Remote Work and the Geography of Opportunity
In October 2025, the City Journal published an analysis of Census Bureau migration data that documented something demographers had been watching unfold gradually for several years but that had not previously been confirmed with this level of clarity: metro areas with under 250,000 residents, many of them classified as rural, had reversed years of population loss among prime-working-age adults, gaining at least 100,000 net new residents annually in each of the past three years. Metro areas with 250,000 to 1 million residents, the category that includes places like Raleigh, North Carolina and Ogden, Utah, also grew, driven by their combination of lower-density living with many of the amenities previously available only in larger cities. Collectively, these smaller and mid-size places had attracted more than 200,000 working-age migrants annually for three consecutive years.
This is not the "Zoom town" story that dominated coverage of remote work migration in 2020 and 2021, when ski towns and vacation destinations saw extreme, often unsustainable population surges driven by temporary pandemic relocations. The pattern documented in 2025 is different in kind: sustained, multi-year migration of prime-age workers and families into smaller metro areas and rural counties, a reversal of population trends that in many of these places had persisted for decades. The question this raises for economic development policy is significant. If remote work has durably changed where economically productive workers choose to live, every assumption about regional economic development built around the geographic concentration of knowledge work needs to be reexamined.
From Zoom Towns to a Structural Migration Shift
The distinction between the initial pandemic-era relocation surge and the pattern that has persisted since matters because it determines whether what is happening represents a temporary disruption that will revert, or a structural change in the geography of economic opportunity.
The original Zoom town phenomenon, as documented in research tracking the 2020 and 2021 migration surge, was concentrated in a specific category of place: previously popular getaway communities, ski resort towns, and recreation-oriented small towns, where the influx of remote workers with urban incomes drove housing prices up by as much as 25 percent in a single year in places like upstate New York. This pattern was, in retrospect, an extension of existing second-home and vacation property markets rather than a genuine redistribution of primary residences and economic activity. Many of these places experienced exactly the kind of unsustainable surge that the "boom town" framing implied: rapid price increases, strain on local services, and in some cases, a partial reversal as the most extreme pandemic-era relocations proved temporary.
The pattern documented through 2024 and into 2025 is geographically broader and demographically different. The Cooper Center's analysis of 2023 population estimates found that rural counties and the smallest metro areas became, for the first time in decades, the top destination category for domestic migration in the United States. Critically, many of the places experiencing this growth were not tourist destinations or recreation hubs. They were ordinary small cities and rural counties that had experienced sustained population loss for years, suddenly receiving net positive migration.
The most striking illustration of the underlying economic logic is the comparison the Cooper Center analysis draws between Washington, D.C. and Charlotte, North Carolina. In 2000, median rent in Washington was 10 percent cheaper than in Charlotte. By 2019, before the pandemic accelerated any of these trends, Washington's median rent was over a third higher than Charlotte's, and its median home price was 2.5 times higher. This gap, which developed gradually over two decades as a function of the geographic concentration of high-wage knowledge work in expensive coastal metros, is precisely the gap that remote work has made economically irrational for a growing share of workers to maintain. If a worker's labor can be performed from Charlotte at the same wage that would be paid in Washington, the twenty-year divergence in cost of living between the two cities becomes a pure subsidy to whichever city the worker happens to live in, and an increasing number of workers have recognized this.
The Donut Effect and Its Limits
Not all of the redistribution documented in the remote work literature represents long-distance relocation to fundamentally different regions. A substantial share represents what researchers have termed the "Donut Effect," a pattern in which economic activity disperses from city centers to surrounding suburbs within the same broader metropolitan area, rather than across regions.
Research published in PNAS using high-frequency spending, commuting, migration, and housing data found that three-fifths of households that left city centers in large metropolitan areas moved to suburbs of the same city, a pattern the researchers attribute substantially to the persistence of hybrid work arrangements, in which employees commute to a central office some days each week but live further from that office than full-time in-person work would make practical. The Donut Effect is real and economically significant within metropolitan regions, but it represents a different phenomenon from the cross-regional migration documented in the smaller metro and rural data. The Donut Effect redistributes economic activity within the boundaries of existing major metropolitan economies. The smaller-metro and rural migration pattern redistributes economic activity across regional economies entirely.
The 2025 migration trend data provides a useful breakdown of where this cross-regional redistribution is actually landing. Survey data on 2024 migration patterns found that 53 percent of movers chose suburban areas, 30 percent moved to urban locations, and 17 percent moved to rural settings, a distribution that, when combined with the Census migration data on smaller metro growth, suggests that the suburbs of mid-size metropolitan areas, places like the suburbs of Raleigh, Nashville, or Charlotte, are absorbing a disproportionate share of the redistribution.
