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New research shows remote workers have been flocking to Vermont during the Covid-19 pandemic, potentially easing some of the state’s demographic struggles. What’s less clear is whether those workers will stay when the crisis is over.
Richard Watts, who led a University of Vermont survey of new remote workers, said the global shift toward teleworking has given more potential transplants the opportunity to move. Vermont’s low Covid-19 infection rates help, he said, but the top reason people cited for moving was “the Vermont ethic”: a focus on the environment, health and the outdoors.
Will these workers remain after the pandemic subsides? The survey, conducted by UVM’s Center for Research on Vermont and the Vermont Futures Project, found that about a third of respondents said yes, a third planned to leave, and a third weren’t sure. Watts said that leaves an opportunity for policymakers to take steps to keep at least a portion of those workers in the state.
**Podcast transcript**
This week: New research shows remote workers have been flocking to Vermont during the Covid-19 pandemic, potentially easing some of the state’s demographic struggles. What’s less clear is whether those workers will stay when the crisis is over.
Our reporter Anne Wallace Allen has been tracking the state’s efforts to recruit newcomers.
Anne, why is Vermont’s population, Vermont’s demographics — why have these been such major issues that we’ve kept hearing policymakers refer back to over and over again in the past several years?
Anne Wallace Allen: One of the biggest and most pragmatic reasons is that our tax base needs to grow in order for the state to pay for all of the programs in place now, and if it doesn’t, the state is going to have to start cutting its budget. The state needs people who are working and who are paying taxes.
And there’s this big question of: How do we get those people here?
Anne Wallace Allen: Right.
[News broadcast]: And if you’re looking for a fresh start, Vermont will soon pay people to move there and — get this — work remotely.
[News broadcast]: Vermont, obviously one of the most beautiful states in the country, a great place to vacation in the summer and winter. But as you mentioned, it has an ageing workforce, one of the slowest growing populations in the country…
[News broadcast]: Vermont: now inviting millennials from across the nation.
Anne Wallace Allen: Just a couple years ago, long before anybody dreamed of this pandemic, it was some progressive lawmakers and others who came up with this idea to pay people to move to Vermont to work remotely, which took off and got the state a lot of attention, and has also yielded some new arrivals.
[News broadcast]: A remote worker grant program offers out of state workers who do their jobs remotely up to $10,000 to relocate to Vermont.
[News broadcast]: State officials hope that the money and Vermont’s high quality of life will lure out of state workers to trade their office for a Vermont home office or maybe some sort of a coworking space…
Anne Wallace Allen: But that numbers in the low hundreds, and didn’t really have a significant impact. Nothing like what real estate agents are reporting now with home sales to people from outside the state. Those people are telling me that they truly have not seen this much traffic, and particularly this much traffic from urban areas, ever in their careers.
Wow. So that’s just people kind of cruising their websites seeing what’s available. Does that translate into home sales?
Anne Wallace Allen: It does. And you know, Vermont has a shortage of homes to begin with. So it’s not like a decent, reasonably priced home was out on the market for a long time before. But now, these same real estate agents are telling me that they’re getting instant offers. They’re getting people buying homes without getting a chance to view them in person. That homes are being snapped up in the course of a single day. And again, their data is showing them that this is different from the last few years, especially in Chittenden County.
So we know there’s a bump here. We don’t know exactly how big it is. What do we know about these people who are coming in?
Anne Wallace Allen: So the Center for Research on Vermont, which is part of the University of Vermont, decided to have a look at, as much as they could, to find out a little bit of the reality behind all the reports they were hearing of people moving to Vermont to escape from Covid. So they advertised on social media and through many different means to find people who had recently moved to Vermont. And they surveyed this self selected group and said, Who are you? Where do you work, how old are you? And, you know, why did you move here?
Back in May, the Center for Research on Vermont did a study on teleworking, that found Vermonters who had started working from home largely felt pretty good about it.
Richard Watts: So I got really interested in that. And then I started hearing about people who are here, what we call “sheltering in place.”
This is Richard Watts, who led both of these studies.
Richard Watts: So they’ve come to Vermont during the pandemic because they feel it’s a safe place. They may have a family connection. They may have had some vacation type thing they’ve done. They may even own a second home here. And all around me, I started hearing stories about that. And then my neighbor’s son, who has a job in a high tech company in San Francisco, moved back home for three months. And then down the road, another one of these kind of 20 somethings came back home — with their job. And it just made me think, is this something that’s going on all around us? And it is.
So this does seem to be a broader trend. How do you go about quantifying that?
