We sifted Zillow data to find where the next Zoom towns would be and narrowed our list to the top five in the state. We worked with Washington State population data and Zillow research to divine the areas and cities that have drawn more people over the past decade and over the past year. We wanted to know where people were moving and what was next. Washington’s population grew by 93,200 per year over the past decade, up from 83,000 in the prior decade. We see the emergence of Zoom towns across Washington for those who looked at all of these trends and made plans to live a fuller life in their chosen Zoom town. We see a generation of workers less restrained by global headquarters and real-time face time than global wandering and Zoom calls.

We see a Pacific Northwest that is less dependent on offices and more invested in distributed human capital, where people are ditching studio apartments for rural redoubts. Whether working for tech startups in the Bay Area from a cabin in the Cascades or freelance writing for New York-based publications while overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a number of trends have fueled the lifestyle dreams of those whose jobs are not place based-the rollout of high-speed internet to otherwise rural areas, the surge in digital transformation, a critical mass in workflow and communication apps, the rise in home prices in cities, a generation that clamors for experiences over things and finally the advent of the pandemic. The pandemic hastened a work lifestyle trend that was well underway throughout the country-working productively and remotely.