21 ms·

Workers Are Fleeing Big Cities for Small Ones, and Taking Their Jobs with Them

286 points by ericmay 7y ago

non-entity 7y ago
As someone who lives in a small city (120k city pop ~800k metro pop) I'm still looking to move to larger one for an number of reasons. Most of probably due to my specific niche issues and likely arent important at all (for example early 20s, I cant drive, lowering my quality of life, etc.) But one big one is networking. I've been told by people trying to get into larger tech companies that the only way to get in as an experienced professional is referrals. Living in a larger tech hub opens up so much more potential for networking and career growth that I just cant get here.
buboard 7y ago
Hey look, there is a solution to the housing crisis that the tech community didn't even think of
- lclarkmichalek 7y ago
  The article attributes some of the shift to remote work, which would seem to be related to tech?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Indeed. n = 1, that's what I did.
  - mondoshawan 7y ago
    Tangentially. I moved from SV to Austin, and work at the Google office. Not technically remote, since I'm growing a team out here.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Yet big tech is not investing in remote work, but into new factory housing or co-suffering spaces.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  the move somewhere else crowd has always been there they just don't fit the empathic narrative that tech media prefers to elevate
- Barrin92 7y ago
  it's not a solution to the housing crisis. It's a solution for a minority of the professional class who have the opportunity to work remotely. The majority of workers in large urban areas don't fall into this demographic, blue collar and white collar service sector workers won't be able to work across the country. Not to mention that it'll be interesting to see what happens during the next recession when some of those people are let off and all the remote workers in Boise are a mismatch for the local economy. Which they already arguably are because as the article points out their purchasing power keeps spiking local prices without bringing in local investment and business.
  - freddie_mercury 7y ago
    I agree, if anything it seems like this will entrench and exacerbate income disparities. Now the developers making $200,000 a year are living in a neighborhood where they make 4x the local average and are more easily able to turn it into generational wealth that they pass on. Not saying it isn't a great deal if you can get it, but it doesn't really seem like a solution for many.
    - wasdfff 7y ago
      When I lived in columbus there were already new build 1brs asking for north of 1.3k a month and the housinf market is inflating. Developers have seen blood in the water and cost of living will rise accordingly if people with high salaries continue to move into the city.
amoitnga 7y ago
I'm moving from New York to San Diego. Going to work remotely. There is a risk involved, sure. But after 11 years in NY I think it's worth a shot.
- cylinder 7y ago
  It's San Diego, not San Juan. I'm sure you will be fine.
  - soroushjp 7y ago
    Hahaha my thoughts exactly when I read this.
oflannabhra 7y ago
> She and her husband, who have two children, bought a house in the Boise area after renting in L.A. It is twice as big as their old place, but the monthly payments are half as much as their L.A. rent. There was also enough room for her mother to move in. 2x the space for 1/2 the price. Our remote-working future cannot come quick enough.
- Mobius01 7y ago
  It this price disparity will only last as far as the demand for these areas stays low. As the demand from remote workers fleeing large cities grows, so will the prices. See Austin for an illustration of rapid gentrification due to migration.
  - otakucode 7y ago
    That is doubtful. Consider scale. While there are a few dozen really densely packed cities, there are a couple orders of magnitude more small cities. There simply aren't enough people to 'fill up' the small cities in the US. There will of course always be regional places that are more in-demand than others, but overall it's like moving from a puddle to the ocean. It's just not going to make a dent.
    - neverartful 7y ago
      I think you're missing the point that many of those moving out of the really big cities are going to the same smaller cities. Taking Austin as an example, it's growing by leaps and bounds. The gentrification is indeed happening. If the outflow from the really big cities was equally distributed (say, as percentage of city's population), then your view would be accurate. But that's not what's happening.
  - maerF0x0 7y ago
    There is a lot of open space in the United States. Time to plan and build the next Austin.
    - 7y ago
harimau777 7y ago
I'm not sure that it makes sense to group Boise with the other cities they mention (Austin, Denver, Portland, Indianapolis, etc.). Boise has less than half the population of Raleigh which I think is the next least populated of the cities that they mention. In addition, while this is much more subjective, most of those cities seem to share a similar "cultural prestige"/influence as compared to other large cities like Columbus, Jacksonville, etc. It seems to me that a more accurate description is that people are moving from the most expensive and culturally prestigious cities to slightly less expensive and culturally prestigious cities. It doesn't sound to me like they are moving to what people generally think of as "small cities".
- ajmurmann 7y ago
  You are exactly describing the reasoning I went through when selecting Portland as the place to move to from SF. Edit: to be clear, price for me was really the main reason to move away from SF and not to move for example to NYC. If there had been city similarly vibrant and interesting, large city as NYC or SF that is affordable I'd have chosen that in a heart beat over Portland.
  - fillskills 7y ago
    How is Portland doing for you? I am moving there in a few days
    - rayiner 7y ago
      Showed my wife (6th generation Oregonian) this thread. Steam is coming out her ears.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - ironmagma 7y ago
        Some people really hate change.
waylandsmithers 7y ago
Definitely happening here in Boston with people choosing to live in Portland, ME and Providence, RI. Both great places to live with a much lower cost of living. The commute is somewhat do-able from Providence. It's a great deal if you can get the Boston salary and make the remote/semi-remote life work.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Yeah, Boston area housing prices will be the death NH/ME/RI. Considering how culturally incompatible the Boston area is with NH and ME I feel really bad for the people of those states who get to see their states turned into MA-Lite.
  - jghn 7y ago
    We moved to the Boston area when I was a kid in the early 80s and the exact same things you described were said then. So either it’s not true or just taking a heckuva long time
  - throwaway0xb 7y ago
    Portland, ME is just far enough from Boston that it's not feasible to do any regular commute unless you really, really want to live there.
    - jt2190 7y ago
      This is very true. I commuted from Newburyport MA (20 minutes south of Portsmouth NH) to Boston by bus for a few years. (My other option was MBTA commuter rail, which was further from my house and ran into North Station, which was farther from work.) The bus ride was routinely 1 hour 20 minutes, so add another 20 to get to Portsmouth. (Edit: I’ve also done the Providence, RI to Boston commute, by rail, which was just over an hour typically. Don’t forget that commuting works well when your job is near free parking/train/bus. It gets pretty bad when you have to add another 20 minute subway wait/ride in once in town...)
      - 7y ago
hoorayimhelping 7y ago
When I lived in Raleigh/Durham back in 2011, I bumped into John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats at a coffee shop. We chatted for a few minutes and he said that he hears a lot of people say that Durham is the Brooklyn of the south, but he doesn't buy it. He thinks (and I agreed) that it has its own charm, its own vibe and its own identity, and that people are trying to make it into something it's not. That's to say, I think you're absolutely right - people want to move to these places cause they perceive them as little Brooklyns or little Seattles. They have the sensibilities and prestige of those places, but not the crowds or the cost.
- t34543 7y ago
  Durham is very nice but prices have skyrocketed since around 2015. Apartments downtown went from 1500 to 3000 monthly, for example.
  - cbames89 7y ago
    Maybe at the highest end, they're 3000, but a quick search of apartments.com shows there are still plenty of nice apartments to be had in the 1000-1500 range.
  - journalctl 7y ago
    This is happening in just about every decently-sized city. Demand has gone up, but very little new housing stock is being built.
    - sliken 7y ago
      That and Berkshire Hathaway is buying up homes at an impressive rate and then driving up the rental costs.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- crowbahr 7y ago
  Even Seattle is a little Seattle. Its main problem is density. It's a very small city for how expensive it is to live there.
king_magic 7y ago
Single data point here, but I moved back to my hometown after leaving NYC about 5 years ago, I work remotely, and I will never go back. Quality of life massively better. Always fun when recruiters reach out. Many simply can’t believe someone wouldn’t want to move back to a bigger city in return for a much higher paycheck (which I politely explain is effectively less money than I make now, due to costs of living).
- brightball 7y ago
  Same. I work remote in a small town in SC (25k). I honestly can’t imagine having to live in a major city at this point.
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    I think the trick is, you need to live in a larger metro area for awhile and establish yourself before you're seen as a viable remote candidate by most employers. That, or start your own busienss. Smaller areas typically lack competitive tech positions and larger areas don't want to take a risk on you when they have a pool of warm bodies to choose from.
    - bpicolo 7y ago
      > they have a pool of warm bodies to choose from Remote work wouldn't be possible in general if this were true. Hiring, especially for senior level engineering talent, remains hard and expensive
- bluedino 7y ago
  HN yesterday: suburbs are evil! Drain on society! Move to the cities! HN today: hey you guys know you can get 2700sq ft on 2 acres for half of what your studio costs right?
  - epx 7y ago
    Let's not confuse a suburb with a smaller city. I live in a 500k hab city, that's the hard limit for me. But it is a fully functional city, not an island of houses; I don't have to drive 16km to buy groceries.
Zenst 7y ago