Richard Watts: We built a survey instrument, and then partnered with the Vermont Futures Project, who has been looking into how Vermont can go forward in a healthy way by attracting the new wave of people that we need. We were able to distribute the survey broadly and got into some social media channels. And about, oh, 233 responses of people who are here because of the pandemic. And then we asked them, “So now that you’re here in Vermont, what would it take for you to stay? And also, why did you come to Vermont? And what are the things Vermont might do to keep you here?”
Got it. So this survey isn’t going to tell us how many people have come as a result of this. But of the subset of people who you were able to connect with, it gives us a glimpse at certain trends about what their motivations are.
Richard Watts: Exactly.
I pointed out to Richard that these subjects sounded to me just like the people the state had been trying to attract with the remote worker program.
It’s interesting that this is that exact situation. And it seems to be happening without any outside incentives.
Richard Watts: Yeah, well, one enormous outside incentive, and that is this pandemic that’s raging through the country. And Vermont’s bipartisan leadership is just excelling in suppressing the pandemic. I’ve had people just all over the country reaching out to try and figure out how they can come to Vermont or how they can stay in Vermont.
Richard said it’s not exactly that Vermont has low infection rates for COVID-19, although it does. It’s more that the recent rise of remote work has let people move pretty much wherever they want.
Richard Watts: Probably the number one reason that people are here is the Vermont ethic, this environment, this place that they feel safe and healthy. One of these respondents wrote, “As soon as the pandemic hit, I sold my house in New York City and moved to Vermont.”
Hmm. That’s a really interesting example because it’s related to the pandemic, but also related to factors beyond the pandemic — just kind of Vermont’s general appeal. It seems like there’s an element of both here.
Richard Watts: After 9/11, there was some conversation that there would be a wave of immigration into into rural places, safer places. And that didn’t happen. Actually, the reverse has happened: cities have grown. But there’s something different here, because it’s not a one off. It’s an ongoing thing. And we’ve seen now, as Vermont has continued to do well in suppressing the virus, other places aren’t. And so people who might have thought that they would be here for a month are now really starting to think about, you know, “maybe this is where I should build my forever home.” And that’s really interesting.
The other thing about these people in the survey, Mike, that’s interesting is that most of them have jobs, and their jobs continue. But they are now doing them remotely from Vermont. And there are just a whole range of titles: from the software engineers that you would expect, to attorneys, to graphic designers, to researchers, to traders, to fund managers to salespeople. All of these are jobs that you didn’t used to think could be done remotely. But now, because of the pandemic, we’re realizing you actually can do them remotely.
Anne Wallace Allen: They are the most coveted demographic for Vermont, which has one of the oldest populations in the country. They’re young: a great number of them are under 35 years old, and the mass, I think it’s 60 or 70% of them, are under 50 years old in total. So these are people who are still working. They’re not coming here to retire. They have kids in the schools. They are going to inject some life into the economy, hopefully, which will help other people and might help wages go up.
Richard Watts: It’s very significant, because Vermont has a stable population, and we have a limited amount of jobs that are here. So if you come with your hundred thousand dollar job to Vermont, it’s a huge investment and infusion into the economy.
From the survey, we’re taking some of these folks and spending more time with some of them just to understand more why they’re here and what it might take to keep them here. And so I’ll tell you about one couple in Vershire, Vermont. They are international consultants, they both do international work. When the pandemic hit, they moved to this house in Vershire, and now they’re going to raise their family there. And they love the idea of being able to say that they’re from Vermont. Something about Vermont values for them is really powerful. So they’re here. When things go back to more normal, they’ll continue to do their work, but they’re always going to now have Vermont as a place.
So that’s an example of somebody who is planning on staying — they’re really attached to the idea of being here. I wonder more broadly with the people you surveyed, is there a sense of: If these people came for reasons related to the pandemic, what does that mean for when the pandemic ends? Do we know?
Richard Watts: Well, we did ask kind of the top level question, “how likely are you to stay here in Vermont?” About a third — which is to me quite a lot — said that they were very likely to stay. About a third were uncertain, and a third wrote, no.
The “no”s are things that Vermont’s never going to do anything about: their job is going to reopen, they have to be there. They like living in a city or near the ocean or near their family or whatever. But a third said that they were likely to stay, and a third were uncertain. And that’s a pretty big number.
I asked Anne, who’s been covering Vermont’s workforce issues for years, whether she thought this represented a major shift. She said yes and no.
Anne Wallace Allen: This is different. People really can work here, which is something that Vermont has never really been able to offer: good jobs that pay well for well educated professionals. There just aren’t a lot of those in Vermont. And this is one way for people to get away from that now, that we didn’t have before. So it’s anyone’s guess. But I would say that the finding that a third of the people said they plan to stay here, a third of the people aren’t sure, and a third say that they’re not going to stay here, shows us that it’s probably not going to be a tidal wave of change. Although, like with everything Covid-related, we really don’t know.
