I just published an update to my Covid Demographics Explorer using the latest American Community Survey data, and wanted to share it here along with some of the findings.
The national picture is striking: remote work more than tripled between 2019 and 2021, peaking at nearly 28 million people. Since then it’s edged down each year - but it’s still roughly 2.5x the pre-Covid baseline, sitting around 22 million today.
The local data is where it gets really interesting. The location with the single largest increase between 2019 and 2021 was Sunnyvale, CA - remote workers there grew almost 11x in two years (from ~3,200 to ~38,000). Tech companies were among the fastest to go remote, and Sunnyvale is in the heart of Silicon Valley, which explains the outlier status.
Then the return-to-office wave hit. For 2021–2024, Sunnyvale also saw the largest decline in the entire dataset: --67%. The next two biggest drops were also in Silicon Valley: Fremont (–61%) and Santa Clara County (–56%). Meanwhile the places that gained remote workers in this period tend to be warm-weather, high-amenity spots: Marion County FL (+69%), Collier County FL (+65%), Maui HI (+57%).
What the app lets you do:
- View the remote work trend over time for any state, county, or city (65k+ population)
- Compare any two years to see which locations changed most
- Explore related Census variables: population, median household income, median rent, public assistance
Full writeup with charts here | App
Also, I’ll be at Dev Day in June. If any Streamlit folks will be there, I’d love to say hello.