circadian rhythms of modern capitalism were about to change forever. Forget about commuting to work and dividing your life between the office and the home, the downtown and the suburbs, the professional and the personal. As social distancing policies and lockdown measures were implemented, a large part of the working population had to overcome these industrial-era divisions and strike a new work-life balance even without reassuring spatial and temporal boundaries.
In the spring of 2020, several big-tech companies announced their plans to temporarily shut down their fully equipped and expensive-to-maintain offices and transition to remote or hybrid working arrangements. “We are going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” posted Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook in May 2020, as the company now known as Meta was about to roll out a plan allowing many of its 50,000 employees to work from home. Several heavyweight tech companies — Coinbase, Shopify, and Twitter, to name a few — followed suit.
Despite the initial shock, the work-from-home option came to be seen as an opportunity by both employers and employees. For companies, transitioning to remote work meant reducing their real estate footprint, thus cutting their operating costs significantly. Office space downsizing had serious implications on urban centers, which saw a drastic reduction in foot traffic, with negative effects on service businesses catering to the needs of office workers. In some cases, the remote-first option led tech giants to forgo real estate investments that public administrations had counted on to revitalize business districts. For urban white-collar workers, the option to work remotely provided unprecedented flexibility. Employees in service, managerial, and low-contact occupations could work from virtually anywhere, as long as a reliable internet connection was available. Why, then, continue living in pricey metropolitan areas, especially when many of the attractions making a city alluring were closed down?
With social distancing measures making urban density more of a bug than a feature of metropolitan areas, the flexibility to work from anywhere became a coveted benefit. The result? An uptick in outmigration rates from tech and financial hubs like New York and San Francisco in the first year of the pandemic. Conversely, rural areas, small towns and second-tier cities saw in the pandemic exodus the opportunity to reboot their local economies thanks to the influx of middle-class, white-collar remote workers. This migration, which primarily involved people in white-collar, low-contact jobs, has similarities to the historical “white flight” phenomenon, where middle-class white residents left densely populated and multiethnic U.S. metropolitan areas for more racially homogeneous suburbs. A process which unfolded in the first half of the 20th century and that led to the hollowing out of city centers resulting in racial segregation and disparities in access to, and quality of, essential public services.
“This place will pay you to move there!”
Headlines like the one above have probably popped up on your social media feeds during the pandemic. Cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fayetteville, Northwest Arkansas, and Topeka, Kansas, made headlines thanks to their talent attraction programs. These programs offer in-kind, cash, and tax incentives to remote workers willing to relocate to rural areas and secondary cities. For instance, the already mentioned Tulsa Remote provides up to $10,000 to new residents and exclusive perks like free coworking membership and access to events and meetups. More creative is Finding Northwestern Arkansas, which offers remote workers a free bicycle — in addition to the usual $10,000 cheque — to explore the region’s 500 miles of greenways.
Even though talent attraction programs are not new — the first ever documented was launched in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2012 — they became quite popular during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Today, a quick Google search for “remote workers incentive programs” returns hundreds of websites and news articles presenting you with the latest Zoom towns — as the press dubbed these destinations — paying you to move there. There are even websites, like MakeMyMove.com, helping you find your next “happy place.” All you have to do is browse the many options available, evaluate their incentive packages, and click Apply when you find the right one.
In 2022, I compiled a list of 15 talent attraction programs for remote workers and analyzed their incentive packages. The results of my analysis are summarized in the dashboard below:
Fig.1 — Remote workers incentive programs in the U.S. Source.
Beyond their promotional façades, made of websites featuring ethnically and gender-assorted models portrayed working at their laptops, and rustic yet hip shots of countryside towns, talent attraction programs come with several profound implications.
First, “remote workers” is more often than not a proxy for white, male, highly educated, middle-upper class individuals. During the early months of the pandemic, research revealed that individuals who could not afford to work from home were typically employed in entry-level jobs, gig work, women, younger individuals, new immigrants, and workers without a college degree.
In addition to broader socio-economic conditions pre-selecting who is and who is not a remote worker, talent attraction programs set clear rules to determine who is welcome in their low-density communities and who can only dream of leaving the city. For instance, Remote Shoals, a talent attraction program promoting the Colbert and Lauderdale Counties in Alabama, sets a $52,000 minimum income requirement that applicants must meet to be eligible to apply. This is almost twice the median individual income of the resident population, currently at $29,667. Tulsa Remote and Bloomington Remote, instead, explicitly prohibit gig workers such as those working through platforms like Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, and DoorDash from applying. They, however, allow all other self-employed workers to apply.
It is also important not to overlook the negative impact that some programs can have on the communities they are meant to promote. A study conducted in 2021 has revealed that some communities are experiencing rural forms of gentrification, where wealthy outsiders are buying up real estate opportunities, driving up prices and making it difficult for locals to afford to live there. This has led to problems such as overwhelmed schools and difficulties retaining local employees due to housing affordability issues. To make matters worse, these problems seem to persist even after remote workers leave these areas to return to downtown offices.
Then, there is the underlying moral question about the appropriateness of using private and public resources, whether through direct cash incentives or tax benefits, to attract wealthy individuals. This is especially important when these resources could be used to support existing and new residents, including those who may have relocated without receiving an incentive payment. For example, those resources could be utilized to mitigate housing costs through zoning reform and inclusionary zoning or to repair and maintain the crumbling public infrastructures, including the broadband infrastructure so essential to relocation programs yet so sparse in the country’s rural areas.
Relocation programs, if left unchecked, have the potential to contribute to a new white flight trend, as they allow middle-class remote workers to live in low-density communities while leaving a significant portion of the population, variously defined by employment status or income level, at the door. It is important to emphasize how such discriminatory logic is not accidental. The requirements of relocation programs are designed to exclude part of the population from the possibility of moving away from city centers, thus contributing to the segregation and racial patterning that have been unfolding since the mid-20th century white flight.
In the early 2000s, Richard Florida’s creative class model was touted as a solution to urban decline. Florida argued that in order to adapt to a post-industrial economy, cities should have attracted the relatively mobile service workers population by offering them an affordable lifestyle and quality consumer services. In hindsight, we can appreciate how local economic policies inspired by that model have created greater polarization between economically advantaged knowledge professionals and lower-paid service workers. Two decades later, talent attraction programs promoting rural areas are furthering this legacy of discrimination and risk exacerbating polarization beyond the confines of urban centers.
Alberto Lusoli is the Digital Democracies Institute Deputy Director and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Simon Fraser University. His research develops at the intersection of media studies, science and technology studies, and critical management studies. Through his work, he analyzes how the diffusion of digital means of production is reshaping organizations and how such transformation is, in turn, constituting new professional cultures. He joined the DDI as a postdoctoral fellow in January 2022.
