The bigger question is usually why don’t people move from a rural location? And the answer is usually “it’s complicated “. Old parents to take care of. It’s familiar. Friends. Maybe own your simple home. Maybe your church is there. Maybe quiet life is your thing.
Remote workers also don’t fully contribute to the economy of the rural area because their place of employment is not in that area. If the company the remote worker works for does well and grows, that won’t grow the rural community.
when you stop competing for the same strip of land, 10 miles from the pacific ocean, it turns out there's a sort of stupendous amount of land.
while, yes, there will technically be some competition, in the areas under discussion i don't think it will meaningfully effect housing prices.
(i could divide the amount of land in rural america by the number of possible work-from-home employees and we could figure out what it'll do to the average population density. but, hell, i've lived in these areas, i don't need to.)
I’ve been following news of this sort closely during COVID as a personal curiosity. Most of the affected towns are either (1) within 1-2 hour drive of a major metro center (e.g. northwestern CT) (2) already a major vacation destination prior to COVID (Jackson Hole, WY and friends) (3) a top-3 metro area in the state. If you check more than one box, the situation is more dramatic.
Many of these places were already changing prior to COVID, but, as in other domains, COVID has accelerated an already latent process.
Basically, Missoula’s example does not contradict their claim.
But yes, remote workers are more likely to move to a place like Missoula than a place like Philipsburg, MT.
are you at all familiar with missoula? i am. my wife is from there. i visit regularly.
it is packed into one end of a mountain valley, surrounded by mountains on three sides. the land there was already extremely limited.
Rural America is huge. If every single person in New York city got themselves a suburban house, they'd take up 0.1% of the United States (about the area of two counties).
Housing is expensive in cities because 10 million people want to live in the same square mile. The US, however, has 4 million of those square miles. (Everyone in New York City could move to California and have 10 acres of their own. I did the calculation with the intent of showing that everyone in the country could have their own square mile, but that's not true -- I didn't realize how big a square mile actually is.)
Remote workers probably aren't going to raise the cost of living that much. It is certainly possible that they could all move to the same place (i.e. turn Aspen, Colorado into New York City), and that would be a problem. But if people randomly move into rural areas, there just aren't enough people buying 1 million dollar apartments in the same place to "gentrify out" farmers.
I'll also point out, that remote work doesn't necessarily imply that it's possible to move to the middle of nowhere. You still need a good Internet connection, and many people want to live closer than an hour's drive away from a grocery store or hospital. I work remotely but I'm happy to live 3 minutes away from Manhattan. There are factors other than commuting to work that account for where people live.
Not sure what you're trying to say with this, but putting 10 million people anywhere and packing them into any density would require enormous infrastructure that needs to be built and paid for.
Of course, this does happen at much smaller scales and in many places. The pattern is repeated all over the USA: developers buy up land from farmers who want to retire, then quickly erect sprawling tracts of cookie-cutter mcmansions, selling a pipe dream of rural living in plywood and tyvek box with a 2 car garage. This always has the effect of straining the local infrastructure, making traffic into a nightmare, boosting the cost of housing to the point where it's out of reach for locals, and sucking the taxbase out of the nearby urban area.
Because you can't get anyone in rural Montana who is capable of getting a job paying Bay Area or NYC salaroies to accept that offer. Adjustment will result in meeting somewhere in the middle but whether that's 25% or 95% of Bay Area salaries is an open question.
That and the logistics of moving. Not to mention, having a job beats not having a job. And moving often means not having a job to start. Especially when your only work experience is retail, factory floor, and farmhand.
You can't really afford to take a week off of getting paid.
And if you're constantly working to make ends meet, you don't really have time or energy to work on developing marketable skills.