MUCH HAS BEEN made of the Covid-era exodus to Lake Tahoe, Martha's Vineyard, or Aspen. White-collar workers, freed of the constraints of the office, decamped for more skiing- and hiking-friendly climates-the pandemic's Zoom Towns. The locals were annoyed. The labor market was reordered. American life changed irrevocably. Or so the story goes. But more recent data suggests that Zoom Town USA looks a lot more like Alameda County, California, across the bay from San Francisco. Eighteen percent of those who moved out of San Francisco in 2020 landed there, just a subway, bus, or ferry ride away. Ditto for smaller cities surrounding Boston: Natick, Worcester, and Weymouth. According to US Postal Service data crunched by the real estate firm CBRE, those who picked up stakes during the pandemic were less likely to flee to the hinterlands than to hop over to less-dense neighboring cities. A CityLab analysis found that 84 percent of the people who abandoned the country's 50 largest cities between March 2020 and February 2021 stayed within the same metro area.
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