This is a good thing, whilst centralisation of workforce has it's upsides, it has in many places exceeded that balance with many negative impacts. Whilst these are small steps, for those removed from the overheads of a delayed saturated comute and associated impacts upon health. Equally, one less commuter, helps reduce that saturation and crowing with associated delays, might even be that per person we are only talking a nanosecond level of scale. But when you have many of these small reductions in saturation, and those gains project across a larger scale. You end up with slightly better air quality, slightly less health impacts, slightly less delays. Hopefully this is a trend that tractions as many roles can be shifted in this way and improve quality of life overall. On the flip-side, will we see large corporation office space shifted into the virtual World? Will signs start appearing in offices "Will the last one to relocate, please not turn off this server". Maybe. But the ability to use up an area and then move on, expand and repeat the process has been one trait humans share with many biological organisms. Is this just nature at play thru adaption to the environment,on some level - I'd say yes.
- ajmurmann 7y ago
  What's the environmental impact of this? Won't this use up way more land and be in general much less efficient?
  - Zenst 7y ago
    For many instances - no as you are just removing that long commute. Many places have high priced area's that people commute to from a great distance. In those cases you are removing the commute. For those moving into the countryside, unless your building new houses - your not using up more land. Just shifting and also removing the need for new housing in dense area's, so protecting green spaces were they are more needed. But any swing one way or another can shift that balance. You can look at the extreme of people all shifting to the countryside that the countryside itself becomes a town, a city.... But things tends to balance out. After all, in many area's we are seeing the demise of high street shopping, is that a good or bad thing. But I'm sure many do not want to live in stacked up boxes so small as so they are barely affordable and all other activities reduced to door delivery. Though in many area's, that is kinda what people have already. Then the whole aspect of the population not getting any smaller and such shifts will be more than offset by population expansion.
jt2190 7y ago
> ... [W]orkers tend to spread out geographically during an economic cycle’s later stages, economists say, raising questions about how these cities will fare in a downturn. Workers are usually more confident—and employers more lenient—when the economy has been flourishing. > In 2017, some 5.3% of adults in metro areas of between 500,000 and three million people worked from home, a rough proxy for remote workers. That was up from 3.7% a decade earlier... It’ll be interesting to see whether these workers will be able to maintain their “big city” salaries over time, and how they’ll fare in a economic downturn (e.g. they’ll be far away from “most” jobs in their sector.)
- stancemall 7y ago
  My name is Stance Malcolm from Illinois and I want to recommend hackerpaulmikeATgmailDOTcom he is the best hacker I have ever come in contact with, I never believed he could help me build up my credit score to 830 Excellent score and a permanent one. I really want to say a big thank you to PAUL MIKE for doing me a great and smooth job and for not taking my money like some other fake hackers out there without doing nothing. Feel free to contact him anytime on his number also: +720-663-0651 you wont regret hiring him.
- tspike 7y ago
  I work mostly remotely from a small town outside a mid size city that has a satellite office for a company based in a big city. I get the big city salary for now, but I'm operating on the assumption that the gravy train will stop at some point. I'm OK with that tradeoff.
barrkel 7y ago
IME people move out of big cities when they get into their late 20s / 30s, when the joy of exploration of what a big city has to offer starts to wane compared with the ease of living life in a comfy groove, when you know what you want and it's available without putting up with everything else that a big city pushes on you - high prices, high rents, crowds, long commutes. I don't think this means that young people are going to stop coming to cities.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- m463 7y ago
  Living in a big city is amazing if you are young and single (or maybe newly married and still in the urban mindset). There are enormous benefits to many young people, lots of things to do, all in a small area. But inevitably goals or expectations change (or the number of dependents increases) and it's time to move to the suburbs or the country. You WILL give up things moving to the country, but if you don't care about or prioritize those things, it's ok. Cities traditionally suck as far as housing/cost of living, crime and some recreation. But I think they might have access to better jobs, transportation/airports, health care and nightlife/museums/venues/etc And good weather might correlate to higher housing costs (think california here)
lawn 7y ago
I live in Sweden and I did the same. Moved back to the community I came from when we got our son. Got rid of the commute and we got a house that's 2x as big for, I kid you not, 1/10th of the price. In fact our expenses fell so much I could even start working 60%, and we had about as much money left as before. There are trade-offs. There are no restaurants except fast food, there is no martial arts training I used to do, there are no boardgame clubs and it's much harder to get friends. But if you can get through that economically it's a ridiculously beneficial thing to do (given you can get a job of course).
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  What about education and health ? I mean even moving out of the big city in UK you are going to see very variable schooling and hospital coverage?
  - freyr 7y ago
    In the U.S., moving from the city to the suburbs is probably the best thing you can do to ensure decent public schooling. For instance, a recent list of top ranked public high schools from US News and World Report: Academic Magnet High School, South Carolina Maine School of Science and Mathematics BASIS Scottsdale, Arizona Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Virginia Central Magnet School, Tennessee Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, Georgia Haas Hall Academy, Arkansas International Academy of Macomb, Michigan Payton College Preparatory High School, Illinois Signature School, Indiana
    - madhadron 7y ago
      Be very careful with that list. Those are specialized, highly competitive schools. What puts them on that list as opposed to Oklahoma School of Science and Math or North Carolina School of Science and Math is that the latter are boarding schools that serve their whole state. These are schools that serve the same role but only allow people in from their county (e.g., Alexandria County for Thomas Jefferson). Also, US News and World Report rankings are useless. They're a measure solely of prestige and brand, not of any actual quality of education. I'm not saying your wrong. I'm just saying that this data doesn't support your point.
stancemall 7y ago
My name is Stance Malcolm from Illinois and I want to recommend hackerpaulmikeATgmailDOTcom he is the best hacker I have ever come in contact with, I never believed he could help me build up my credit score to 830 Excellent score and a permanent one. I really want to say a big thank you to PAUL MIKE for doing me a great and smooth job and for not taking my money like some other fake hackers out there without doing nothing. Feel free to contact him anytime on his number also: +720-663-0651 you wont regret hiring him.
fjabre 7y ago
Does this mean smaller cities are getting bluer?
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  If its a family that is moving, it likely is making them redder.
  - ahnick 7y ago
    Why do you say that?
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      Families leaving are typically seeking a better place to raise children.
      - fjabre 7y ago
        And recent grads a place that is affordable. All my friends from Los Angeles have moved to Texas and Florida (some are families) and they are all progressive like most in Californian major cities. So they will make those states more blue. Which goes against what youre saying. I fail to see why families from big cities would be red. Most in big cities are progressive, even families. I havent seen data that would suggest otherwise
- dd36 7y ago
  Yes. See Phoenix.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  It likely has some effect though at the same time, it's much more difficult to see "them" as evil when you're neighbors, making everyone a bit more purple.
- tathougies 7y ago
  I really hope not or we will start to see the same problems in these small cities that liberal policies caused elsewhere creating an endless cycle of rich liberals migrating to conservative run higher quality of life cities and ruining them.
sylens 7y ago
I'm all for spreading the workforce out and encouraging more remote work. It makes no sense to subject so many people to LA, SF, and NYC commutes every day when the job can be done just as well from home or another office location in a suburb or satellite campus somewhere.
- wasdfff 7y ago
  The difference is in those places you have a lot more options to pivot to a new job. If the suburban office closes there are no jobs for you in the area and you’d have to relocate. Some people like remote work, but personally I don’t. I get a lot more done being able to run into people face to face and quickly hash through something in the hallway or at a desk or over lunch. And you can live close to work in those cities. I live and work in LA and commute on public transport for 20 mins one way. The rents may be high in LA, but even minumum wage is nearly $14 now, and rents are pretty even across many parts of town barring some obvious exceptions.
segmondy 7y ago
It's harder to get a remote job. There are more non remote jobs than remote. So if you're looking for a job, you have a set of 3 choices, remote only, non remote or both. Moving when you have a remote job is cool, but if things get tough say in an economy downturn and you need a new job. You might find that it's more difficult to get another remote job. If you moved to a location without much jobs, you are going to put yourself in a difficult bind. If you bought a house, tougher!
- cheez 7y ago
  I solved this problem for myself years ago: make your own job. May not pay as well for a bit, but every dollar is portable.
  - ge96 7y ago
    Out of curiosity what do you do? If you don't want to share that's fine, but I also wish to do the same however have not found something to solve/make yet.
    - cheez 7y ago
      Literally the most boring thing you would ever think of which has tons of competitors. I sell it to big companies who don't mind spending $1K/year on it (h/t to Joel on software for this tip) If you want to do it, then find some product that exists, that you like, copy and tweak.
      - ge96 7y ago
