The rise of Zoom Towns
The effect of “Zoom town” migration during the 2020 pandemic
Abstract
The high cost of living in wealthy cities and the opportunity for remote work has driven homebuyers further away from urban metros. An influx of affluent newcomers to rural areas has driven up the cost of rentals and home purchases, and tensions have arisen. As the politically, racially, and culturally diverse new groups arrive, existing residents must grapple with the socio-economic change this brings.
“Zoom town” is an emerging shorthand for places that experienced growth during the 2020 pandemic because of their natural attractiveness and availability of internet bandwidth that enable remote workers to maintain the same level of connectivity they have in urban areas.
“A Pew Research survey in November found that about 5% of Americans had moved in the prior several months as a result of the pandemic — after only 9.3% moved for any reason in all of 2019, according to U.S. census data. Smaller cities and towns across the country are already benefiting as the destinations of these moves.” (Florida and Ozimek 2021)
Inflated home prices have driven people further and further away from urban metros.
This phenomenon is not unique to California or even the United States. “DFL” is a slang term for someone who is “Down from London” (Lewis 2013) in reference to people who have left London in search of more affordable housing.
Truckee, California experienced an estimated 10% increase in population in 2020 alone (Levin 2021). Tensions flare in Truckee as less affluent full-time residents who have lived there for decades clash with newcomers over lifestyle differences. In an NPR Marketplace story about “Zoom Towns,” a story about disputes over pet dogs serves as a proxy for cultural tensions and resentments. “There is a lot of entitlement with the people that come up here,” said Jenny Graham, who was born and raised in Truckee and is now retired. “The Bay Area is really different than mountain living.” (Levin 2021)
Bozeman Montana, Cary, North Carolina, The Hamptons and Hudson Valley in New York, Lake Tahoe, California, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Henderson, and Reno, Nevada are on the growing list of cities that have found themselves part of the “Billionaire Wilderness,” a term coined by Yale Sociologist Justin Farrell (Farrell 2021, 12)
Figure 1. Estimated map of “Zoom towns”, Created by the author, Aynne Valencia
In a series of economically driven migrations, the rural landscape has changed from middle and working-class small-town life to wealthier, more culturally and racially diverse people who have purchased the most desirable homes in the area. As Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy writes in her article Shrinking Economies, Growing Global Markets for Land:” There is a de facto redefinition of “the economy” when sharp contractions are gradually lost to standard measures. The unemployed who lose everything: jobs, homes, medical insurance — easily fall off the edge of what is defined as “the economy” and counted as such. So do small shops and factory owners who lose everything and commit suicide. And so do the growing numbers of well-educated students and professionals who emigrate and leave Europe altogether. These trends redefine the space of the economy. They make it smaller and expel a good share of the unemployed and the poor from standard measures. Such a redefinition makes “the economy” presentable, so to speak, allowing it to show slight growth in its measure of GDP per capita. The reality at ground level is more akin to a kind of economic version of ethnic cleansing in which elements considered troublesome are dealt with by simply eliminating them.” (Sassen 2014, 23) Sassen is referring to austerity measures the European Union put upon Greece and Spain in her article but increasingly, this could easily be describing the United States.
The Pandemic Urban Flight Effect
2020 was not just the year of a contentious election; it was also a year of unprecedented change. The global Covid-19 pandemic and the stay-at-home orders allowed many people to work from home. Suddenly an apartment in the city became an uncomfortable cell and would be home buyers, fueled by low-interest rates flocked to small, rural, and tourist towns like Petaluma, Sebastopol, Lake Tahoe, and Truckee.
“The Town of Truckee remains the largest incorporated municipality in Nevada County, with 16,729 residents — an increase of 549 (3.4%) over 2010.
Grass Valley grew by 1,156 residents to 14,016 — a 9% increase. (YubaNet 2021)
However, and importantly, official census data population charts do not account for people who primarily reside elsewhere and have the Lake Tahoe area as their vacation or second home residence.
Figure 2. Nevada County Population by Year (“California Population 2021 (Demographics, Maps, Graphs)” 2019)
While this influx of new people from the city was happening, another change was brewing in the area. One of the newcomers, San Francisco transplant Racheal Howard penned an article in the San Francisco Chronicle describing her experience of moving to Nevada City. She describes somewhat ominously: “Since President Donald Trump’s election — and, truthfully, long before it — this soft civil war has played out on the opinion pages of the Union, our local newspaper, and on Facebook groups for locals, where neighbors insult each other in mile-long threads. Because of this, there has been a temptation to imagine our local conflict as merely virtual. But I wonder, as we hurtle toward the election, and as the rocks thrown through windows become shatteringly real if that perception is a serious mistake.” (Howard 2020)
Politics played out in the leafy streets with understated hostility. Homes with lawn signs with the democratic candidate, Joe Biden, would often find their lawn signs ripped apart or stolen in the middle of the night. Polarization of the racially homogenous but politically and culturally diverse population started to happen. Handbill signs advertising meet-up groups for anti-government, pro-firearm, disaster prep groups like Mamalitia began to appear on the Community Bulletin Board of the local Co-Ops. This division is left to fester and grow unabated as we approach the start of the new election cycle it is likely tensions will only increase.
