The Rise of the Pandemic Move

The Great Tech Migration to the 'burbs, countryside, hometown, etc.

If your social media feed is anything like mine you’re seeing a lot of relocation happening. Some are apologetic about packing up, like the New Yorker friend who swore she’d never leave Manhattan, where she was born and raised, until she moved to New Jersey last month. (I swear I’m not a traitor and I’ll take my son to NYC every chance I get!) Others were defiant, leaving the city where they’d spent the past five+ years with a middle finger and a giant FU to the place they couldn’t wait to get out of, like the colleague who had been dying to leave the Bay Area for the better part of a decade, until she finally had enough leverage to coax her partner out of it. Still others were opportunistic, finally buying a first home in smaller, more affordable cities after years of saving for more expensive ones, like the friends who could never afford San Francisco but could afford Palm Springs, Tahoe, and the like. And some were spontaneous adventurers, responding to the limbo of a year of uncertain terms by creating their own — purchasing land to build on, living that #vanlife, or simply moving somewhere completely unexpected from whatever was previously in their five-year-plan.

My husband and I put ourselves in the latter camp after realizing both our jobs could be done remotely for the next year. Maybe we didn’t have to stay in the 665 square foot 1 bedroom we shared with our dog and 11 month old. Maybe we could try something totally different, and treat this year like an experiment that we — not the virus — designed. So last month, we picked up and moved to the outskirts of Santa Fe to be closer to family. We currently live at the end of a dirt road where we are neighbors to a dozen hens and stunning sunsets, with a handful of crops to call our own. And no, I couldn’t have predicted that move, either.

Technology companies were some of the first to proclaim a work-from-home reality when the pandemic hit and are on track to be some of the last to return to office life whenever a vaccine lands. If you work in tech or another white-collar profession, chances are you have some flexibility in where you work from. If on top of that you don’t currently own a house or have children, you may be even more liberated. Which is why so many of my peers are packing up and moving elsewhere.

The pandemic move isn’t necessarily permanent for those of us who are relocating, although it can be. We’re living out alternate realities, experimenting with a different way of living that may or may not stick when this is all said and done. In some ways, it’s easier now to take a leap of faith and try something totally different, like moving back to Wisconsin even though you swore you’d never move back home because you really need the childcare support. Or relocating to the desert because, space, and besides — you’ve always wanted an excuse to sport tiki wear year round anyway. I can’t tell if these moves make us more like immature young professionals who have regressed to their former, irresponsible teenage selves, college students ready to party in their new pad, or repressed adults finally discovering and living out their true desires about the kind of lifestyle they want to live, and the type of home they want to create (or even build). If it was embarrassing to admit that we have always secretly wanted to move back to Iowa, Indiana, or some other fly over state we’re from but our Coastal coworkers regularly disparage; or confess that even though we work in technology, we hate screens and are grateful for faulty wifi and an excuse to unplug in the countryside; or that even though we’ve become accustomed to attending the company happy hour and Q&A every Friday we’d really rather be gardening, baking, or doing some other domestic chore that is in fact, for us, a hobby, the pandemic has given us one hell of an excuse to reconnect with and admit our real feelings and see them through. 

My husband and I are only a few weeks into settling into our new home (a rental, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here), and so far happily enjoying it. We’ve still got split shifts of childcare (half the day on, half the day off) to attend to until we’re out of quarantine and can get help from family, and we’ll have to adjust our day-to-day routines to stay on PST with our teams, but already we’re breathing easier. (Literally — we left just before the sky turned orange in the Bay Area due to this year’s early, raging, and devastating wildfire season.) To say that we are relieved to be here — no longer in our cramped apartment and competing for airtime on video calls, breathing in harsh wildfire air, dealing with a corporate landlord who didn’t seem to care that the fire alarms were faulty and going off at all hours of the night — is an understatement. 

The view from the new place. Not pictured: chickens, giant squash, bunnies, our city dog living his best life outdoors.

I suspect we are not the only ones breathing a sight of relief. When I told coworkers I was leaving for Santa Fe, the number of people who admitted they were jealous was higher than I expected. “It’s beautiful out there!” “So lucky to have family nearby!” “Are you buying?” “How long will you go for?” “That’s legit.” Or, as one friend put it, “WHAT A DREAM!” My hunch is that as more companies declare themselves work-from-home friendly through next summer, or begin to make the shift to a more distributed workforce overall, or go all in and become remote-first entirely, we’ll see more of this white collar migration over the months to come. (Realtors, I know, already see this opportunity — as evidenced by the handful of cringeworthy messages I’ve already received on LinkedIn.) 

Of course, anyone contemplating a pandemic move has some level of privilege that can’t be denied, since they have options: job stability, savings, the ability to walk away and start over. For better or worse, the choices they make now will have lasting effects. The real question is what happens in a few years’ time. Will our pandemic moves be the first step towards permanent change, or a mere blip in our personal histories? Will the (mostly blue) migration of tech workers change the political makeup of the (sometimes red) states they move to? Will we see a new gentrification battle between locals and tech workers as they drive up property values in towns that thought they were protected from this kind of influx? Will we see a return to the family unit, an almost un-American attachment to our elders that goes against the grain of our individualistic, ship-me-off-to-college-ASAP and I’m-never-looking-back culture of independence and make-it-on-our-own mythology? Will working in tech become as cliché as working in finance, code for “sellout,” and result in entire cohorts of techies defecting to become craftspeople, homesteaders, small business owners and the like in a pursuit of greater meaning than designing the next addictive mobile app? Today I’ll say: Too soon to tell, unlikely, probably, I doubt it, to a certain degree. 

I expect that eventually, there will be a backlash to this movement. It won’t be long before the pandemic-move-shaming begins, tech corporations begin to rescind their work-from-home privileges, and distributed workforces realize just how isolating and difficult working remotely can be. Just when we think home prices in cities are becoming affordable (since everyone left for the ‘burbs, of course), our peers will begin to think so too, and before you know it, tech workers are back riding the shuttle, displacing poor populations, reminding themselves to believe in the mission of giant corporations, and around and around we go.

Or maybe we’ll fall in love with taking care of chickens, build a rammed earth house for ourselves and another for the grandparents, and pivot this year into another world entirely.