        > h/t to Joel on software for this tip Is that Joel Spolsky? Man I miss the SO podcast. I can't think of what it is you do but thanks for your response. That's a good tip about existing product(existing market).
        cheez 7y ago
        Yes Joel spolsky. Go read his essays, classic stuff
seibelj 7y ago
If I were at a small startup as an engineering manager and the CEO told me to outsource to save money, I would try very hard to convince him to outsource within the country. Employees are cheaper while the timezone and skill set remain high. It obviously is nowhere near as cheap as Vietnam or India, but so much better even with 1/4 as many devs. That outsourcing conversation I had at every single startup I worked for, and I greatly hope the trend to remote work continues.
- throwaway0xb 7y ago
  On top of that if your startup has any meaningful operations or customer service headcount, you will save so much money outside of SF/LA/NYC -- not just because of wages, but because of rent, as well.
madengr 7y ago
People are welcome; politics are not. I have been happily living in flyover country. Don’t move here with your gun control.
- kbrwn 7y ago
  Your politics are not superior. If your state, community, or legislature makes moves toward gun control it's anyone's civic duty to support or oppose based on their own beliefs not where they live.
  - madengr 7y ago
    Yes they are; read your Constitution.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      Ok, Senator Calhoun.
    - kbrwn 7y ago
      The Constitution allowed slavery to exist. Literally humans owning other humans. It's a document to care about if you are a rich white landowner. If you are anybody else in the USA it's just another law document.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    Given that people literally want to move to states like his, due to their better qualities of life for less money, I think its safe to say their politics may be superior
  - Macross8299 7y ago
    >Your politics are not superior. One would think that if you are moving away from California for reasons in part caused by political factors (progressive NIMBYism that opposes new housing development, tent city promotion), you would reconsider whether your politics are really that beneficial to the community you're moving to. Alas, people don't really learn and Austin is already starting to have a flourishing tent city complete with typhoid fever and all. I'm beginning to understand the "Go back to California" sentiment.
lerie 7y ago
They have been saying this for years, it's still not true.
davidw 7y ago
Bend, Oregon is apparently the remote work capital of the US, according to statistics compiled by one of the Oregon state economists who - it turns out - works remotely from Bend rather than in Salem or Portland. IDK... I've done remote work too, but I now have a job in an office and it makes me happier to be around other people, and to be able to chat about stuff in a higher bandwidth way.
- VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
  I've experienced both remote work from another state in a house I owned and working in the company office in Manhattan for extended periods. Working in the office was massively better for my daily mood and mental health than working at home all the time. Just little things like getting up to go get an afternoon coffee with the people I work with. When I worked at home sometimes I wouldn't even leave the house for two or three days at time.
  - davidw 7y ago
    I started going to the store every day just to have something to do to go out. My wife was like "NO, we don't need anything!" until she kind of got why.
ahnick 7y ago
Tulsa has an incentive program just for this, made possible by GKFF. https://tulsaremote.com/ https://tulsaremote.com/
leoc 7y ago
I suppose one interesting question is if some of these cities that are highly attractive to remote workers will gather up a large enough concentration of them that they will start to get hired locally there. (Or perhaps this is even happening already?) If I was in charge of economic development in one of those areas I'd certainly want to look into what might encourage that local→remote→local transition to take place.
- the_watcher 7y ago
  A big one would be local jobs that pay competitively with remote jobs for SF/NYC companies.
- nugget 7y ago
  I believe Austin has started to benefit from this trend.
VeryHacker 7y ago
Living in Berlin for almost a decade, bought a house here and love to live here because costs of living is far less than compared to my original city (50k people, even the house market is expensive over there). No car needed, plenty of services for family and kids. My original city doesn't offer them at all and you need to own a car if you want to go somewhere.
curioussavage 7y ago
I just moved out of SF and went remote. It’s pretty awesome. Living there was fun but also stressful and inconvenient especially with kids. I didn’t even lose my “walkability” you can find that in many places if you choose the right neighborhood. In fact kind of improves if you factor in not worrying about getting mugged or accosted by homeless crazies. My large home in one of the top planned communities in the nation costs me just under the shack I rented in the east bay.
- mech422 7y ago
  20 years into work from home... 10 years of it after leaving the valley. There really is no comparison. Less cost, less stress, and more productive. Bonus is valley companies tend to pay the same salary regardless of the jobs on-site/remote status. Got a house with 2 extra bedrooms - set one up as an office and the other as a 'server room'.
- non-entity 7y ago
  > I didn’t even lose my “walkability” you can find that in many places if you choose the right neighborhood. Sadly the case for me seems to be that there are very nice walkable areas in these small cities, but everytime I interview for a job it turns out the office in in some way out suburban office park, so I have no way of commuting
  - r00fus 7y ago
    The idea is that you work remote not try to find employment in the new locale.
    - analog31 7y ago
      I wonder if there's a way to split the difference, for instance get a job at the new locale, but gradually switch to working from home. This would at least be "less remote" from the employer's standpoint because you could bop into the office for meetings when needed.
      - 7y ago
ajross 7y ago
I'll just say this and take my downvotes[1]: It's impossible to read a piece like this in the modern world, about two white middle class families leaving large, coastal multiethnic metropolises for suburban homes in (what a quick google tells me is) the sixth whitest state in the union, without a racial lens. These workers "fleeing" big cities simply don't seem likely to be a uniformly sampled demographic, and for the article not to at least nod to that seems like pretty questionable journalism. But maybe that's just a step too woke. [1] Edit: heh, two minutes before the first accusation of racism. Pretty much what I expected.
- someguydave 7y ago
  People who think every human decision revolves around race are racist.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    You’re missing the point. Would a visibly brown family have the same latitude?
    - someguydave 7y ago
      Treating people as objects of pity because of their race is racist.
    - umeshunni 7y ago
      I dunno, man, most of my (Indian-American) family lives out in the Midwest and not in some hipster coastal city.
      - ajross 7y ago
        Yeah, but the Boise sprawl neighborhoods detailed in the article are almost certainly 95+% white. It's not like there's no diversity in "the midwest", but the Idaho places being described (and lovingly photographed!) are awfully segregated. Would you or your extended family really be comfortable packing up and moving into an environment where they're literally the only south asians in their neighborhood? If not, then that seems like an important fact to address in an article about large scale population motion. It just creeps me out. The article is nominally about a fairly bland economic point, but the archetype they picked is a bunch of (seriously, really beautiful) photos of white families in de facto segregated neighborhoods!
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
This article lacks numbers.
artur_makly 7y ago
Austin..cheaper? update : just a bit. https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/los-angeles/austin/breakdown https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/los-ang...
gniv 7y ago
There is another dynamic at play, not mentioned in the article: the smaller cities are actively trying to become better places to live. Here's a nice writeup: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/this-land-is-your-land https://annehelen.substack.com/p/this-land-is-your-land Quoting from that blog post: "“Cool,” which is to say, a certain type of bourgeois, with a certain aesthetic that unites it with larger cities while still maintaining a feeling of quaintness. In Tulsa, for example, there’s a gorgeous new book store, an ever-expanding number of breweries, co-working spaces in rehabbed brick buildings, coffee shops in rehabbed brick buildings, airy restaurants with farm-to-table menus in rehabbed brick buildings. There’s a walkable downtown, a First Friday art walk to get people there, a cultural tourist site (the Woody Guthrie Museum) and public (in this case, actually private) outdoor space (The Gathering Place)."
deleted 7y ago
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pfdietz 7y ago
Remote work not only allows workers to be in small cities, it allows employers to be in small cities (or outside the cities).
deleted 7y ago
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sudosteph 7y ago
Yep, I saw this play out first-hand. My company hired a good group of people in the Seattle office for a job that was essentially remote. After a few years, the office shrank from about 6 people, to 2 as people decided to just move to CoL cities. Example destinations: Tampa, Santa Fe, Spokane, and Raleigh (in my case). Nobody regrets their move yet to my knowledge. I'm definitely very happy to be saving money, and my standard of living is better. My urban lifestyle hasn't changed much (still only drive 2-3x a month for trips to cities, beaches or mountains) and I'm from NC, so culture stuff like the food and friendly people are a positive as well.
shawnkalin 7y ago
What are the best websites for finding remote jobs? What tools are best?
shawnkalin 7y ago
What websites are best for finding good remote jobs? What are the most useful tools and apps?
scurvy 7y ago
Does hiring a remote worker trigger nexus if you don't otherwise have a "presence" there? I'm sure you'll need to register with the secretary of state there to pay payroll taxes.
Mc91 7y ago
