COVID-19 was supposed to reverse decades of economic agglomeration. Is it?

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Thomas Day

5 min readOct 25, 2021

In the depths of uncertainty last year, some wondered if remote work would allow legions of American workers in professional services to decamp cities and usher in a new age for suburban and even rural areas. I did. As the Delta variant recedes, can we begin to see lasting changes in American life? Perhaps.

Let’s start with a baseline observation: Americans have migrated to the city since the Civil War.

And since the Great Recession, Americans not only continued moving to cities, skilled workers began converging in several “superstar” cities, driving an economic diversion not only between rural and urban communities, but between a rarified group of cities — San Francisco, Boston, New York, Austin, and Los Angeles — and everyone else.

COVID-19 was supposed to upend these trends. Skilled workers, now free to stay at home, were going to use that opportunity to decamp cities and reacquaint themselves with the suburbs, rural America, or at the very least, the non-superstar cities.

Have they? Let’s unpack this.

Workers haven’t yet gone back to the office. About 65 percent of workers continue to work from home.

So this would indicate the doors are still open for a reversal of the urbanization trend that has spanned nearly two centuries. And there is plenty of data to suggests that Americans were moving to the suburbs years even before COVID-19.

Will the suburbs continue to grow? How far out will urban residents move? And are the superstar cities really past their prime? Tech jobs are everywhere now, we’re told.

When the pandemic began, tech workers began finding new homes. A favorite destination of the Silicon Valley diaspora is Boise, Idaho, and a recent jump in housing prices in Boise seems to reflect a sudden inflow of new, high-income residents.

But housing prices are climbing in the superstar cities too.

And the skilled workforce is not a static number of people. Graduates from places like MIT School of Engineering are produced every year, and there’s no indication any of them have moved to Boise.

Another indication that the superstar cities remain superstars comes from H1B data, which indicates most applications (Labor Condition Applications, or LCAs) are sponsored by employers headquartered in the familiar spots.

Whatever the impact on the superstar cities and the movement of skilled workers into other cities, there’s no indication that skilled and high-income workers are moving out of urban regions entirely and into rural areas. One reason: Even if they wanted to move to a rural area, tech workers would have a tough time connecting to their bosses in the superstar cities — and elected representatives of these rural areas have rigorously opposed federal action\}t to fix this unequal access to broadband. This is building a digital wall between rural and urban economies.

The dark blue areas have faster connectivity and the green areas do not. And yes, the correlation between broadband access and the 2020 vote is clear.

Perhaps a more nuanced story needs to be told about skilled labor, the “creative class,” and the United States after COVID-19. Perhaps what we see is a channel of skilled workers, moving through places like Stanford and MIT, making stops at superstar-city-based Big Tech (or any other tech) firms, before finding ways to more sustainable lifestyles in places like Boise.

I’m curious to see how far the creative class moves out of the concentric circles that surround Northern California. It’s one thing to move from Palo Alto to Boise, quite another to move from Palo Alto to Altoona, Pa. The natural byproduct of the economic division is between Palo Alto and Altoona is a cultural division. And this cultural division is manifesting itself rural Americans, who have clearly found a home in the Republican Party, believing some bizarre…