The 5 Cities Ready to Build With Remote Workers in Mind
The co-living company Common has announced the cities vying to host the company’s “Remote Work Hub,” aimed at snaring digital nomads fleeing more expensive markets.
Developers in Bentonville, Arkansas, are eager to help boost the small city’s appeal to remote workers.
Photographer: Terra Fondriest/Bloomberg
In August, the co-living company Common released a request for proposals from U.S. cities that wanted to host a “Remote Work Hub” — a kind of office-plus-apartment complex aimed at young digital nomads. This week the company announced five winners of this quasi-competition, who will now move on to the workshop phase: Developers in New Orleans; Bentonville, Arkansas; Ogden, Utah; Rocky Mount, North Carolina; and Rochester, New York. Their prize is design expertise and a marketing boost from the Common team.
Common, a six-year old company that manages shared living spaces in nine U.S. cities, is betting long on remote work, trusting that the employment style, which has been growing in popularity for years, will survive, and that the cities poised to rebound economically will do so by absorbing the perpetual-WFH crowd. The plan, the company said, predated the coronavirus pandemic, and the live-work facilities themselves wouldn’t break ground until Covid-19 recedes.