People are still working from home post-pandemic
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The trend of working at home has continued in a post-pandemic world.
Driving the news: 15.5% of Cleveland metro area workers are working from home as of 2022, down slightly compared to 16.5% in 2021, per new census figures released last month.
The big picture: Workers in America's biggest, most competitive cities aren't giving up the flexibility and savings — in both time and gas money — of working from home, Axios' Sam Baker and Simran Parwani report.
Zoom out: Overall, 15% of the U.S. worked from home last year — but the numbers are much higher on both the East and West coasts, and in other large metro areas.
- Boulder, Colorado, had the highest share of remote workers of any metro area last year, at 32%. Denver wasn't far behind.
- San Francisco and San Jose were both in the top 10. Their main rival for tech jobs — Austin, Texas — ranked higher than both.
- Just over 25% of the Washington, D.C., metro area workforce is remote — the sixth-highest rate of any city, and higher than any state.
The other side: Mississippi has the lowest share of remote workers in the U.S., at just 5.5%, and the Southeast generally is well below the national average.
The intrigue: Every state has more remote workers now than it did in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
- And even after two years, the trend line is barely moving. Nationwide, the share of people working from home declined by less than 3 percentage points between 2021 and 2022, according to the census figures.
Zoom in: Hybrid work arrangements, paired with economic uncertainty and year-over-year decreases in office jobs, have led to a rise in office vacancies in Cleveland.
- The office vacancy rate in the metro area increased slightly from 2023's first quarter to the second, according to a report on Cleveland's office market from real estate company Newmark.
What we're watching: The work-from-home revolution is most entrenched in big cities with large concentrations of office buildings, and downtown economies that survived because of those office buildings being full.
- Any number of large employers, from big banks in New York all the way up to the federal government, have tried to get their employees back to the office. For the most part, they haven't been very successful.