I am on one of those arrow paths from New York City to the upper south. Sort of. They fly me in from NYC during the week for four days, then fly me back for the weekends. I didn't really make a decision to move, I was looking for work in NYC, but was given a good job offer which said I'd be paid a NYC type salary, and have expensed flights, hotels, car rentals and meal etc. per diems. I haven't exactly moved, I rent in NYC and stay at a hotel down there. I don't plan on staying down here permanently - if and when I start looking for another job it will be in NYC. I think some of what is observed is kind of illusory. Because what is really happening here? On a very broad level - am I from NYC saying I want to become more of an upper south kind of guy? Or is this upper south Fortune 100 company saying it wants to become more of an NYC-type company, and bringing me and others down there to accomplish that? From everything I have seen, more of the latter. Northern Virginia has already pretty much been swallowed into the Boston to DC megalopolis, and it's possible that Richmond, Virginia Beach, Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill and Charlotte are next. Or if companies are desperate enough for IT etc. talent, they might start offices in NYC, SF etc. looking for it. Our company already has a west coast advanced IT office, as well as some offshored stuff to India. New York means not needing to own a car, because it has a massive public transit system (which has been a little shaky for the past five years though). It means 4AM last call. It means having technical meetups and conferences, and universities like Columbia and NYU with impressive CS professors and students. It means lots of job opportunities with good salaries. You can even avoid the city and live a suburban existence if you want. All anybody talks about are the slim pickings in the local job market down there. You don't have that problem in San Francisco or New York.
notus 7y ago
The infrastructure in many big cities is so broken, daily existence is kind of painful. I live in Austin which isn't really even that big of a city but the infrastructure is so poor that commuting anywhere is very painful and there are a lot of road rage incidents as a result. Unless you live downtown there is no walkability and if you live downtown you need to work downtown. The public transit system is laughable. We have a metro rail that doesn't run after 6 and doesn't run on Sundays.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  Austin's infrastructure is broken and poor because it (like many cities in the US) were not at all designed in mind with a growing population. So as people move around to cities like Austin, they place immense stress on the transit system while the city is unable to act due to both the regional and state politics and poor city planning. The rapid gentrification of the city outpaces the creation of new homes or businesses which means in 5-10 years Austin will be in a really, really bad state.
- jseliger 7y ago
  Many voters, unfortunately, appear to prefer broken infrastructure: https://www.statesman.com/news/20180512/wear-austins-light-rail-backers-ponder-thumbs-down-vote-in-nashville https://www.statesman.com/news/20180512/wear-austins-light-r...
  - notus 7y ago
    Yeah there are a lot of NIMBY's here. They don't want to make the sacrifices necessary to make the city better.
wasdfff 7y ago
I dont think I could ever move back to the midwest. Spent a couple years in columbus and that city gets old pretty fast. Either you pay 1.3k a month to drink in a 4 story apartment complex with thin walls and a pool closed for 8 months of the year, or you live out in white bread suburban hell until you are in hospice care. Not for me. Where I’m at now is probably the most multicultural city in the americas. You see signs in all kinds of languages on a daily bases. Neighborhoods actually have striking character. There are interests I have here that I could never pursue in any other city. There’s also the weed, the weather, the fact that ambitious transit is actively being built, and, my god, the FOOD. My ashes will be scattered across the santa monica mountains.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  New Orleans would like a word.
- burntoutfire 7y ago
  > or live out in white bread suburban hell until you are in hospice care Funny how 95% of world population would be ecstatic about moving there, yet you describe it as hell.
  - patthebunny 7y ago
    Feels like a pretty drastic over estimation.
    - burntoutfire 7y ago
      US is one of the very few places in the world where most people live in their own house, even if it's in "hellish" suburbs. Outside of US, even in first world countries, most people live in flats. Also, majority of world population live in flat out third world countries, and for them, moving to a "boring" (safe, clean, reasonably well designed, consisting of polite/civilized people, having working, high-quality infrastructure etc. etc.) US suburb would be a huge improvement.
ttul 7y ago
Canadian datapoint here. I used to expend every cent living in whatever crappy rental I could find in Vancouver. Moved to a tiny island community six years ago and now work remote one of two days a week to cut the commute down. I have deer walking in my yard and 20 square miles of untouched forest to hike in directly where I live. Our internet provider recently upgraded service to 1Gbps, so video conferencing is snappy and glitch-free. Many of my employees are making similar moves. One moved to a mountain town about an hour outside of the city. Another moved to a seaside village. This is clearly the future, brought to us by the vast improvements in remote work infrastructure such as Slack and Zoom.
devonkim 7y ago
I took a pay cut to work remotely in Asheville, NC (about the most remote, stable, infrastructure-enabled city I could find next to Chattanooga, TN) and while the community was great and living costs were much cheaper, this kind of plan was still wishful thinking because unless... 1. you stay remote (read: can handle work != social structure) 2. your spouse's employment situation is also accommodating 3. your community doesn't decline due to the brain drain / job drain problem of areas outside major metro centers So you need to be resistant and resilient to the downsides of living away from so many techies.
- Xcelerate 7y ago
  Funny you mention Asheville and Chattanooga. I’m currently working at one of the large tech companies in the Bay Area, but if I ever take a remote job, those are the top two cities I would move to.
  - DataDisciple 7y ago
    I'm surprised more folks aren't moving to those areas. I can see them being the next Boulder.
    - devonkim 7y ago
      I knew about the Denver area’s potential at the time but the high real estate prices were a problem. Part of my objective was to get years ahead of a big boom and save money before it got too bad, and I managed to do that fine in Asheville. The region has a lot of the same issues as smaller towns in the US without any industries to accelerate its growth besides craft beer and tourism. The healthcare industry is entirely because of the massive retiree population that are typically snowbirds that don’t contribute to state and county taxes besides property taxes, so its everyday population is starved for government resources relative to its size while it has the highest property values in NC (well, it was until 2016 last I saw). So basically Buncombe County was the lowest earning but most expensive part of NC to live in - this is not a recipe for sustainable growth. I really liked the community and it was a really good place to live if you could afford it. Chattanooga is much better off in comparison although I’m curious about how it’s done at attracting a sustained tech industry almost a decade after its investments.
tempsy 7y ago
I live in SF, which many would consider a big city, but I’ve come to realize that I actually do enjoy living in a big city, it’s just that in the US in particular big city living means a big cost of living premium. There’s dozens of big metropolitan cities outside the US that have better public transportation systems, lower rents, lower food costs, etc. that the analogous big city in the US, namely SF, LA, and NYC. I’m beginning to realize that the best way to continue living in a big city but lower my monthly expenses would be to move abroad.
xenocyon 7y ago
The article doesn't touch on carbon impact, which I can intuitively think of as going in either direction. On the one hand, it's obvious that replacing a car commute with remote work is directly advantageous on a one-to-one basis. On the other hand, it's also possible that many households will actually see an overall increase in car and air miles (to say nothing of systemic scalabilities from serving infrastructure/goods/services to dense vs sparse populations) - so whether the trend is overall positive or negative is not obvious to me.
sys_64738 7y ago
The problem with moving to little cities is the downturn and losing your job. Where is your next job?
einpoklum 7y ago
Rich consultants / independent service providers working remotely move from one place to another. Yawn.
peter303 7y ago
Many of these second tier tech cities have a full tech ecosystem: nationally ranked tech schools, lots of startups, venture capital, tech accelerators, startup weeks, etc. I have live in both Palo Alto and Denver over a decade each. Denvers biggest tech shortcoming is a lack big VCs.
ilaksh 7y ago
I had been working remotely for a startup and since funding is very limited so is my pay for now. Moved across the border from San Diego to Tijuana. My cost of living is less than half of what it was even though I live at the beach now instead of a low income neighborhood in San Diego.
agumonkey 7y ago
Once again I cannot help but to see this waving pattern. rural -> urban -> ~rural decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized It's an odd phenomenon when elements aggregates into a pole to accelerate until that pole is saturated and overwhelmed, improved elements now go away, until the next cycle.
tompoole 7y ago
We've been seeing this for several years now. VBOs (Virtual Business Owners) are seeing their effective spending power double by moving to places with lower taxes and cheaper housing - that is REAL! - https://vbonation.com/vbo-lifestyles/move-to-rural-america/ https://vbonation.com/vbo-lifestyles/move-to-rural-america/
DataDisciple 7y ago
Didn't read the article because, paywall. But Austin, Denver, Portland have all had significant price increases. RiNo in Denver is really cool but homes are $700k+. It's a big discount from LA, but I wouldn't call it life-changing, especially when you consider what you give up. Art, culture, and diversity of people are what make a city so interesting to me. In LA, we have so many friends who are working on interesting projects and are very intelligent. Every time we discuss moving to a smaller town, we are concerned that we might have difficulty finding social circles that fit us. The average American and I just don't have a ton in common. I know that sounds super snobby, but people are different. I'm not saying one is right or wrong. I always think about what will be the next tier of cities where remote work and satellite offices will be popular? To me, Asheville, Greenville, and to a lesser extent Chattanooga will be popular locations. CoL and an urban core are requirements, but also access to nature, transplants and local universities seem to help. A good airport is also big, as we love to travel.

