I am really skeptical of this idea that suddenly people will be moving to small cities. For one, this assumes that people just move to big cities to work. Is there any research to prove that ? For most people, especially when they are younger, people gravitate to big cities for all the amenities that come with the big city living, jobs being one of them. So in essence, it is jobs chasing people into big cities, rather than other way round.
It’s kind of both. More people in smaller places means more of the amenities and lifestyle of bigger cities without the cost and hassle. Will there be a massive outmigration? Probably not sufficiently to make NYC a ghost town, but it could absolutely turn second and third tier cities into places where a lot more people want to live. There are a sufficient number of people that move specifically for jobs, but would be happy to live in a smaller place. Even if that’s 5% or 10% of professionals, that’s still a huge impact on the communities they move to.
You don't move to the city until you have the job (or are already the wealth to do so).
---
It's anecdotal, but a few of my team members have been making moves out of Seattle. I can only imagine the life they can live in other cities on a Seattle-salary.
Nearly everyone I know on my team moved to Seattle for work. I'd say less than 5% are "from" Seattle.
Fresh out of college, I moved from Lubbock (small town) to Dallas (big city), again, for work. Moved from Dallas to Seattle, again, for the job not "for Seattle"
You can get most of what you need in a large town or a small city. I live in a large university town; we have malls, movies, some of the best fashion in the country, every kind of food but no Michelin restaurants, excellent education and schools.
Compare to the big city (Kuala Lumpur) where there's... zoos, opera, symphonies, IKEA, nicer restaurants, libraries.
The offices are there because they're near to rich people homes. The rich people homes are there because they're next to offices.
The city has few parks. Parks are kept clean by shooing away anyone 'loitering', so there's no real leisure spots in the city except malls. It takes half an hour to get to a supermarket because of the traffic, weird highways, and another half hour to find parking. Delivery startups took off, but only in the big city.
This might not be the case with say, NYC, but it's probably similar in many large cities like Jakarta or Bangkok.
It's no coincidence that the highest paying jobs are also in the heart of traffic jams - you'd need to pay me a lot more to commute there and even more to live in such a noisy, polluted area.
It's older research, but this work [0] found that when choosing a city to move, roughly 65% of moves were based on employment and housing (cost, proximity to job, size, etc), and only 25% came from desirability (neighborhood, crime, amenities, etc).
They also assessed the difference in motivation between low-income and high-income movers; the role of desirability was reduced to about 17% for low-income moves, which seems to make intuitive sense since they are less likely to have the luxury of basing a move on less-economic factors.
The authors also observed a trend that younger and more well-educated movers were more likely to choose an urbanized destination, but not by too much (single-digit percentages). In contrast, marital status and whether or not you had children were substantially more influential.
I didn't do too much digging through the followup work, so I can't say anything conclusively about changes in these trends over the last 30 years.
As a 30 something, single developer in boulder, if I knew my current job was going to be remote for the long haul, I would leave this place in heartbeat for some tiny town in Wyoming. Boulder and the rest of colorado have become entirely too crowded.
For an N=1 sample, I'm a younger person who moved to the Bay just for work and chose as out of the way of a place as I could find to live. If I had found a comparable opportunity nearly anywhere else I would have taken it in a heartbeat.
I did wind up liking it here and have a preference toward staying, but starting every morning with a swim in the ocean and having plentiful hiking opportunities is much more of a contributing factor than the city amenities.
I'm in for an anecdote. I moved to Manhattan from Upstate for work, primarily. Transit being present and inexpensive takeout options are important when starting off a career ;)
