Employees Might Not Be Fleeing So Far Away

In Wired August 2021, titled The Rise Of The Zoom Town, “A CityLab analysis found that 84% of the people who abandoned the country’s 50 largest cities between March 2020 and February 2021 stayed within the same metro area. Eighteen percent of those who moved out of San Francisco in 2020 landed in Alameda County, a Bart ride away. People who move to the suburban and smaller towns will still be spending money, but instead of doing so in the big downtowns they will be spending it in the small locales near where they live. However, there are increasing reports of the big downtowns coming back. New York office leasing has picked up, although the vacancy rate of 19% in Manhattan is still a record high, and San Francisco apartment rents have headed back to pre-Covid levels, after dropping 20-24% in 2020.