286 points by ericmay 7y ago

As someone who lives in a small city (120k city pop ~800k metro pop) I'm still looking to move to larger one for an number of reasons. Most of probably due to my specific niche issues and likely arent important at all (for example early 20s, I cant drive, lowering my quality of life, etc.) But one big one is networking. I've been told by people trying to get into larger tech companies that the only way to get in as an experienced professional is referrals. Living in a larger tech hub opens up so much more potential for networking and career growth that I just cant get here.

buboard 7y ago

Hey look, there is a solution to the housing crisis that the tech community didn't even think of

lclarkmichalek 7y ago
The article attributes some of the shift to remote work, which would seem to be related to tech?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Indeed. n = 1, that's what I did.
- mondoshawan 7y ago
  Tangentially. I moved from SV to Austin, and work at the Google office. Not technically remote, since I'm growing a team out here.
- buboard 7y ago
  Yet big tech is not investing in remote work, but into new factory housing or co-suffering spaces.
rolltiide 7y ago
the move somewhere else crowd has always been there they just don't fit the empathic narrative that tech media prefers to elevate
Barrin92 7y ago
it's not a solution to the housing crisis. It's a solution for a minority of the professional class who have the opportunity to work remotely. The majority of workers in large urban areas don't fall into this demographic, blue collar and white collar service sector workers won't be able to work across the country. Not to mention that it'll be interesting to see what happens during the next recession when some of those people are let off and all the remote workers in Boise are a mismatch for the local economy. Which they already arguably are because as the article points out their purchasing power keeps spiking local prices without bringing in local investment and business.
- freddie_mercury 7y ago
  I agree, if anything it seems like this will entrench and exacerbate income disparities. Now the developers making $200,000 a year are living in a neighborhood where they make 4x the local average and are more easily able to turn it into generational wealth that they pass on. Not saying it isn't a great deal if you can get it, but it doesn't really seem like a solution for many.
  - wasdfff 7y ago
    When I lived in columbus there were already new build 1brs asking for north of 1.3k a month and the housinf market is inflating. Developers have seen blood in the water and cost of living will rise accordingly if people with high salaries continue to move into the city.

amoitnga 7y ago

I'm moving from New York to San Diego. Going to work remotely. There is a risk involved, sure. But after 11 years in NY I think it's worth a shot.

cylinder 7y ago
It's San Diego, not San Juan. I'm sure you will be fine.
- soroushjp 7y ago
  Hahaha my thoughts exactly when I read this.

oflannabhra 7y ago

> She and her husband, who have two children, bought a house in the Boise area after renting in L.A. It is twice as big as their old place, but the monthly payments are half as much as their L.A. rent. There was also enough room for her mother to move in. 2x the space for 1/2 the price. Our remote-working future cannot come quick enough.

Mobius01 7y ago
It this price disparity will only last as far as the demand for these areas stays low. As the demand from remote workers fleeing large cities grows, so will the prices. See Austin for an illustration of rapid gentrification due to migration.
- otakucode 7y ago
  That is doubtful. Consider scale. While there are a few dozen really densely packed cities, there are a couple orders of magnitude more small cities. There simply aren't enough people to 'fill up' the small cities in the US. There will of course always be regional places that are more in-demand than others, but overall it's like moving from a puddle to the ocean. It's just not going to make a dent.
  - neverartful 7y ago
    I think you're missing the point that many of those moving out of the really big cities are going to the same smaller cities. Taking Austin as an example, it's growing by leaps and bounds. The gentrification is indeed happening. If the outflow from the really big cities was equally distributed (say, as percentage of city's population), then your view would be accurate. But that's not what's happening.
- maerF0x0 7y ago
  There is a lot of open space in the United States. Time to plan and build the next Austin.
  - 7y ago

harimau777 7y ago

I'm not sure that it makes sense to group Boise with the other cities they mention (Austin, Denver, Portland, Indianapolis, etc.). Boise has less than half the population of Raleigh which I think is the next least populated of the cities that they mention. In addition, while this is much more subjective, most of those cities seem to share a similar "cultural prestige"/influence as compared to other large cities like Columbus, Jacksonville, etc. It seems to me that a more accurate description is that people are moving from the most expensive and culturally prestigious cities to slightly less expensive and culturally prestigious cities. It doesn't sound to me like they are moving to what people generally think of as "small cities".

ajmurmann 7y ago
You are exactly describing the reasoning I went through when selecting Portland as the place to move to from SF. Edit: to be clear, price for me was really the main reason to move away from SF and not to move for example to NYC. If there had been city similarly vibrant and interesting, large city as NYC or SF that is affordable I'd have chosen that in a heart beat over Portland.
- fillskills 7y ago
  How is Portland doing for you? I am moving there in a few days
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Showed my wife (6th generation Oregonian) this thread. Steam is coming out her ears.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - ironmagma 7y ago
      Some people really hate change.

waylandsmithers 7y ago

Definitely happening here in Boston with people choosing to live in Portland, ME and Providence, RI. Both great places to live with a much lower cost of living. The commute is somewhat do-able from Providence. It's a great deal if you can get the Boston salary and make the remote/semi-remote life work.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Yeah, Boston area housing prices will be the death NH/ME/RI. Considering how culturally incompatible the Boston area is with NH and ME I feel really bad for the people of those states who get to see their states turned into MA-Lite.
- jghn 7y ago
  We moved to the Boston area when I was a kid in the early 80s and the exact same things you described were said then. So either it’s not true or just taking a heckuva long time
- throwaway0xb 7y ago
  Portland, ME is just far enough from Boston that it's not feasible to do any regular commute unless you really, really want to live there.
  - jt2190 7y ago
    This is very true. I commuted from Newburyport MA (20 minutes south of Portsmouth NH) to Boston by bus for a few years. (My other option was MBTA commuter rail, which was further from my house and ran into North Station, which was farther from work.) The bus ride was routinely 1 hour 20 minutes, so add another 20 to get to Portsmouth. (Edit: I’ve also done the Providence, RI to Boston commute, by rail, which was just over an hour typically. Don’t forget that commuting works well when your job is near free parking/train/bus. It gets pretty bad when you have to add another 20 minute subway wait/ride in once in town...)
    - 7y ago

hoorayimhelping 7y ago

When I lived in Raleigh/Durham back in 2011, I bumped into John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats at a coffee shop. We chatted for a few minutes and he said that he hears a lot of people say that Durham is the Brooklyn of the south, but he doesn't buy it. He thinks (and I agreed) that it has its own charm, its own vibe and its own identity, and that people are trying to make it into something it's not. That's to say, I think you're absolutely right - people want to move to these places cause they perceive them as little Brooklyns or little Seattles. They have the sensibilities and prestige of those places, but not the crowds or the cost.

t34543 7y ago
Durham is very nice but prices have skyrocketed since around 2015. Apartments downtown went from 1500 to 3000 monthly, for example.
- cbames89 7y ago
  Maybe at the highest end, they're 3000, but a quick search of apartments.com shows there are still plenty of nice apartments to be had in the 1000-1500 range.
- journalctl 7y ago
  This is happening in just about every decently-sized city. Demand has gone up, but very little new housing stock is being built.
  - sliken 7y ago
    That and Berkshire Hathaway is buying up homes at an impressive rate and then driving up the rental costs.
deleted 7y ago
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crowbahr 7y ago
Even Seattle is a little Seattle. Its main problem is density. It's a very small city for how expensive it is to live there.

king_magic 7y ago

Single data point here, but I moved back to my hometown after leaving NYC about 5 years ago, I work remotely, and I will never go back. Quality of life massively better. Always fun when recruiters reach out. Many simply can’t believe someone wouldn’t want to move back to a bigger city in return for a much higher paycheck (which I politely explain is effectively less money than I make now, due to costs of living).

brightball 7y ago
Same. I work remote in a small town in SC (25k). I honestly can’t imagine having to live in a major city at this point.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  I think the trick is, you need to live in a larger metro area for awhile and establish yourself before you're seen as a viable remote candidate by most employers. That, or start your own busienss. Smaller areas typically lack competitive tech positions and larger areas don't want to take a risk on you when they have a pool of warm bodies to choose from.
  - bpicolo 7y ago
    > they have a pool of warm bodies to choose from Remote work wouldn't be possible in general if this were true. Hiring, especially for senior level engineering talent, remains hard and expensive
bluedino 7y ago
HN yesterday: suburbs are evil! Drain on society! Move to the cities! HN today: hey you guys know you can get 2700sq ft on 2 acres for half of what your studio costs right?
- epx 7y ago
  Let's not confuse a suburb with a smaller city. I live in a 500k hab city, that's the hard limit for me. But it is a fully functional city, not an island of houses; I don't have to drive 16km to buy groceries.

