Remote work as rescue for rural economies draws doubts

West Virginia and other heavily rural states are hoping to lure remote workers to live in rural areas. And while recent studies from Apple and Google have raised hopes about such workers revitalizing rural economies, "new evidence raises questions about the true potential of the remote-work-driven renewal storyline," write researchers from the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.

Anecdotal evidence seems to show that, while many tech firms are moving inland, they're mostly going to metropolitan areas with existing tech centers rather than truly new places. On the worker side, "The current narrative is that the widespread shift to remote work amid the Covid-19 pandemic has created a massive pool of footloose workers who are rapidly exiting the big coastal tech hubs and heading for the heartland, where they will boost the inland economy," the researchers write.

"Plenty of anecdotes and commentators have pushed this narrative over the past 15 months," but an April data analysis based on U.S. Postal Service data found that, while there was an uptick in migration from big cities, the numbers were modest and most people moved only a short distance to a nearby county, not to the nation's heartland, the researchers report.

"Given that, 'attraction' strategies seem like a long shot for the places most in need of growth as the pandemic eases and remote work declines. Communities across the country should instead focus on the kind of basic block-and-tackling that will lead to more robust growth overall and a higher quality of life for residents," the researchers report. "This includes the harder work of building authentic growth sectors; developing a skilled and diverse digital workforce; deploying robust transportation infrastructure for local residents; and enacting policies that support workers and their families, such as investment in education, accessible child care, and universal paid sick and family leave. New and better place-based and place-conscious federal policies would also help, such as the creation of sizable regional tech hubs in new places, or new investments in the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and minority-serving institutions (MSIs)."