Working From Home Is Not an Urban Escape Hatch
The mass shift to remote work during the pandemic allowed people with professional and management jobs to do them effectively from mountaintop aeries, beachfront cottages and exotic foreign locales. Mainly, though, it seems to have enabled residents of big-city neighborhoods and close-in suburbs to avoid going to offices that were in some cases within walking distance of their homes.
These numbers are from the 2021 edition of the American Community Survey, a sort of mini-census that the US Census Bureau sends out to 3.5 million households each year. They come in response to the multiple-choice question, asked of household members who were already reported to have performed paid work the previous week: “How did this person usually get to work LAST WEEK?”
“Car, truck or van” remained the box checked most frequently, with an estimated 75.6% of US workers getting to their jobs that way in 2021. But the percentage working from home, which had been rising slowly for years, jumped to 17.9% in 2021 from 5.7% before the pandemic in 2019. In some places, as should already be apparent from the above chart, it jumped much more than that.
The places I have chosen to focus on here are Census Public Use Microdata Areas, or PUMAs, which divide the nation into units big enough (population of more than 100,000, usually) for the Census Bureau to release microdata from which anybody can compile their own custom estimates and tables without compromising the privacy of respondents. These particular numbers are derived not from the microdata (which isn't out yet and is released only as five-year averages in any case) but from a table published by the Census Bureau in mid-September that I've seen referenced by one pseudonymous Twitter user
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