Zenst 7y ago

This is a good thing, whilst centralisation of workforce has it's upsides, it has in many places exceeded that balance with many negative impacts. Whilst these are small steps, for those removed from the overheads of a delayed saturated comute and associated impacts upon health. Equally, one less commuter, helps reduce that saturation and crowing with associated delays, might even be that per person we are only talking a nanosecond level of scale. But when you have many of these small reductions in saturation, and those gains project across a larger scale. You end up with slightly better air quality, slightly less health impacts, slightly less delays. Hopefully this is a trend that tractions as many roles can be shifted in this way and improve quality of life overall. On the flip-side, will we see large corporation office space shifted into the virtual World? Will signs start appearing in offices "Will the last one to relocate, please not turn off this server". Maybe. But the ability to use up an area and then move on, expand and repeat the process has been one trait humans share with many biological organisms. Is this just nature at play thru adaption to the environment,on some level - I'd say yes.

ajmurmann 7y ago
What's the environmental impact of this? Won't this use up way more land and be in general much less efficient?
- Zenst 7y ago
  For many instances - no as you are just removing that long commute. Many places have high priced area's that people commute to from a great distance. In those cases you are removing the commute. For those moving into the countryside, unless your building new houses - your not using up more land. Just shifting and also removing the need for new housing in dense area's, so protecting green spaces were they are more needed. But any swing one way or another can shift that balance. You can look at the extreme of people all shifting to the countryside that the countryside itself becomes a town, a city.... But things tends to balance out. After all, in many area's we are seeing the demise of high street shopping, is that a good or bad thing. But I'm sure many do not want to live in stacked up boxes so small as so they are barely affordable and all other activities reduced to door delivery. Though in many area's, that is kinda what people have already. Then the whole aspect of the population not getting any smaller and such shifts will be more than offset by population expansion.

jt2190 7y ago

> ... [W]orkers tend to spread out geographically during an economic cycle’s later stages, economists say, raising questions about how these cities will fare in a downturn. Workers are usually more confident—and employers more lenient—when the economy has been flourishing. > In 2017, some 5.3% of adults in metro areas of between 500,000 and three million people worked from home, a rough proxy for remote workers. That was up from 3.7% a decade earlier... It’ll be interesting to see whether these workers will be able to maintain their “big city” salaries over time, and how they’ll fare in a economic downturn (e.g. they’ll be far away from “most” jobs in their sector.)

stancemall 7y ago
My name is Stance Malcolm from Illinois and I want to recommend hackerpaulmikeATgmailDOTcom he is the best hacker I have ever come in contact with, I never believed he could help me build up my credit score to 830 Excellent score and a permanent one. I really want to say a big thank you to PAUL MIKE for doing me a great and smooth job and for not taking my money like some other fake hackers out there without doing nothing. Feel free to contact him anytime on his number also: +720-663-0651 you wont regret hiring him.
tspike 7y ago
I work mostly remotely from a small town outside a mid size city that has a satellite office for a company based in a big city. I get the big city salary for now, but I'm operating on the assumption that the gravy train will stop at some point. I'm OK with that tradeoff.

barrkel 7y ago

IME people move out of big cities when they get into their late 20s / 30s, when the joy of exploration of what a big city has to offer starts to wane compared with the ease of living life in a comfy groove, when you know what you want and it's available without putting up with everything else that a big city pushes on you - high prices, high rents, crowds, long commutes. I don't think this means that young people are going to stop coming to cities.

deleted 7y ago
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m463 7y ago
Living in a big city is amazing if you are young and single (or maybe newly married and still in the urban mindset). There are enormous benefits to many young people, lots of things to do, all in a small area. But inevitably goals or expectations change (or the number of dependents increases) and it's time to move to the suburbs or the country. You WILL give up things moving to the country, but if you don't care about or prioritize those things, it's ok. Cities traditionally suck as far as housing/cost of living, crime and some recreation. But I think they might have access to better jobs, transportation/airports, health care and nightlife/museums/venues/etc And good weather might correlate to higher housing costs (think california here)

lawn 7y ago

I live in Sweden and I did the same. Moved back to the community I came from when we got our son. Got rid of the commute and we got a house that's 2x as big for, I kid you not, 1/10th of the price. In fact our expenses fell so much I could even start working 60%, and we had about as much money left as before. There are trade-offs. There are no restaurants except fast food, there is no martial arts training I used to do, there are no boardgame clubs and it's much harder to get friends. But if you can get through that economically it's a ridiculously beneficial thing to do (given you can get a job of course).

lifeisstillgood 7y ago
What about education and health ? I mean even moving out of the big city in UK you are going to see very variable schooling and hospital coverage?
- freyr 7y ago
  In the U.S., moving from the city to the suburbs is probably the best thing you can do to ensure decent public schooling. For instance, a recent list of top ranked public high schools from US News and World Report: Academic Magnet High School, South Carolina Maine School of Science and Mathematics BASIS Scottsdale, Arizona Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Virginia Central Magnet School, Tennessee Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, Georgia Haas Hall Academy, Arkansas International Academy of Macomb, Michigan Payton College Preparatory High School, Illinois Signature School, Indiana
  - madhadron 7y ago
    Be very careful with that list. Those are specialized, highly competitive schools. What puts them on that list as opposed to Oklahoma School of Science and Math or North Carolina School of Science and Math is that the latter are boarding schools that serve their whole state. These are schools that serve the same role but only allow people in from their county (e.g., Alexandria County for Thomas Jefferson). Also, US News and World Report rankings are useless. They're a measure solely of prestige and brand, not of any actual quality of education. I'm not saying your wrong. I'm just saying that this data doesn't support your point.

stancemall 7y ago

My name is Stance Malcolm from Illinois and I want to recommend hackerpaulmikeATgmailDOTcom he is the best hacker I have ever come in contact with, I never believed he could help me build up my credit score to 830 Excellent score and a permanent one. I really want to say a big thank you to PAUL MIKE for doing me a great and smooth job and for not taking my money like some other fake hackers out there without doing nothing. Feel free to contact him anytime on his number also: +720-663-0651 you wont regret hiring him.

fjabre 7y ago

Does this mean smaller cities are getting bluer?

Fjolsvith 7y ago
If its a family that is moving, it likely is making them redder.
- ahnick 7y ago
  Why do you say that?
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    Families leaving are typically seeking a better place to raise children.
    - fjabre 7y ago
      And recent grads a place that is affordable. All my friends from Los Angeles have moved to Texas and Florida (some are families) and they are all progressive like most in Californian major cities. So they will make those states more blue. Which goes against what youre saying. I fail to see why families from big cities would be red. Most in big cities are progressive, even families. I havent seen data that would suggest otherwise
dd36 7y ago
Yes. See Phoenix.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
It likely has some effect though at the same time, it's much more difficult to see "them" as evil when you're neighbors, making everyone a bit more purple.
tathougies 7y ago
I really hope not or we will start to see the same problems in these small cities that liberal policies caused elsewhere creating an endless cycle of rich liberals migrating to conservative run higher quality of life cities and ruining them.

sylens 7y ago

I'm all for spreading the workforce out and encouraging more remote work. It makes no sense to subject so many people to LA, SF, and NYC commutes every day when the job can be done just as well from home or another office location in a suburb or satellite campus somewhere.

wasdfff 7y ago
The difference is in those places you have a lot more options to pivot to a new job. If the suburban office closes there are no jobs for you in the area and you’d have to relocate. Some people like remote work, but personally I don’t. I get a lot more done being able to run into people face to face and quickly hash through something in the hallway or at a desk or over lunch. And you can live close to work in those cities. I live and work in LA and commute on public transport for 20 mins one way. The rents may be high in LA, but even minumum wage is nearly $14 now, and rents are pretty even across many parts of town barring some obvious exceptions.

segmondy 7y ago

It's harder to get a remote job. There are more non remote jobs than remote. So if you're looking for a job, you have a set of 3 choices, remote only, non remote or both. Moving when you have a remote job is cool, but if things get tough say in an economy downturn and you need a new job. You might find that it's more difficult to get another remote job. If you moved to a location without much jobs, you are going to put yourself in a difficult bind. If you bought a house, tougher!

cheez 7y ago
I solved this problem for myself years ago: make your own job. May not pay as well for a bit, but every dollar is portable.
- ge96 7y ago
  Out of curiosity what do you do? If you don't want to share that's fine, but I also wish to do the same however have not found something to solve/make yet.
  - cheez 7y ago
    Literally the most boring thing you would ever think of which has tons of competitors. I sell it to big companies who don't mind spending $1K/year on it (h/t to Joel on software for this tip) If you want to do it, then find some product that exists, that you like, copy and tweak.
    - ge96 7y ago
      > h/t to Joel on software for this tip Is that Joel Spolsky? Man I miss the SO podcast. I can't think of what it is you do but thanks for your response. That's a good tip about existing product(existing market).
      - cheez 7y ago
        Yes Joel spolsky. Go read his essays, classic stuff

seibelj 7y ago

If I were at a small startup as an engineering manager and the CEO told me to outsource to save money, I would try very hard to convince him to outsource within the country. Employees are cheaper while the timezone and skill set remain high. It obviously is nowhere near as cheap as Vietnam or India, but so much better even with 1/4 as many devs. That outsourcing conversation I had at every single startup I worked for, and I greatly hope the trend to remote work continues.

