In May of 2021, Sara Corcoran got a great job as an assistant project manager for a construction company in Dallas, working from home. Because the position was fully remote, she and her husband bought a 3-bedroom mobile home in Wylie, a lake community about 30 miles northeast of Dallas, in November. She loved the affordability of Wylie, where they paid $500 a month, less than half of what they had paid to rent a two-bedroom apartment in North Dallas, and that she could “smell the lake and see the stars.”
But eight months later, her company suddenly called everyone back to the office and told her she wasn’t remote any more, she says. “They said, ‘We’re going to have everyone come back to the offices, we want to see your smiling faces,’” she says. Its offices are southwest of Dallas, an 80-mile commute one-way. She went in for two days, and after getting home at 8 p.m. and paying $15 per day in tolls, she quit. She had a new job lined up two days later.
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Last week, when President Biden called on Americans to “get back to work and fill our great downtowns again,” he joined a cadre of politicians and businesses across the country calling for employees to return to their offices. They may not realize how out of touch they sound to workers like Corcoran, who have seen home prices rise 30%, rents rise roughly 16%, and the price of gas increase 78% over the past two years.
Read More: There’s Never Been a Worse Time to Buy a Home, Poll of U.S. Households Shows
More than a third of jobs—often but not always ones performed by people with a college degree—can be performed from home, according to a University of Chicago analysis. What these workers hear when their employers call them back to the office is that they’re expected to either pay a big chunk of their paychecks to live close to the office or save money on rent and weather longer—and more expensive—commutes, as if the last two years of work-from-home hadn’t happened at all. Around…
Source : time
