I first noticed about 12 years ago how San Diego, both city and suburb, was full of people who worked from home using the Internet. Online sales, online marketing, independent programmers and web devs.
More than one moved here from another part of the USA after starting a company, and left the rest of the company behind, continuing it manage it from their San Diego home.
San Diego isn’t unique here of course. I learned in one of my cases that a Russell 2000 CEO works entirely remotely from his home in rural Utah, hundreds of miles from the corporate HQ. But in terms of “great lifestyle for people who want to work remotely” I think we are tops. There’s just nowhere else in the USA that matches our health-giving weather and low crime with nearly all the amenities of a major metro area, as well as being commuting distance from the worldwide centers of the mass media and software industries.
I cant put a number on it but I noticed much longer than that ago there are a disproportionate number of people living here that worked from home long before the pandemic. I have always run into national sales guys, consultants, wall street trader types and more that have chosen to live here without a job based here. Of course the pandemic has both increased those opportunities and increased the value people place on their home environments. Couple that with obscenely low interest rates and he’ve had the perfect storm here
.