throwaway0xb 7y ago
On top of that if your startup has any meaningful operations or customer service headcount, you will save so much money outside of SF/LA/NYC -- not just because of wages, but because of rent, as well.

madengr 7y ago

People are welcome; politics are not. I have been happily living in flyover country. Don’t move here with your gun control.

kbrwn 7y ago
Your politics are not superior. If your state, community, or legislature makes moves toward gun control it's anyone's civic duty to support or oppose based on their own beliefs not where they live.
- madengr 7y ago
  Yes they are; read your Constitution.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    Ok, Senator Calhoun.
  - kbrwn 7y ago
    The Constitution allowed slavery to exist. Literally humans owning other humans. It's a document to care about if you are a rich white landowner. If you are anybody else in the USA it's just another law document.
- tathougies 7y ago
  Given that people literally want to move to states like his, due to their better qualities of life for less money, I think its safe to say their politics may be superior
- Macross8299 7y ago
  >Your politics are not superior. One would think that if you are moving away from California for reasons in part caused by political factors (progressive NIMBYism that opposes new housing development, tent city promotion), you would reconsider whether your politics are really that beneficial to the community you're moving to. Alas, people don't really learn and Austin is already starting to have a flourishing tent city complete with typhoid fever and all. I'm beginning to understand the "Go back to California" sentiment.

lerie 7y ago

They have been saying this for years, it's still not true.

davidw 7y ago

Bend, Oregon is apparently the remote work capital of the US, according to statistics compiled by one of the Oregon state economists who - it turns out - works remotely from Bend rather than in Salem or Portland. IDK... I've done remote work too, but I now have a job in an office and it makes me happier to be around other people, and to be able to chat about stuff in a higher bandwidth way.

VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
I've experienced both remote work from another state in a house I owned and working in the company office in Manhattan for extended periods. Working in the office was massively better for my daily mood and mental health than working at home all the time. Just little things like getting up to go get an afternoon coffee with the people I work with. When I worked at home sometimes I wouldn't even leave the house for two or three days at time.
- davidw 7y ago
  I started going to the store every day just to have something to do to go out. My wife was like "NO, we don't need anything!" until she kind of got why.

ahnick 7y ago

Tulsa has an incentive program just for this, made possible by GKFF. https://tulsaremote.com/ https://tulsaremote.com/

leoc 7y ago

I suppose one interesting question is if some of these cities that are highly attractive to remote workers will gather up a large enough concentration of them that they will start to get hired locally there. (Or perhaps this is even happening already?) If I was in charge of economic development in one of those areas I'd certainly want to look into what might encourage that local→remote→local transition to take place.

the_watcher 7y ago
A big one would be local jobs that pay competitively with remote jobs for SF/NYC companies.
nugget 7y ago
I believe Austin has started to benefit from this trend.

VeryHacker 7y ago

Living in Berlin for almost a decade, bought a house here and love to live here because costs of living is far less than compared to my original city (50k people, even the house market is expensive over there). No car needed, plenty of services for family and kids. My original city doesn't offer them at all and you need to own a car if you want to go somewhere.

curioussavage 7y ago

I just moved out of SF and went remote. It’s pretty awesome. Living there was fun but also stressful and inconvenient especially with kids. I didn’t even lose my “walkability” you can find that in many places if you choose the right neighborhood. In fact kind of improves if you factor in not worrying about getting mugged or accosted by homeless crazies. My large home in one of the top planned communities in the nation costs me just under the shack I rented in the east bay.

mech422 7y ago
20 years into work from home... 10 years of it after leaving the valley. There really is no comparison. Less cost, less stress, and more productive. Bonus is valley companies tend to pay the same salary regardless of the jobs on-site/remote status. Got a house with 2 extra bedrooms - set one up as an office and the other as a 'server room'.
non-entity 7y ago
> I didn’t even lose my “walkability” you can find that in many places if you choose the right neighborhood. Sadly the case for me seems to be that there are very nice walkable areas in these small cities, but everytime I interview for a job it turns out the office in in some way out suburban office park, so I have no way of commuting
- r00fus 7y ago
  The idea is that you work remote not try to find employment in the new locale.
  - analog31 7y ago
    I wonder if there's a way to split the difference, for instance get a job at the new locale, but gradually switch to working from home. This would at least be "less remote" from the employer's standpoint because you could bop into the office for meetings when needed.
    - 7y ago

ajross 7y ago

I'll just say this and take my downvotes[1]: It's impossible to read a piece like this in the modern world, about two white middle class families leaving large, coastal multiethnic metropolises for suburban homes in (what a quick google tells me is) the sixth whitest state in the union, without a racial lens. These workers "fleeing" big cities simply don't seem likely to be a uniformly sampled demographic, and for the article not to at least nod to that seems like pretty questionable journalism. But maybe that's just a step too woke. [1] Edit: heh, two minutes before the first accusation of racism. Pretty much what I expected.

someguydave 7y ago
People who think every human decision revolves around race are racist.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  You’re missing the point. Would a visibly brown family have the same latitude?
  - someguydave 7y ago
    Treating people as objects of pity because of their race is racist.
  - umeshunni 7y ago
    I dunno, man, most of my (Indian-American) family lives out in the Midwest and not in some hipster coastal city.
    - ajross 7y ago
      Yeah, but the Boise sprawl neighborhoods detailed in the article are almost certainly 95+% white. It's not like there's no diversity in "the midwest", but the Idaho places being described (and lovingly photographed!) are awfully segregated. Would you or your extended family really be comfortable packing up and moving into an environment where they're literally the only south asians in their neighborhood? If not, then that seems like an important fact to address in an article about large scale population motion. It just creeps me out. The article is nominally about a fairly bland economic point, but the archetype they picked is a bunch of (seriously, really beautiful) photos of white families in de facto segregated neighborhoods!

thatfrenchguy 7y ago

This article lacks numbers.

artur_makly 7y ago

Austin..cheaper? update : just a bit. https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/los-angeles/austin/breakdown https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/los-ang...

gniv 7y ago

There is another dynamic at play, not mentioned in the article: the smaller cities are actively trying to become better places to live. Here's a nice writeup: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/this-land-is-your-land https://annehelen.substack.com/p/this-land-is-your-land Quoting from that blog post: "“Cool,” which is to say, a certain type of bourgeois, with a certain aesthetic that unites it with larger cities while still maintaining a feeling of quaintness. In Tulsa, for example, there’s a gorgeous new book store, an ever-expanding number of breweries, co-working spaces in rehabbed brick buildings, coffee shops in rehabbed brick buildings, airy restaurants with farm-to-table menus in rehabbed brick buildings. There’s a walkable downtown, a First Friday art walk to get people there, a cultural tourist site (the Woody Guthrie Museum) and public (in this case, actually private) outdoor space (The Gathering Place)."

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pfdietz 7y ago

Remote work not only allows workers to be in small cities, it allows employers to be in small cities (or outside the cities).

deleted 7y ago

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sudosteph 7y ago

Yep, I saw this play out first-hand. My company hired a good group of people in the Seattle office for a job that was essentially remote. After a few years, the office shrank from about 6 people, to 2 as people decided to just move to CoL cities. Example destinations: Tampa, Santa Fe, Spokane, and Raleigh (in my case). Nobody regrets their move yet to my knowledge. I'm definitely very happy to be saving money, and my standard of living is better. My urban lifestyle hasn't changed much (still only drive 2-3x a month for trips to cities, beaches or mountains) and I'm from NC, so culture stuff like the food and friendly people are a positive as well.

shawnkalin 7y ago

What are the best websites for finding remote jobs? What tools are best?

shawnkalin 7y ago

What websites are best for finding good remote jobs? What are the most useful tools and apps?

scurvy 7y ago

Does hiring a remote worker trigger nexus if you don't otherwise have a "presence" there? I'm sure you'll need to register with the secretary of state there to pay payroll taxes.

