What Remote Work Means for the Future of Urbanization

The COVID-19 pandemic created an occupational crisis previously unprecedented in modern history. With non-essential work being closed for months on end, millions of people were left jobless and stressed for income. The beginning stages of the pandemic and subsequent quarantine were widely considered to be temporary until the curve could be flattened, with the eventual goal of decreasing the burden on the health care system. These precautions, however, would end up staying for almost a year after the fact.

During these early stages, numerous companies were trying to find ways for their employees to continue doing their work without having to visit the office in person. Many found the solution to be remote work, in which employees could do their daily office routine from the comfort of their living rooms.

Post-Pandemic Remote Work

With many companies starting to use alternative methods of communication to get their remote work done, tools like Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, and Discord allowed for an easier transition from in-person to online networking. As COVID-19 restrictions continued to ease over the coming months, alongside initial vaccine rollouts, many offices adamantly remained closed and/or limited their employee capacity. These workers could simply perform their tasks remotely.

However, over time, after successful distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines, companies began to open up their offices to in-person work, and many places decided to adopt a flexible remote/in-person schedule. This meant that employees who wished to work remotely could continue doing so post-pandemic. Large companies like Google, Dropbox, Spotify, Ford, Microsoft, and Slack all announced fully remote or flexible options for their remote-eligible employees (Forbes, Stoller, 2021). A mixture of increased productivity, retention, and profitability began driving large companies to keep remote/flexible work policies (Forbes, Farrer, 2020).

A significant majority of employees favor this new work freedom and flexibility. Remote work has allowed for a more diverse pool of applicants no longer restricted to geographic location, has enabled people to have more time for family, and has cut down on long commutes with expensive gasoline prices (Vox, Molla, 2021).

Remote Work and De-Urbanization

When the pandemic initially hit, people living in urban areas began to look elsewhere to work: primarily suburbs. As more companies move toward flexible/remote work, people are no longer constrained to live close to the city where their companies are headquartered.

With this new freedom, people have begun looking for areas where the cost of living is significantly cheaper than their larger metropolitan areas counterparts. Areas like New York City, Silicon Valley, The Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Jose, and other expensive cities where tech companies are usually housed are seeing a migration of people headed towards cheaper suburban areas (Reuters, Lee, 2020). As a result, real estate sites are experiencing more online traffic as realtors are beginning to see shifts away from urban areas: facilitating a suburban boom (Forbes, Richardson, 2020).

Most people who worked in these large metropolitan areas didn’t cross country but instead moved to local suburbs surrounding their former cities (Bloomberg et al, 2021). Although cities saw a greater percentage of people leave than move in, most of the movers who left didn’t go too far. The Sun Belt states — specifically Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia — saw an influx of people who wanted the feel of a city without the extreme price tag usually associated with them (NBC, Popken, 2020).

Remote Work and the Housing-Market

As more city-dwellers continue to look for cheaper places to live in the suburbs, the cost of buying a house has begun to skyrocket. The pandemic has created a situation where suburbanites are unwilling to sell their homes while many urbanites are rushing to look for real estate. Mortgage rates have reached an all-time low while the cost of labor to build new homes rises (due to the pandemic): surging the net cost and demand of real estate (Vox, Demsas, 2021).

The Future of Remote-Work

The rise of remote work has now created a generation of people no longer constrained to their company’s location. As large companies continue to allow for more flexible work environments, more people are allowed to live and work in areas that would otherwise have been inconvenient and inaccessible.

Notably, this travel privilege is not something that is being felt equally. Many companies have considered cutting the salaries of their remote workers who are leaving to areas with lower costs of living, incentivizing them to stay in select geographic locations (Insider, Jones, 2021).

Moreover, throughout the pandemic, people of color and low-income individuals have had to disproportionately work through quarantine or lose their jobs because the option of remote work was unavailable to them (EPI, Gould & Shierholz, 2020). Individuals who work in retail, food industry, shipping, and hospitality are significantly less likely to be able to work remotely, and thus they have had to continue showing up to work in-person: greatly increasing their chance of infection compared to their remote-working counterparts (WBUR, Parr, 2020).

The pandemic has once again highlighted a socioeconomic disparity, where only those who have had the privilege to work remotely are able to leave densely packed urban areas. Meanwhile, people of color and low-income individuals have had to stay in more hazardous public health situations.

The pandemic continues to shape company policies regarding telework, as the discussion can be approached from multiple angles and perspectives. Before the pandemic, working from home may have been seen as a futuristic development to imagine. However, with the widespread permanent use of telecommunication services and digital tools, remote work has rapidly hit corporate industries in a short amount of time, and it looks like it’s here to stay.

We, at the Coronavirus Visualization Team, are one of the numerous remote opportunities that have sprouted from the pandemic’s remote work. The advancement of telecommunication technologies, like Slack, has allowed for expansive global interaction that links our like-minded and passionate members together: regardless of timezone or geography.