For years, she has tracked the suburban detritus of “dead malls” and underused office parks. “They can assure their historic places as hubs of their region.”Įllen Dunham-Jones is a professor of architecture at Georgia Tech and directs its Urban Design Program. Places such as Lowell, Springfield, and Worcester do not need to be smaller branches of Boston, he says. “This is an opportunity for these smaller cities to reposition themselves and capture some of the growth from folks who may want to not live right in the middle of the city anymore,” says Andre Leroux, who leads the group’s Transformative Transit-Oriented Development program. An additional 7.5 percent stayed within the same state. A CityLab analysis found that 84 percent of the people who moved out of the country’s 50 largest cities between March 2020 and February 2021 stayed within the same metro area. Ditto for smaller cities surrounding Boston-Natick, Worcester, and Weymouth.Īccording to Postal Service data crunched by the real estate firm CBRE, those who picked up stakes during the pandemic were less likely to hightail to the hinterlands than to move to neighboring, less-dense cities, slightly farther from the downtown core. Eighteen percent of those who moved out of San Francisco last year landed there, just a subway, bus, or ferry ride away.
Or so the story goes.īut more recent data suggests that Zoom Town USA looks a lot more like Alameda County, California, across the bay from San Francisco.
White-collar workers, freed of the constraints of the office, last year decamped for more skiing- and hiking-friendly climes-the pandemic’s Zoom towns. Much has been made of the pandemic-era exodus to Lake Tahoe, Martha’s Vineyard, or Aspen.
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