Pictured: Zoom Conference Call

The Great Work-From-Home Experiment carries on as the country continues to be shelled by Covd-19. Fortunately, most people involved — companies and employees alike — think that it’s working pretty well, except those trying to work and take care of kids simultaneously.

According to a recent survey by Deutsche Bank that has tracked sentiment, we may be at “peak WFH”: 65% of respondents said they expect to work from home at 1-3 days per week when their offices reopen, compared to 65%, 57%, and 39% in the past three months.

At the same time, there have been heaps of anecdotes about people who can afford to leave high-cost cities like New York, accelerating planned moves to the suburbs and taking advantage of a remote work policy to live in cheaper areas.

The scale of the urban exodus is unclear at the moment. Anecdotally, many people think people are leaving the city in droves. However, Zillow’s chief economist says people aren’t leaving in droves (at least not yet).

The country’s biggest companies are often clustered together in economic hubs — big cities. For years, it made sense as that’s where the biggest labor pools were and companies would position themselves to take advantage of them. 

But with the pandemic pushing people into isolation, the need to be physically proximate has evaporated since technology provides the virtual connections to keep productivity going.

“I think it’s really a potentially positive development for rural areas or less densely populated areas,” said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies the middle class and social mobility. “This is a big country and we have lots of inexpensive real estate, it’s just that there aren’t jobs in those places — and this would be a way to bring a lot of jobs to people who need them in rural areas and small towns.”

Sawhill and Mercer’s HR experts Mary Ann Sardone and Matt Stevenson, said that often small hubs can pop up when people are given the green light to work remotely, as workers choose “nice” places to live unrelated to their workplace. Sawhill pointed out that these scenarios often raise the entire town’s economic profile by providing employment for essential infrastructure like grocery stores and barber shops.

Sometimes, Stevenson said, a place that begins as a low-cost “small town” ends up losing its bargain status over a period — like Fargo, N.D., after Microsoft employees began to cluster there in 1999 when it opened a small campus.

If enough young, upwardly mobile workers move, things change, says Charles Whelan, an economics professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., a small town of 11,500.

If you’re under age 30 and single, things may be tough. Stevenson said being young and living in a small town means you’re “kind of exiled,” and Whelan said he wouldn’t “wish it on anybody.”

For a young family, Whelan said, it’s much different — especially families with two earners that may face hard choices about where to live because of their jobs. If one can work remotely, it’s no problem if the other’s job is in a fairly rural place.

"You run the risk of creating two parallel work forces," said Stevenson. "You don't want the best people going out to the countryside missing out on the career track."

One potential area of growth is in village-like smaller towns and cities that offer some amenities similar to urban places, but with more room and fewer people. With an economic center like a hospital or a university, these are often well set up to attract people fleeing urban environments.

Sawhill and Whelan pointed out that there is substantial research behind this phenomenon. Once you have a hub like a hospital, Whelan said, everyone else comes. “You have architects, wealth management people, lawyers — that’s why college towns work,” he said.

In the short term, however, things look tough for college towns dealing with the possibility that life will not be the same this fall under the pandemic. As Yahoo Finance has reported, closures take an enormous toll on college towns that would need a significant city exodus to replace.

Matt Dunne, a politician, businessman, and director of the Center for Rural Innovation in Vermont, pressed the internet issue and the fact that scrappy collectives of towns had managed to put together fast connections on their own.

Dunne has been trying to figure out how to revitalize the country’s more rural parts and told Yahoo Finance that the opportunity gap continues to widen between cities and towns – since 2008 traditional rural jobs have been automated, globalization continued to take off, and entrepreneurship declined in rural areas.

The hope, Dunne said, is that there aren’t just three hubs where everyone wants to go to, but rather that workers see the whole country as a potential place to be where jobs can be had — and training can be possible for people to enter the workforce without a detour in New York or San Francisco. Inclusivity is key.

Unfortunately, like college towns that are being crushed by closures and reduced economic activity, small towns that rely on tourism are being hit as well by Covid shutdowns and a more cautious public.

However, the next few years shake out with the Covid crisis and the Great Work-From-Home Experiment either working or not working for businesses, a lot is up in the air. As Dunne pointed out, the housing market in the northeast has exploded as people look for a place to buy to escape the city — a move that could put pressure on those who live there already. It seems as if trends are accelerating, but as of yet, it’s hard to say which direction they’re going.