Can Remote Work Bring a Small Town Back to Life?

I closed my laptop the other evening and kept looking at it for a moment longer than usual.

Almost everything I need for work fits inside it. The code, the meetings, the people I build things with.

In theory, it could be open anywhere.

A kitchen table in a city. A kitchen table in a town of twenty thousand people. A kitchen table in the village where I grew up.

When I wrote about Spain's free houses, I ended up arguing that a village needs an anchor. A job, a school, something that doesn't depend on one family's patience. And I was a little dismissive of remote workers. People who bring their income with them, I wrote, with nothing holding them there but preference.

I've wondered since whether I was too quick.

Because if the job can travel, maybe the anchor can too.

For a while, that was the story everyone wanted to tell.

The offices emptied, people discovered they could work from a spare bedroom, and the spare bedroom didn't have to be in the capital. Small towns would fill up again. Big cities would breathe out. The map would quietly redraw itself.

I believed some version of that. It felt obvious.

And towns are acting as if it's true. At the end of October, a round of reporting on relocation incentives described places paying people cash to move. Cumberland, in Maryland, which has shrunk from more than forty thousand people to under nineteen thousand since its big employers closed, is offering twenty thousand dollars to up to ten newcomers. Half to move, half towards a house. In return, they have to stay five years.

Five years.

The same contract logic as the Spanish villages, just with a bank transfer instead of a set of keys.

When I went looking for evidence on whether any of this actually moves people, I found something more careful than the headlines.

A study of remote work in Great Britain, published this year, separates remote work into kinds, and that separation turns out to matter more than anything else. Using national labour survey data from 2022 and 2025, the researchers found that fully remote work is linked to people moving between regions, and to something that looks like a measurable rural revival. Hybrid work mostly isn't. The more office days a job asks for, the more its workers live exactly where on-site workers have always lived.

Which makes sense, once you say it out loud.

A job that needs you in on Tuesdays still needs you within reach of Tuesday.

And most remote work is the Tuesday kind. The authors point out that where people settle still follows the old map of where wages are highest, and that because hybrid is the most common arrangement, remote work is unlikely to redistribute people or wealth in any big way. Even the coast, the place everyone said they'd move to, hasn't become a more common place to live.

So the revival is real.

It's just small, and it belongs to a fairly narrow group of people.

The part I keep coming back to isn't the money, though. It's what happens after people arrive.

Tulsa, in Oklahoma, has been paying remote workers ten thousand dollars to move there since 2018, and asks them to stay for only a year. You'd expect a lot of people to take the money and leave.

Mostly, they didn't. A 2023 look at the programme found that about three quarters of the people who completed the year were still living there.

And when the people running it describe what they offer, the cash is only the start. There are events, volunteering, a shared place to work, newcomers introduced to other newcomers and to locals before the loneliness has time to settle in.

Structure, again.

The money got people to look at Tulsa. The structure gave them a reason to keep looking.

I wrote in the loneliness piece that belonging comes from repeated, low-effort reasons to see the same people. It's a little strange to watch a city build that on purpose, with a budget and a staff, for strangers who arrived carrying laptops.

Strange, and a little moving.

There's a version of this that worries me, though.

Picture someone who moves to a small town and keeps working for a company in a capital. The salary comes from somewhere else. The colleagues are somewhere else. Eight hours a day, their attention is somewhere else.

A recent Telecompetitor analysis looks at the same problem from the other side. Rural workers who build new skills can take remote jobs with city employers that offer clearer ways up. That's good for them. It also quietly pulls talent away from the businesses around them.

So the town gains a resident.

The local firm loses a hire.

Someone can live in a place for years without ever really working in it. And I notice that the people with the most freedom to choose where they live are often the people least tied to the place they choose.

I'm not judging that. If I'm honest, it's the version I can most easily picture for myself.

But it isn't the same thing as a revival.

So maybe I had it slightly wrong in both directions.

In the village post, I treated remote workers as too provisional to matter. Since then, I'd half started treating remote work as the anchor that post was missing.

Both were too simple.

A remote job seems to solve one kind of anchor. The income. The reason you can afford to be there at all.

It doesn't solve the other kind. The belonging. The reason you'd still be there in the fifth winter, when the contract has run out and nobody is paying you to stay.

Tulsa seems to understand that the second anchor has to be built deliberately. Cumberland, with its five-year clause, seems to be hoping it grows out of the first one on its own.

Maybe it will. I don't know.

The question I'm left with is narrower than the one I started with. Not whether remote work can bring people to a town. Whether a town can give them enough reasons to stop living somewhere else in their heads.

My laptop is still on the table.

It could be open anywhere. That part is true.

But I'm starting to think it matters less where it's open than who's on the other side of the door when I close it.