WFH Is Moving To The Suburbs, Where It Makes Sense

In 2023, 35.9% of the employed residents of Apex and Holly Springs, North Carolina, fast-growing suburbs on the western edge of the Raleigh metropolitan area, worked primarily from home, according to data released last month by the US Census Bureau. That’s up from 32.7% in 2022, even as the national work-from-home percentage fell to 13.8% from 15.2%.

It also made Apex and Holly Springs No. 1 in WFH percentage among 2,486 Census Public Use Microdata Areas — which “partition each state or equivalent entity into geographic areas containing no fewer than 100,000 people each” — in the US, including Puerto Rico.

The Apex and Holly Springs PUMA’s 0.04 percentage point lead over the suburban neighborhoods on the northwestern fringe of Austin, Texas, is well within the margin of the error of the American Community Survey — the Census Bureau’s detailed annual look at demographics, housing and work — so I wouldn’t make too much of the exact rankings here. But the fact that 2023’s top 25 list is dominated by suburbs and outlying neighborhoods of large cities is probably significant. So is the presence of so many areas in North Carolina and Texas, states that have added a lot of new housing in recent years and filled it with migrants from the Northeast and West Coast.

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the survey in 2020, so the 2021 edition provided the first detailed picture of the new geography of working from home, and it was a strange one. The 2021 WFH rankings were dominated by urban neighborhoods, with central Washington topping the list at a 56.6% share and areas encompassing or adjacent to downtown San Francisco and Seattle coming in second, third and fourth. By 2022 this was beginning to change, and with the 2023 list the shift is almost complete. Yes, central Los Angeles, Denver and Washington are in the top 25, but such areas are now anomalies. New York City, which had three neighborhoods in the top 25 in 2021, didn’t have one in the top 50 in 2023. (The Park Slope and Carroll Gardens PUMA in Brooklyn was 53rd, with a WFH share of 28.9%.)

Urban neighborhoods dominated the WFH rankings in 2021 because they housed the greatest concentrations of professionals whose jobs could be done remotely when the Covid-19 pandemic suddenly shut down offices. With offices open again (if not necessarily full), and people having had more time to adjust their living situations to their remote-work preferences, the country’s WFH hotbeds are now increasingly found in the suburbs — and beyond. Which is basically what everyone was predicting when the world embarked on its great remote-work experiment in spring 2020. It’s just taken a little while.

I started using PUMAs to measure the changing geography of remote work two years ago because they allowed me to zoom in on the big-city neighborhoods where the practice was most prevalent in 2021. PUMAs also allow for consistent annual rankings in a way that city and county statistics do not because many of those are below the 65,000-population cutoff for single-year ACS data. There are five-year average statistics available for less-populous areas, but with WFH percentages changing so drastically over the past five years — and the 2019-2023 data not due until December — they’re not all that informative just yet.

This approach really only works for comparing WFH prevalence within and among large metropolitan areas, though. Because PUMAs have to have at least 100,000 residents, smaller cities and towns that are heavy on remote workers usually get thrown together with neighboring rural areas where most employment is hands-on and in-person. Still, the one-year WFH statistics for metropolitan statistical areas — counties or groups of counties with at least one urbanized area of 50,000 or more — give some sense of what’s afoot outside the biggest ones.

Now we see a list heavy on college towns, scenic spots and large(ish) metropolitan areas with a lower cost of living than the so-called superstar metros on the coasts. High real estate prices and changing demographics were beginning to take the shine off of superstar cities worldwide even before the pandemic. Since then, a sudden shift in work practices that made it easier for people to live anywhere has led to growing concentrations of remote workers where the living is cheaper or better or both.

The oddballs on this list are metro Washington, Seattle and San Francisco, expensive superstar cities that nonetheless continue to have high metropolitan WFH percentages. As with the downtowns that continue to rank high in WFH, it feels as if something has to give in these places. Will people really continue to pay a premium to live near offices they never go to?