Brookings: US tech jobs remain concentrated in coastal hubs but 36 other cities, including Philadelphia, had stronger tech job growth than before the pandemic
Caitlin Harrington / Wired : Tweets: @caitharr and @louisgray Tweets: Caitlin Harrington / @caitharr : New @BrookingsInst data finds that tech workers didn't flee tech hubs en masse during the pandemic. They did disperse slightly though, especially to vacation towns like Barnstable, MA https://www.wired.com/... Louis Gray / @louisgray : “Has the so-called remote work revolution spawned a grand dispersal of tech jobs? Not really.” The Great Tech Hub Exodus Didn't Quite Happen https://www.wired.com/... /by @caitharr for @wired
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'great tech exodus' thesis has been eroding for two years. Job-posting data already showed openings stayed concentrated in tech hubs during the pandemic, a 2021 report found 96.9% of Bay Area startups never left the region, and displaced workers began trickling back as Twitter reopened its SF HQ and Google planned expansion there.
Brookings' new data closes the loop: rather than a mass dispersal, it finds modest spread — 36 cities including Philadelphia grew tech jobs faster than before the pandemic, plus leakage into vacation towns like Barnstable, MA — while coastal-hub concentration itself held firm.
First-order effects
- Philadelphia and the other 34-35 rising metros gain a measurable claim on tech employment growth, strengthening their pitches to employers and relocating workers even as the biggest hubs keep their share.
- Hub-based employers like Twitter and Google get data backing their return-to-office and local expansion bets — the workforce they assumed would stay put largely did.
Second-order effects
- Second-tier cities must now compete on more than remote-work availability, since posting data shows hub employers were always less likely to offer it — pushing them toward incentives, cost arguments, and local talent pipelines instead.
- Vacation-town destinations like Barnstable face a different problem: small inflows of high-wage tech workers against limited housing stock, a localized affordability squeeze rather than a boom.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US tech geography settles into a durable core-plus-second-tier structure rather than the flat distribution remote-work advocates predicted — echoing Brookings' earlier finding that only ten cities had grown their share of tech jobs since 2010.
- Regional-policy debates shift accordingly: the question becomes how to convert marginal growth in places like Philadelphia into sustained share gains, not how to manage an exodus that the data says never happened.
The trend: Pandemic-era remote work nudged tech jobs outward at the margins while leaving coastal-hub concentration intact, making incremental second-tier growth — not dispersion — the real story.