The pandemic has been hard on everybody, but big cities in the U.S. are just beginning to grapple with loss of tech workers migrating to smaller communities, sometimes to take new jobs where housing costs are lower.
Data from LinkedIn shared with Fierce Electronics shows that the New York City area lost 7% of its tech talent over 18 months from December 2019 through May, leading a list of 50 U.S. cities that saw declines.
Other metro areas hit hardest with more than 5% in tech talent declines include Buffalo (down 6.8%), Dallas-Fort Worth (down 5.6%), Miami-Fort Lauderdale (down 5.3%) and Las Vegas (down 5.2%). Areas with tech talent losses of between 4% and 5% for that period include Los Angeles (down 4.6%), Atlanta (down 4.4%), Oklahoma City (down 4.3%) and New Orleans (down 4.2%).
Traditional tech meccas such as San Francisco and Boston also lost tech talent, but each at less than 1% from December 2019 through May 2021, according to LinkedIn’s analysis of its member profiles.
LinkedIn based its findings on profiles that members write themselves from its 178 million U.S. members focusing on tech and related talent that include jobs in engineering, IT, software development and related fields. LinkedIn identifies more than 3,000 tech skills from machine learning to aircraft design. Membership totals are in the millions for New York City, Dallas, Miami and Las Vegas and in the tens of thousands for Buffalo.
In contrast to the cities that saw a decline, LinkedIn recently reported seven smaller U.S. cities that grew tech talent during the pandemic based on member profiles. The greater Madison, Wisconsin, area came out on top with 2.2% growth in tech talent over the 18-month pandemic period studied, according to LinkedIn’s latest numbers. Other U.S. areas that saw growth included Colorado Springs, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, Pittsburgh, Huntsville, Alabama, Austin, Texas and Tucson.
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In a separate finding, LinkedIn reported that Austin had the highest percentage of tech talent in 2021 of any of the 59 areas it studied, with 10.11%. By comparison, New York had 5% of LinkedIn members in the tech talent field in 2021.
The movement of tech workers away from big cities follows a more general trend for workers in other professions. However, few economists are calling the out-migration pattern a nationwide urban exodus. That’s partly because it is hard to establish when tech workers are moving from a dense city center to a distant suburb which might be barely outside a statistical sampling area for a particular metro area in question. Some moves might be in the same economic region to a locale 100 to 150 miles away.
In April, Bloomberg compared U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Census Bureau data and found areas in the U.S. adjacent to urban centers saw more people moving in than moving out during the pandemic. In one example, New York metro saw 100 people leave the city for every 84 people who moved. Likewise, San Francisco saw a loss while Stockton, California, east of San Francisco, saw a gain with 112 people moving in for every 100 people moving out.
“The phrase or the concept of urban exodus, that really only applies to New York and San Francisco,” said Stephan Whitaker, policy economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, according to Bloomberg.
Behind the data, economists have attributed tech job moves partly to the ability to use of broadband and wireless to connect to work, which is available in communities with less expensive housing. Analysts also noted a surge in vehicle purchases starting in late 2020, as some people moved from urban areas with mass transit to suburbs and smaller communities where owning a car is essential to get around.