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The remote workers have left, but the housing havoc they created remains

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Economics


THE REMOTE WORKERS HAVE LEFT, BUT THE HOUSING HAVOC THEY CREATED REMAINS

Small and midsize rural communities had some of the biggest increases in home
prices in the first two years of the pandemic, driven by out-of-town buyers.

The historic downtown shops in Whitefish, Mont., in 2018.George Rose / Getty
Images file
Link copied
Feb. 6, 2023, 12:00 PM UTC
By Shannon Pettypiece

WASHINGTON — The throngs of remote workers who flocked to rural communities
throughout the pandemic have begun to thin as employers push a return to
offices. But for many of the towns remote workers descended on, the housing
crisis they fueled has remained. 

“The people can’t find housing, and I’m not talking about affordable housing.
I’m saying they can’t find housing at all,” said Barbara Bruno, the mayor of
Springdale, Utah. “Even if they can afford to buy something, there’s nothing to
buy. It’s really that dire.”




Small and midsize rural communities saw home prices surge during the first two
years of the pandemic as workers with the newfound ability to do their jobs from
anywhere relocated outside of city centers for more space and easy access to
outdoor activities.

But that city-to-country migration has shown signs of reversing over the past
year. Home buyers have been shopping for places closer to large metro areas,
with cities like Washington and Los Angeles seeing population gains again in
2022. The shift comes as a growing number of employers are requiring workers to
come back into the office — for the first time since the start of the pandemic,
more than half of workers in major metro areas went into the office at least
once from Jan. 18 to 25, according to data from the building security firm
Kastle Systems.

“They need to be back for their work, they have to go back to their office, so
we see that the big city centers are reviving as more people are going back,”
said Nadia Evangelou, senior economist at the National Association of Realtors. 

People’s desire to get out into nature also appears to have waned, with visits
to popular national parks like Yellowstone and Zion down from their pandemic
highs last year, RV demand slowing, and several popular ski resorts, like Vail
in Colorado, having fewer visitors.



All that should mean some relief for the housing markets in popular rural
communities where home prices ballooned over the past two years from a burst of
out-of-town buyers, pricing local workers out of the market. But residents and
officials in the affected communities say that while the ranks of remote workers
have ebbed, they have seen no relief from the massive housing shortages they
spurred. 

In the 500-person town of Springdale, Utah, near Zion National Park, residents
and officials have been increasingly struggling to find even basic housing to
support the local workforce, leaving businesses and the national park
chronically understaffed with few signs of the situation improving, said Mayor
Bruno. 


WHAT ARE THE TRENDS IN THE 2023 HOUSING MARKET?

Jan. 26, 202304:32


Prior to the pandemic, Springdale wasn’t known as a hotspot for out-of-towners
seeking second homes or investors looking for rental income. But since the start
of the pandemic, average home prices there have increased almost 60% in under
three years to more than $575,000, according to the Zillow's home value index,
which uses a range of data to determine average home values. That rise has been
driven by out-of-staters buying second homes, investors and the conversion of
long-term rentals to Airbnbs and other types of short-term rentals, said Bruno. 

That has left local businesses, which cater to millions of visitors who pass
through the town each year on their way to Zion, struggling to hire everyone
from hourly workers to skilled professionals needed to support the community.
Bruno said she has heard of renters repeatedly losing their lease because the
property is being converted into a short-term rental, workers commuting more
than 100 miles round-trip for hourly jobs, and others living in RVs, campsites
or shipping containers.



Affordable housing has been an issue for decades in rural destination towns,
like Aspen, Colorado, and Jackson, Wyoming, popular spots for wealthy visitors
and dependent on large numbers of low-wage workers to support the tourism
industry. 



But the large numbers of people moving from high-cost, large cities to smaller
communities greatly exacerbated those housing shortages and spread the problem
to new communities with less experience dealing with affordable housing and
fewer resources to respond, said Danya Rumore, a professor at the University of
Utah who founded the Gateway and Natural Amenity Region Initiative. 

“The pandemic really hit the gas pedal on what was already happening,” said
Rumore. “The pandemic basically expedited this trend by 15 years. So 15 years of
a trend that we thought would happen was just compressed it into one.”


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In Moab, Utah, residents are having similar issues as their desert community has
become a new hot destination for second-home buyers, said Kaitlin Myers,
executive director of the Moab Area Community Land Trust.  



Even with demand seeming to ease and the housing market cooling, developers
continue to build housing that will be unaffordable for most local residents,
said Myers. She said several mobile home parks, which were one of the last
bastions of affordable housing in the community, were bought in 2021 by
developers who plan to put higher-end housing in its place.

“Our housing prices were lower than a lot of other resort communities, so we had
a surge in second homes, and for the first time we were seeing our community go
to that next level of resort community,” said Myers, who says she’s begun to
notice more homes sitting dark and empty. 

There are few nearby alternatives for the town’s workforce, with the closest
city more than an hour and a half away. While in the past, lower-wage workers
struggled to find housing, the pandemic-triggered surge in home prices means
even middle-income professionals, like teachers, city officials and health care
workers, have been priced out, Myers said. 

“In 2018, 2019, you could be a working-class family and we still had housing
options that were $300,000 to $400,000, which is manageable. But now we just
don’t have options like that in our market anymore,” Myers said. “We definitely
still need housing for housekeepers and restaurant workers and river guides, but
for the most part, we have a lot of businesses that are starting to figure out
housing for them. Our bigger issue is making sure that we have housing for
teachers, nurses and firefighters and our essential workforce that we need to
run the community.”



In Whitefish, Montana, home to a ski resort and near Glacier National Park, the
population grew by nearly 10% in 2021, to 8,500 people, and home prices doubled
to nearly $1 million from just over $450,000 at the start of the pandemic,
according to Zillow data. 

When Daniel Sidder started searching for a home in Whitefish last fall after
taking a job there as the executive director of the advocacy group Housing
Whitefish, he said he was unable to find a place that would lease to his family
for more than nine months a year because so many properties had been converted
to vacation homes, with owners wanting to use the house in the summer or rent it
for more to summer tourists.

“For a long time Whitefish has been a pretty affordable place where people could
come and work seasonal jobs and maintain a pretty decent quality of life and
continue to grow their careers over time,” Sidder said. “It is just getting
harder and harder for those people that are seeking those opportunities to
maintain that over the long term.”

Real estate economists say that the rural areas that saw the biggest pandemic
booms will likely see outsize declines in prices, compared to the housing market
nationally.



But given the limited supply of housing and the unwillingness of homeowners with
low mortgage interest rates to sell, prices aren’t expected to return to their
pre-pandemic levels, said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist for the real estate
data firm Bright MLS.

“There’s just such an imbalance between how much housing is needed and how much
housing is available, and that’s not going to change in the near term at all,”
Sturtevant said. “That’s going to still be challenging.”


Shannon Pettypiece

Shannon Pettypiece is senior policy reporter for NBC News digital.



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