I guess they have to go through a winter here. That will be telling.
[Laughs] Fair point. The question then becomes, if policymakers do want to keep those people here, what can they do? Is there any hint about what might give those people an extra nudge to stick around?
Anne Wallace Allen: That’s such a great question. I mean, it’s funny, because we always hear that broadband is one of the things that’s keeping people away, and we all know from our personal experience that phone coverage and wifi is spotty in Vermont. However, the people I’ve talked to have said that was not an issue for them. I don’t know if they can pay to get it out to their house, or they’re just in places where they have it. But larger issues are things like the weather, shopping — things Vermont obviously is not going to do anything, can’t do anything about. They have very individual concerns about whether they’re going to be able to find the right childcare.
So it’s a lot of practical things that we all face in Vermont: there’s not a lot of services and there isn’t the critical mass of population to justify those services, and those kind of things. It seems as though newcomers from the larger urban areas they can tolerate for a while, but they’re not sure if they want that to be part of their lives.
Richard Watts: Wifi, internet, broadband — when we talk about the challenges that comes up all the time. And yet a big chunk of these people actually said that their broadband internet service is good. So overlaying where these people want to live with where the broadband, internet, wifi infrastructure is, and thinking about the other goals Vermont has, like growing or supporting our small communities — clearly, it would be better from a public policy point of view if new people in Vermont live more in our villages and downtowns. So what is it about our villages and downtowns that we can do to support those? To make them vibrant, attractive, exciting places? If we have 10,000 new people who come to Vermont, and they all live off in big homes in rural areas, it doesn’t really satisfy other goals that we have for the state.
So I am really interested in those two public policy goals: attracting new people to live here, but also supporting our villages and downtowns.
It raises something else that’s interesting, too, which is that — I feel like probably these people are moving to places where they know they can get decent broadband or cell phone service or whatever they need to do their jobs. I feel like often the policy conversation around broadband revolves around leveling the playing field for people who are already here, and are subject to the worst of the digital divide.
I was thinking about this too, as you were ticking off the jobs that a lot of these incoming people have, like software developers, lawyers, graphic designers — I think we know now that the pandemic has hit hardest people in the service industry, people who don’t really have that kind of mobility, who aren’t able to work from home. I wonder how those discrepancies in these different categories of jobs affect this conversation. It seems like there’s so much focus here on these high earning people with a lot of mobility. Where does all this leave the service workers and people who are kind of on the other end of the economic spectrum?
Richard Watts: I think that’s exactly right, Mike. And we really have to have all these different public policy goals in mind. And in this case, we are potentially attracting high wage earners who could work anywhere, but we want them to work in Vermont, and that will raise the whole economy. But it doesn’t do anything to address what you said, about people who don’t have the option of teleworking, and what about people who are on the lower end of the wage scale. All those things, we have to think about. In this one case, attracting these higher wage earners to Vermont is good for the overall state, but it can’t be the only thing we do.
So these survey respondents only represent one type of potential newcomer, one piece of the population puzzle. But Anne said there’s another aspect of this conversation where COVID-19 definitely isn’t helping.
Anne Wallace Allen: After I wrote that story, I heard from people, as I sometimes do when I write about efforts to attract new Vermonters, saying that we don’t need new Vermonters. And that they are spoiling the forests and the fields and the farms with their new homes, and they’re crowding the roads, and Vermont is fine the way it is.
I think that plays into a larger dynamic that is going on, that always goes on in Vermont. A joke in Vermont and in every U.S. state is, you know, we don’t want people from outside, we love our identity, and vacationers, please come and spend your money and go home. And that’s definitely on display here.
I saw a car with Florida plates in Montpelier the other day that had a cardboard sign taped to it saying, “this is a rental. We’re really from Vermont.” People do tie their identities closely to being from Vermont, and they do feel threatened when outsiders come in. I think for our entire species, this is just something that happens with all of us. And particularly so when there’s a pandemic, and the outsiders might be carrying disease. That’s a dynamic in this too.
Richard Watts: I think one internal debate a little bit in Vermont, where there’s some concern about people from away bringing Covid to Vermont. And so in all of this conversation, we have to think about how we make sure that the reasons that people are coming to Vermont remain the reasons that Vermont is. There’s a little bit of a dance here: we want new people,. but we want to keep Vermont this beautiful, safe place that it is.
Thanks for your time, Richard.
Richard Watts: Thanks, Mike.
