Work and home life have been blurred since the coronavirus pandemic leading people to leave their office and take their work to their residences.
A fall Gallup Poll showed not as many people are working remotely as they were in spring 2020, but if you’re a Georgian who enjoys working in your pajamas and skipping your daily commute, there’s good news for you — two Peach State cities have landed on an analysis of the best U.S. cities for working remote.
High-speed internet service provider InMyArea.com evaluated around 800 communities throughout the nation to discover the ones that offer remote workers the best balance of affordability and high-speed internet access.
Specifically, it reviewed the percentage of a city’s residents that have access to high-speed wired internet, access to affordable basic wired broadband internet plans, the cost of monthly rent and housing costs per square meter. The ISP used data from the Federal Communications Commission and crowd-sourced cost of living database Numbeo.
Additionally, the website gave cities a composite ranking score that combined the aforementioned factors, which were evenly weighted. A percentage emerged with a score closest to zero being the best and a score closest to 100 being the worst. Cities were also filtered by size and awarded places based on that. The size categories were large (population: 100,000+), medium (population: 20,000-99,999), small (population: 5,000-19,999) and extra small (population: >5,000).
Two Georgia cities made it onto the list in two categories.
Dalton was the best work-from-home city in the Peach State and it was the No. 5 best medium-sized city for remote workers. It costs an average of $650 a month for rent in the Carpet Capital of the World and 99% of people have access to high-speed wired internet.
Meanwhile, an Atlanta neighborhood also made it onto the list, which for its purposes was considered an extra-small city. Buckhead came in at No. 7 in the category.
“Before any of us had heard of COVID-19, increasing access to high-speed internet and the broad shift toward an information economy had been conspiring to drive more and more workers out of offices and back to the couch, er, home office,” InMyArea.com wrote in its conclusion. “There’s no doubt that these changes will reverberate through the economy, even to industries that don’t make this shift. But one positive aspect of this transformation is that workers may have more freedom to move, and as our analysis indicates, there are cities large and small all across the country that would be excellent options for remote workers.”
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