With the newcomers, the demand for workers increased, gardeners, handymen, painters, plumbers were in high demand, and most restaurants, cafes, stores, and bars had “help wanted” signs hanging perpetually on their windows. Prices for restaurant food, gas, and groceries in rural and suburban areas are rival those in the cities.
Rentals are few and far between. Rent for a one-bedroom apartment averages $1800.00 in Nevada, Sonoma, Placer, and Mendocino counties and much of the housing stock is owned by people who do not live full-time in the town. In a search on Craigslist and Zillow, eight rental properties were available within a 30-mile radius of the area, and none in the walkable and transit-accessible downtown.
“A lot of my friends who work in the hotel live in Reno or come over from Sacramento or Oakland and crash out with friends and go home on the weekends,” confessed Robert (named changed to protect his identity), a bartender in his mid-twenties I spoke with at an upscale restaurant. “I have had to move three times in the last five years, everyone is selling their rentals, and we don’t have rent control here. So, I have to move. It’s hard with two kids. I need to keep them in their school,” complained Stacey, a mid-thirties woman who works at a local non-profit as an administrator.
Figure 3. Average Home Prices California, RedFin
Homebuyers face rising prices. The average home prices and the increase year over year confirm concerns. A home that would previously fetch 350,000 and take months to sell will now get multiple bids and sell at half a million and up. By 2021, listings for homes for $1 — $1.5 million were common.
In the words of resident Scott (named changed to protect his identity), who has lived in the area for fifteen years, “Yes, I could sell my house for twice as much as I paid for it, but where would I go? Where would I be able to afford to buy a house in California?”.
From the vantage point of a person who works in a blue-collar or service industry job, the person who works from home in a white-collar professional or technical job, who occasionally steps out of their home office to partake in a $4.00 cup of drip coffee would be seen as having the privilege and seen as a threat.
“ The practical politics flowing from a theoretical acceptance of intersectionality’s supposed explanatory power amounts to the demand that we develop self-awareness and “check our privilege”. Privilege theory, defined by Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad in this journal as “the idea that oppression works through a series of unearned advantages enjoyed by those who do not suffer a particular oppression”, has seriously individualizing and divisive consequences.* It undermines the drive to solidarity which is the key to building political movements that can challenge the bosses or capitalism itself.” (Miles 2016)
The new precariat
I grew up in a two-story, 2,235 square foot home in the hills near Berkeley. My parents purchased their home in the late 1970s for $125,000 (Approximately $478,560.61 today). It was, at the time, a very expensive home even for the Bay Area. My parents sold that home in 1990 for $310,000m which at the time was a huge increase in value. Two years ago, that same home sold for $2.1 Million.
In 2021 with a household income well over the state average and a dual-income household, I can not afford to purchase a home that is equivalent to the house I grew up in. I am not the only person in my generation who is in this situation. Housing prices in major cities have long been impossibly unaffordable to the average blue-collar worker. Homeownership is now of reach even for those with well-paying white-collar professional and technical jobs.
As more and more blue-collar, administrative, health care, transportation, service jobs, and even white-collar and technical jobs are met with automated technology, more and more will find themselves as the new precariat.
Real estate has become a commodity, and worldwide, we see people moving further and further away from urban metros seeking the possibility of owning a home and a less stressful way of life. But this dream comes at a price. The price is that a police officer, a teacher, someone who works in a cafe or owns a plumbing business can no longer afford to live in the exurb and rural towns that were the refuge for those left behind in the new economy.
As long as real estate continues to be commodified, expulsions of people from urban metro areas to areas further from the city will continue and cultural adjustments, as challenging as they are will continue.
Inequalities such as a perception of housing or job precarity, affect a complex system that can create the conditions for other groups to be used as a scapegoat.
The economic status one finds themselves at any given time is precarious. And it does not automatically afford one lifelong privilege. It only affords one the possibility of engaging in the illusion of privilege by denigrating others who are different. Who is privileged in any given situation might be malleable depending on the context and socio-economic conditions that surround it. Income inequality and disparity is an issue that not only creates feelings of stress and precarity but also explodes into violence and scapegoating.
As Patricia Hill Collins writes in Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas: “By now, a general consensus exists about intersectionality’s general contours. The term intersectionality references the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities.” (Hill Collins 2015, 2)
As long as systems of real power benefit by pitting the precariat against the precariat, we will be unable to get to the root cause of the suffering.
