In the past, I have noted the potential for coworking spaces outside major cities and generally in what the US calls “the flyover states”, outside the dominant cultural centers on the coasts.
This month there have been a flurry of articles about a “brain gain”, reporting that people are moving to out of the way places, including small towns [1, 2]. This counters the dominating narrative that all the kids leave for the big city, and that small towns are dying.
OK, there is some hype here. A handful of people moving into a small town is a big deal for that town, but it’s just a trickle compared to the flood pouring into NYC, LA, and the Sun Belt. Plus, it never was the case that everybody was leaving, or even all the “best”. So, it never was quite the way Girls portrayed it.
(And, knowing local Chamber of Commerce folks, I know that there is some motivated storytelling going on.)
But overall, this is plausible and even a good thing.
In the “Future of Work”, many workers can work from anywhere, so long as there is decent connectivity. And, as I have pointed out, depending on how you want to live, the standard of living can be way better outside a metropolitan area.
Earlier I discussed a recent survey of Freelancers in NYC, and pointed out that the survey focused on Freelance workers who live in NYC. The survey implicitly assumed that these workers also work in NYC, which, of course most do. But many of them probably have remote gigs and they probably collaborate (and compete) with Freelancers who live elsewhere and work in NYC. These variations on life and work were not really explored by that survey, which aimed to boost living the La Vida Giggada in NYC.
The fact is, if you are successful, you can move out of the city and keep working.
And when you do, you might well want to have a local coworking space in your new location. It will be filled with other “freelancers in flyover land”.
So yeah. It’s not just me. It’s a real thing. I know dozens of people who either never moved to the big city or came back to make a good life.
- Sara Millhouse, Brain Gain: Professionals Find Niche in Rural Upper Midwest, in The Daily Yonder: Keep It Rural. 2018. https://www.dailyyonder.com/brain-gain-professionals-find-niche-rural-upper-midwest/2018/05/30/25657/
- Sarah Smarsh, Something Special Is Happening in Rural America, in New York Times. 2019: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/opinion/rural-america.html
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