Mc91 7y ago

I am on one of those arrow paths from New York City to the upper south. Sort of. They fly me in from NYC during the week for four days, then fly me back for the weekends. I didn't really make a decision to move, I was looking for work in NYC, but was given a good job offer which said I'd be paid a NYC type salary, and have expensed flights, hotels, car rentals and meal etc. per diems. I haven't exactly moved, I rent in NYC and stay at a hotel down there. I don't plan on staying down here permanently - if and when I start looking for another job it will be in NYC. I think some of what is observed is kind of illusory. Because what is really happening here? On a very broad level - am I from NYC saying I want to become more of an upper south kind of guy? Or is this upper south Fortune 100 company saying it wants to become more of an NYC-type company, and bringing me and others down there to accomplish that? From everything I have seen, more of the latter. Northern Virginia has already pretty much been swallowed into the Boston to DC megalopolis, and it's possible that Richmond, Virginia Beach, Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill and Charlotte are next. Or if companies are desperate enough for IT etc. talent, they might start offices in NYC, SF etc. looking for it. Our company already has a west coast advanced IT office, as well as some offshored stuff to India. New York means not needing to own a car, because it has a massive public transit system (which has been a little shaky for the past five years though). It means 4AM last call. It means having technical meetups and conferences, and universities like Columbia and NYU with impressive CS professors and students. It means lots of job opportunities with good salaries. You can even avoid the city and live a suburban existence if you want. All anybody talks about are the slim pickings in the local job market down there. You don't have that problem in San Francisco or New York.

notus 7y ago

The infrastructure in many big cities is so broken, daily existence is kind of painful. I live in Austin which isn't really even that big of a city but the infrastructure is so poor that commuting anywhere is very painful and there are a lot of road rage incidents as a result. Unless you live downtown there is no walkability and if you live downtown you need to work downtown. The public transit system is laughable. We have a metro rail that doesn't run after 6 and doesn't run on Sundays.

fzeroracer 7y ago
Austin's infrastructure is broken and poor because it (like many cities in the US) were not at all designed in mind with a growing population. So as people move around to cities like Austin, they place immense stress on the transit system while the city is unable to act due to both the regional and state politics and poor city planning. The rapid gentrification of the city outpaces the creation of new homes or businesses which means in 5-10 years Austin will be in a really, really bad state.
jseliger 7y ago
Many voters, unfortunately, appear to prefer broken infrastructure: https://www.statesman.com/news/20180512/wear-austins-light-rail-backers-ponder-thumbs-down-vote-in-nashville https://www.statesman.com/news/20180512/wear-austins-light-r...
- notus 7y ago
  Yeah there are a lot of NIMBY's here. They don't want to make the sacrifices necessary to make the city better.

wasdfff 7y ago

I dont think I could ever move back to the midwest. Spent a couple years in columbus and that city gets old pretty fast. Either you pay 1.3k a month to drink in a 4 story apartment complex with thin walls and a pool closed for 8 months of the year, or you live out in white bread suburban hell until you are in hospice care. Not for me. Where I’m at now is probably the most multicultural city in the americas. You see signs in all kinds of languages on a daily bases. Neighborhoods actually have striking character. There are interests I have here that I could never pursue in any other city. There’s also the weed, the weather, the fact that ambitious transit is actively being built, and, my god, the FOOD. My ashes will be scattered across the santa monica mountains.

selimthegrim 7y ago
New Orleans would like a word.
burntoutfire 7y ago
> or live out in white bread suburban hell until you are in hospice care Funny how 95% of world population would be ecstatic about moving there, yet you describe it as hell.
- patthebunny 7y ago
  Feels like a pretty drastic over estimation.
  - burntoutfire 7y ago
    US is one of the very few places in the world where most people live in their own house, even if it's in "hellish" suburbs. Outside of US, even in first world countries, most people live in flats. Also, majority of world population live in flat out third world countries, and for them, moving to a "boring" (safe, clean, reasonably well designed, consisting of polite/civilized people, having working, high-quality infrastructure etc. etc.) US suburb would be a huge improvement.

ttul 7y ago

Canadian datapoint here. I used to expend every cent living in whatever crappy rental I could find in Vancouver. Moved to a tiny island community six years ago and now work remote one of two days a week to cut the commute down. I have deer walking in my yard and 20 square miles of untouched forest to hike in directly where I live. Our internet provider recently upgraded service to 1Gbps, so video conferencing is snappy and glitch-free. Many of my employees are making similar moves. One moved to a mountain town about an hour outside of the city. Another moved to a seaside village. This is clearly the future, brought to us by the vast improvements in remote work infrastructure such as Slack and Zoom.

devonkim 7y ago

I took a pay cut to work remotely in Asheville, NC (about the most remote, stable, infrastructure-enabled city I could find next to Chattanooga, TN) and while the community was great and living costs were much cheaper, this kind of plan was still wishful thinking because unless... 1. you stay remote (read: can handle work != social structure) 2. your spouse's employment situation is also accommodating 3. your community doesn't decline due to the brain drain / job drain problem of areas outside major metro centers So you need to be resistant and resilient to the downsides of living away from so many techies.

Xcelerate 7y ago
Funny you mention Asheville and Chattanooga. I’m currently working at one of the large tech companies in the Bay Area, but if I ever take a remote job, those are the top two cities I would move to.
- DataDisciple 7y ago
  I'm surprised more folks aren't moving to those areas. I can see them being the next Boulder.
  - devonkim 7y ago
    I knew about the Denver area’s potential at the time but the high real estate prices were a problem. Part of my objective was to get years ahead of a big boom and save money before it got too bad, and I managed to do that fine in Asheville. The region has a lot of the same issues as smaller towns in the US without any industries to accelerate its growth besides craft beer and tourism. The healthcare industry is entirely because of the massive retiree population that are typically snowbirds that don’t contribute to state and county taxes besides property taxes, so its everyday population is starved for government resources relative to its size while it has the highest property values in NC (well, it was until 2016 last I saw). So basically Buncombe County was the lowest earning but most expensive part of NC to live in - this is not a recipe for sustainable growth. I really liked the community and it was a really good place to live if you could afford it. Chattanooga is much better off in comparison although I’m curious about how it’s done at attracting a sustained tech industry almost a decade after its investments.

tempsy 7y ago

I live in SF, which many would consider a big city, but I’ve come to realize that I actually do enjoy living in a big city, it’s just that in the US in particular big city living means a big cost of living premium. There’s dozens of big metropolitan cities outside the US that have better public transportation systems, lower rents, lower food costs, etc. that the analogous big city in the US, namely SF, LA, and NYC. I’m beginning to realize that the best way to continue living in a big city but lower my monthly expenses would be to move abroad.

xenocyon 7y ago

The article doesn't touch on carbon impact, which I can intuitively think of as going in either direction. On the one hand, it's obvious that replacing a car commute with remote work is directly advantageous on a one-to-one basis. On the other hand, it's also possible that many households will actually see an overall increase in car and air miles (to say nothing of systemic scalabilities from serving infrastructure/goods/services to dense vs sparse populations) - so whether the trend is overall positive or negative is not obvious to me.

sys_64738 7y ago

The problem with moving to little cities is the downturn and losing your job. Where is your next job?

einpoklum 7y ago

Rich consultants / independent service providers working remotely move from one place to another. Yawn.

peter303 7y ago

Many of these second tier tech cities have a full tech ecosystem: nationally ranked tech schools, lots of startups, venture capital, tech accelerators, startup weeks, etc. I have live in both Palo Alto and Denver over a decade each. Denvers biggest tech shortcoming is a lack big VCs.

ilaksh 7y ago

I had been working remotely for a startup and since funding is very limited so is my pay for now. Moved across the border from San Diego to Tijuana. My cost of living is less than half of what it was even though I live at the beach now instead of a low income neighborhood in San Diego.

agumonkey 7y ago

Once again I cannot help but to see this waving pattern. rural -> urban -> ~rural decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized It's an odd phenomenon when elements aggregates into a pole to accelerate until that pole is saturated and overwhelmed, improved elements now go away, until the next cycle.

tompoole 7y ago

We've been seeing this for several years now. VBOs (Virtual Business Owners) are seeing their effective spending power double by moving to places with lower taxes and cheaper housing - that is REAL! - https://vbonation.com/vbo-lifestyles/move-to-rural-america/ https://vbonation.com/vbo-lifestyles/move-to-rural-america/

DataDisciple 7y ago

Didn't read the article because, paywall. But Austin, Denver, Portland have all had significant price increases. RiNo in Denver is really cool but homes are $700k+. It's a big discount from LA, but I wouldn't call it life-changing, especially when you consider what you give up. Art, culture, and diversity of people are what make a city so interesting to me. In LA, we have so many friends who are working on interesting projects and are very intelligent. Every time we discuss moving to a smaller town, we are concerned that we might have difficulty finding social circles that fit us. The average American and I just don't have a ton in common. I know that sounds super snobby, but people are different. I'm not saying one is right or wrong. I always think about what will be the next tier of cities where remote work and satellite offices will be popular? To me, Asheville, Greenville, and to a lesser extent Chattanooga will be popular locations. CoL and an urban core are requirements, but also access to nature, transplants and local universities seem to help. A good airport is also big, as we love to travel.