Jessica Cassell asserts, in the article Marxism Vs. Intersectionality, “From a Marxist standpoint, no one form of oppression can be understood or overcome in isolation, and the struggle against oppression and exploitation must draw in and include all layers of the oppressed. Marxists also firmly oppose discriminatory attitudes and behaviors and argue that these only serve to divide us, preventing the unity of the working class required to achieve emancipation.” (Cassell 2017)
We need to be able to speak frankly about class, wealth, and the role affordable housing has in driving a feeling of precarity.
The present and future
As we emerge into a new phase of the global pandemic and end the first year of a Democratic administration in power, we are still processing the massive change that occurred. The possibility of remote workers returning to the office is uncertain. “A recent analysis from the University of Chicago suggests that these office exiles will continue to work from home. Researchers estimate that 20 percent of post-pandemic workdays will happen at home, compared with 5 percent before the virus.” (Marshall 2021)
The future of remote work is still unknown, and what that continued effect will be on these zoom towns in the future.
Conclusion
It is December 2021. My “zoom town” is adorned with elaborate Christmas decorations, and delicate white lights illuminate the snow-covered rooftops. There are placards in the store windows with information about the Chinatown district of the town that was destroyed during a fire in the early 1900s. A new gallery has opened in town run by the local Tribal Council, featuring artwork from indigenous artists. A new mural was painted in the historic theater on the main street in town. It is a beautiful homage to the natural beauty of the region, featuring flora and fauna and painted in beautiful rich colors inspired by the minerals found in the hills and streams in the area. Abstract symbols and imagery celebrate the presence of the indigenous people, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the Cornish, and the Irish who founded the current incarnation of this beautiful place. There is a drag show at the local bar later today. A man plays didgeridoo on a corner for a group of delighted children as their father and mother look on. The Veterans of Foreign War Auxiliary are spooning out hot mulled wine to an Asian couple and sharing a laugh. A young woman and her wife sell delicious smelling goat milk bath products made from their farm.
Post pandemic shut down, the recent newcomers have started to emerge from their homes and take their seats next to the longer-term residents in the local coffee shops. They will join the rotary club and take Kundalini hot yoga classes with people who have lived in the town for their entire lives. We are all here for our own reasons, negotiating the changes and trying to understand one another. As we face an uncertain future the hope is that we will stop focusing on what is different about us and recognize we are all part of a complex system. We need to see what we have in common to find a way to come together to become something new. To become something new and beautiful.
References
Cassell, Jessica. 2017. “Marxism vs. Intersectionality.” Marxist.ca. https://www.marxist.ca/article/marxism-vs-intersectionality.
Farrell, Justin. 2021. Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West. N.p.: Princeton University Press.
Florida, Richard, and Adam Ozimek. 2021. “How Remote Work Is Reshaping America’s Urban Geography — — Smaller cities and communities are turning into ‘Zoom towns’ and competing with coastal hubs as workers move to find more space and lower costs.” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2021. https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/review-how-remote-work-is-reshaping-americas/docview/2497460464/se-2?accountid=30962.
Hill Collins, Patricial. 2015. “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.” The Annual Review of Sociology, no. 41, 1–20. 10.1146/annurev-soc-073014–112142.
Howard, Rachel. 2020. “In Nevada City, politics and protests stoke a brewing civil war.” San Francisco Chronicle. https://www.sfchronicle.com/culture/article/In-Nevada-City-politics-and-protests-stoke-a-15609974.php.
Levin, Matt. 2021. “California “Zoom town” grapples with influx of remote workers.” Marketplace.org. https://www.marketplace.org/2021/04/13/california-zoom-town-grapples-with-influx-of-remote-workers/.
Lewis, Carol. 2013. “The rise of the DFL — that’s people moving Down from London.” The Times, October 11, 2013. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-rise-of-the-dfl-thats-people-moving-down-from-london-b8bbfsxpn2j.
Marshall, Aarian. 2021. “The WFH Exodus Creates an Opportunity for Small Cities.” WIRED, April 29, 2021. https://www.wired.com/story/wfh-exodus-creates-opportunity-small-cities/.
Metzl, Jonathan M. 2020. Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland. N.p.: Basic Books.
Miles, Laura. 2016. “Can we combine intersectionality with Marxism? • International Socialism.” International Socialism. http://isj.org.uk/can-we-combine-intersectionality-with-marxism/.
“Nevada County, California Population 2021 (Demographics, Maps, Graphs).” 2019. World Population Review. https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/nevada-city-ca-population.
Sassen, Saskia. 2014. “Shrinking Economies, Growing Global Markets for Land.” The Global South 8, no. 2 (Fall): 16–33.
