Since the start of the pandemic, remote work has increasingly given many Americans the freedom to choose where they want to live — regardless of its proximity to a physical office.
And some of them are still leaving bigger cities behind. According to a survey from review crowdsourcer Yelp, which examined three years of internal data on its own fully remote workforce, the number of employees living near its office locations saw a steep drop from 2019 to 2022, Bloomberg reported.
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As of 2022, many U.S. remote workers weren’t working from home out of necessity but because they preferred it (76% compared to 60% in 2020), and nearly 20% said they were working remotely because they’d relocated, per a Pew Research Center study.
In the case of Yelp’s workforce, many employees are leaving large, expensive cities. The number of workers living near the company’s San Francisco headquarters fell by 70%, and the number of those living near offices in New York, Washington DC and Chicago dropped by 67%.
During that same period, the number of Yelp employees residing in Florida and Texas increased four times over.
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“Many of the employees we’ve spoken with moved away from former office locations to areas with a lower cost of living, with some individuals purchasing their first home or enjoying a slower pace of life,” said Carmen Whitney Orr, the company’s chief people officer.
