The Oakland Hills Public Use Microdata Area, or PUMA (a Census Bureau designation that I’ll explain in a moment), in Oakland, California, contains some of the most appealing urban neighborhoods in the US. There are charming residential streets designed by the Olmsted Brothers in Crocker Highlands and Trestle Glen, great restaurants and shops in Lakeshore, Piedmont Avenue, Rockridge and Temescal, houses perched on impossibly steep streets in the hills proper with sweeping views of San Francisco and the bay, and rugged parkland to the north and east.
Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that people there don’t want to commute to offices in downtown Oakland, San Francisco, Silicon Valley or elsewhere in the Bay Area. Last year, an estimated 45.4% of employed Oakland Hills residents worked primarily from home, the highest such share in the US. Here’s a list of the 50 PUMAs with the highest work-from-home share in 2022, which I realize is a lot of places to squeeze into a table (especially on a phone), but I decided to try anyway because, admit it, you want to see if your neighborhood is on the list.
The Census Bureau divides the US into 2,487 PUMAs (2,462 not counting Guam and Puerto Rico) big enough to allow it to release so-called microdata on individual responses to the decennial census and annual American Community Survey without endangering privacy. These areas, which generally have 100,000 residents or more, are also quite useful for comparing communities in the one-year ACS data tables, the 2022 editions of which were released this month. Many cities and even counties are too small for data to be released from a single year’s survey; in December, the Census Bureau will release 2018-2022 five-year averages for geographical areas from census tracts on up, but given how much remote-work practices have been changing lately, the one-year numbers are much more informative.
The national WFH share fell from 17.9% in 2021 to 15.2% in 2022 — still up a lot from 2019’s 5.7%. The ACS simply asks respondents “How did you usually get to work last week?” with working from home one of the multiple-choice answers, so it misses some of the increase in hybrid work. Monthly surveys conducted for the academic group WFH Research found that about 30% of paid full working days were worked from home in the US in 2022 (and an average of 28.5% so far in 2023), although two researchers from the American Enterprise Institute argued this month that this could be overstating matters for various reasons.
In any case, people in some places, such as the Oakland Hills PUMA, work from home a lot more often than that. Exactly how much more is somewhat uncertain, given that the estimated sampling error for the Oakland Hills’ 45.4% is plus or minus 5 percentage points. The sampling errors for the 50 top WFH areas range from 6.7 points for northwest Charlotte, North Carolina, to 2.9 for Chicago’s Lakeview and Lincoln park neighborhoods, meaning that they’re all pretty much indistinguishable statistically, as are dozens more that didn’t make the top 50.
Still, all these areas clearly do have much higher WFH shares than the nation as a whole. What else do they have in common? One striking characteristic, which I highlighted in the top-50 table, is that most are located in central cities of metropolitan areas, which are designated as such based on population and how many people commute to jobs there. What’s more, two non-central cities on the list — Cupertino, California, and Redmond, Washington — happen to be home to the headquarters of the two most valuable companies in the world, Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp., and several others are also home to large corporate headquarters. Working at home seems to be most popular in places close to lots of offices and other places of employment.
As I noted when writing about these statistics a year ago, this is at odds with the perception that remote work is allowing large numbers of people to do their jobs from beaches, mountaintops and other scenic rural locales. That perception is not all wrong, and there probably are neighborhoods in or near, say, Jackson, Wyoming, where WFH is even more prevalent than in the Oakland Hills. But most residents of the Sheridan, Park, Teton, Lincoln and Big Horn Counties PUMA of which Jackson makes up a small part have more hands-on occupations, with the area’s WFH share just 10% in 2022.
The shift to remote work during the pandemic has been concentrated in places where there were already lots of people whose jobs could be done remotely. Well-educated white-collar workers — who live mainly in the biggest and richest metropolitan areas — are heavily concentrated in central cities and close-in suburbs. Here, for example, are the 25 PUMAs where the share of residents with a bachelor’s degree or more is highest, a list that has a lot of overlap with the WFH list.
The PUMAs that show up in this table but not the first are mostly (1) college towns (which includes northeast Seattle, home of the University of Washington, and south Denver, home of the University of Denver) and (2) neighborhoods of Manhattan. Professors and other university employees, while they did work remotely early in the pandemic, had by 2022 returned to their lecture halls and offices. In Manhattan, where commutes are often short and even high earners often live in tiny apartments, employers’ calls to return to the office seem to have met with a more willing response than in other high-education zones. The PUMA lines were redrawn between the 2021 ACS and the 2022 edition, so exact comparisons aren’t possible, but six New York City PUMAs were in the WFH top 50 in 2021; that fell to just one in 2022.
Whether this will eventually happen in the San Francisco, Washington and Seattle areas as well is still an open question, but there are signs that some WFH normalization is afoot. Before the pandemic, it was most common in metropolitan areas that were (1) small, scenic and often adjacent to much larger metro areas, (2) large but relatively cheap and in the Sun Belt or (3) home to large military installations, where those who live and work on base may be counted as working from home.
The mass shift to remote work during the pandemic brought big changes. Scenic Denver-adjacent Boulder, Colorado, stayed on top but large expensive metros with lots of high-end office jobs shouldered aside many of the other smaller metro areas.
In 2022, superstar metros such as San Francisco, San Jose and Washington began to slide down the rankings again, and Philadelphia and southwestern Connecticut fell out of the top 25 entirely. One interesting new addition is Nashville, which appears to have joined the likes of Austin, Raleigh and Atlanta as a top magnet for educated home-office workers from elsewhere.
Where things are headed for the Oakland Hills is an interesting question. It’s a lovely place, but not without its challenges. Real estate prices there remain high, and right now so are Oakland’s crime rates as the city struggles with a pandemic hangover caused in part by the Bay Area’s enthusiastic embrace of working from home. Will Oaklanders start going to the office more, or will they leave for places where they can work from home with less expense and hassle? I don’t think they’ll just keep on doing what they’re doing now forever, but we’re in uncharted territory here.
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