This is neither the Donut Effect within major metros nor a pure rural revival. It is the growth of a tier of metropolitan areas that sit below the largest coastal cities in size and cost, but above small towns and rural counties in economic density and amenities.
What This Means for Regional Economic Development Strategy
The economic development implications of this migration pattern depend substantially on what kind of place a region is, and the strategic response that makes sense for a mid-size Sunbelt metro is different from the response that makes sense for a small rural county.
For mid-size metros, including the Raleigh, Nashville, Denver, and Charlotte tier identified in multiple analyses of migration destinations, the strategic question is whether the region's existing infrastructure, particularly housing supply and transportation systems, can absorb sustained population growth without replicating the cost-of-living dynamics that made the largest coastal metros economically inaccessible to the workers now relocating away from them. The Hilldrup migration analysis identifies Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina as states experiencing the most significant inflows, and all four face active policy debates about whether housing construction is keeping pace with demand. A mid-size metro that experiences remote-work-driven population growth without a corresponding increase in housing supply will, within a relatively short timeframe, begin to replicate the affordability dynamics that drove workers away from larger metros in the first place. The lesson of the original Zoom towns, where housing prices rose 25 percent in a single year in some destinations, is directly applicable: rapid in-migration without housing supply response converts an opportunity into an affordability crisis.
For small metro areas and rural counties, the strategic question is different and in some ways more favorable. These places generally have more available housing capacity relative to the scale of in-migration they are experiencing, and the economic activity that remote workers bring, household spending, local tax revenue, demand for services, represents genuinely additive economic activity in places that have experienced population decline for decades. The research published in the International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research on rural economic impacts of remote work identifies broadband infrastructure as the critical determinant of whether this opportunity translates into "widespread, inclusive revitalization or simply isolated pockets of prosperity in an otherwise disconnected rural landscape." This framing captures the central policy choice rural and small-metro economic development officials face: remote work migration is not a tide that lifts an entire regional economy automatically. Without broadband infrastructure that allows the benefits to extend beyond the specific neighborhoods or developments where relocating remote workers settle, and without housing and service infrastructure that allows existing residents to participate in the economic activity that new residents bring, the result can be a bifurcated local economy, prosperity for a remote-work-enabled enclave alongside continued struggle for the existing community.
The Equity Dimension That Gets Lost in Aggregate Numbers
The aggregate migration numbers, real and significant as they are, obscure a demographic pattern that has direct implications for which communities benefit from this redistribution and which do not.
The original Zoom town research found that people with higher levels of education and higher incomes were substantially more likely to have relocated during the pandemic migration surge, a finding that aligns with the broader reality that remote work itself is concentrated among higher-wage, higher-education occupations. This means that the economic redistribution remote work enables is not a redistribution of opportunity broadly defined. It is a redistribution of a specific category of high-wage knowledge work and the household spending that accompanies it, toward places that previously had limited access to that category of economic activity.
For the receiving communities, this can be genuinely transformative: a small city that gains several hundred households earning coastal-metro salaries while paying local cost of living sees meaningful increases in local spending, property tax revenue, and demand for local services. But it does not directly address the economic prospects of existing residents in those communities who are not themselves remote workers, and in cases where housing supply does not respond, it can actively worsen housing affordability for those existing residents even as it improves other economic indicators for the region as a whole.
This is the central tension that regional economic development policy needs to navigate as this migration pattern continues. The arrival of remote-work households represents a genuine economic opportunity for smaller metros and rural communities that have experienced decades of population loss and economic decline. Capturing that opportunity in a way that benefits the existing community, rather than creating a parallel economy that exists alongside but separate from it, requires deliberate policy attention to housing supply, broadband access, and the connections between new residents' economic activity and existing local businesses and workers. The migration is happening regardless of policy. Whether it produces broad-based regional revitalization or a more geographically dispersed version of the same inequality that characterized the pre-remote-work economy depends substantially on the choices regions make now, while the migration pattern is still actively unfolding rather than already settled.
This article is part of the PPV Economic Insight series. The previous installment, Green Jobs and Just Transition: Lessons from the Inflation Reduction Act, examined the distributional effects and durability challenges of federal clean energy investment. The next, The Capital Access Gap for Minority-Owned Businesses, examines new evidence on lending disparities and the policy tools that can expand entrepreneurship in underserved communities.
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