Charlotte is (almost) the Work from Home Queen of the United States

The Census Bureau recently released its latest American Community Survey, a detailed look at how Americans live.

One of the topics: How Americans get to work, and how many don’t have a commute at all.

In the city of Charlotte, 29.7% of survey respondents reported working from home in 2023.

That’s high. Still, it’s not a surprise, because Charlotte is a white-collar city. There are lots of bankers and lawyers working in their home offices, at least part-time.

But few people know just how high that is.

The ACS compiled data on 234 “places” with more than 65,000 people (including cities and densely-populated unincorporated areas).

Of all those places, only Berkeley, Calif., had a greater share of people working from home than Charlotte, at 31.3%.

Charlotte being almost tops in the nation for “work from home” is more than just a quirky statistic.

It explains why the uptown office market is struggling, with some leaders calling for drastic measures such as tax incentives to demolish unneeded buildings. And it should be a key consideration in how the city plans its transportation future, especially a proposed multibillion-dollar plan that depends on a one-cent sales tax increase.

Sixty percent of that sales tax money is dedicated to transit — which has been crippled in Charlotte in part by a number of technological and societal changes, including work from home.

The cities with the most and least work-from-home

Before we get back to all that, here is some data on work-from-home:

In 2014, 4.9% of American workers worked from home, according to the American Community Survey. That’s now nearly tripled, to 13.8%.

A decade ago, 5.2% of Charlotte workers were homebound. That was just a smidge above the national average. There were more than 60 cities in the country with a greater share of people working from home.

But the city’s share of people working from home has risen nearly 500%, vaulting us to almost the top of the list.

Here are the Census-designated places with the greatest share of people working from home in 2023:

• Berkeley, Calif. 31.3%
• Charlotte, NC 29.7%
• Arlington, Va. 28.6%
• Seattle, Wash. 28.5%
• Alameda, Calif. 28.1%
• Austin, Texas  28.1%
• Naperville, Ill.  27.9%
• Washington, D.C. 27.3%
• Dublin, Calif. 27.2%
• Denver, Colo. 26.1%

And here are the Census-designated places with the smallest share of people working from home:

• New Bedford, Mass. 3.8%
• South Gate, Calif. 4%
• Trenton, N.J. 4.3%
• Brockton, Mass. 4.8%
• Fall River, Mass. 4.9%
• Corpus Christi, Texas 4.9%
• Compton, Calif. 5.2%
• Springfield, Mass. 5.2%
• San Juan, Puerto Rico 5.5%
• Elizabeth, N.J. 5.6%

How do we get to work?

The ACS also estimates how Charlotte’s 505,000 workers commuted in 2023.

• Drove alone in a car: 286,000
• Work from home: 150,000
• Carpool: 42,500
• Walk: 10,200
• Public transportation: 9,272
• Bicycle: 1,200

Compare that to the ASC breakdown of how Charlotte’s 410,000 workers commuted in 2014:

• Drove alone in a car: 315,000
• Carpool: 44,700
• Work from home: 21,500
• Public transportation: 15,640
• Walk: 7,640
• Bike: 1,472

Total public transportation share in 2014 was 3.8%. That’s fallen by more than half, and it’s now down to 1.8%.

One thing that’s interesting is that walking had a sizable jump over the last decade, from 7,640 to 10,200. Perhaps that’s the result of more people living uptown and in South End, where they can walk the Rail Trail to the office.

(If you are wondering, the American Community Survey asks workers age 16 and up how they got to work in the previous week from a list of options, including work from home. People who commute with more than one method are asked to select the mode of travel used on most days. So someone working from home might still go into the office one or two days a week.)

Moving forward, it’s unclear whether employers will be able to force their workers back to the office full time, or at least the majority of time.

At the start of 2024, Bank of America issued a stern warning to its employees who weren’t returning to the office. Most of the banks and other white-collar employers are on something like a three-day-a-week requirement now, but (so Transit Time hears through the grapevine) compliance is spotty at best.

Last month, Amazon ordered all its workers to return to the office five days a week. Will that embolden other companies to do the same?

Road congestion

The Texas Transportation Institute found the average Charlotte driver lost 57 hours a year to congestion in 2017. That fell rapidly during the pandemic as we stayed home en masse, dropping to 24 hours lost.

Total traffic delays haven’t reached pre-pandemic levels yet, but are rising rapidly. They were up to 48 hours in 2022. Delays could surpass pre-pandemic levels this decade.

Not a consideration for transportation plan

Charlotte is leading efforts to increase the Mecklenburg sales tax by one-cent to fund a multibillion-dollar transportation plan.

City leaders haven’t publicly discussed in-depth the impact of work from home on transit, which is slated to receive 60% of the sales tax money if the plan moves forward (counting buses and rail). They instead focus on the overall population growth in the region, and the need to mitigate future congestion.

In fiscal year 2014, CATS carried 29.5 million passenger trips. By fiscal year 2019, on the eve of the pandemic, ridership had already fallen to 24.3 million. That was possibly due to the proliferation of ride-share companies.

COVID and work-from-home drove ridership even lower.

For fiscal year 2024, CATS carried 15.3 million passengers. The transit system is on pace to carry about 16 million passenger trips in the current fiscal year.

The rate of post-pandemic bounce-back is slowing, suggesting CATS ridership will stabilize at around 16 million to 17 million trips. That would be 68% of pre-pandemic levels and 56% of the peak a decade ago.

The best way to measure the impact of work-from-home is on CATS’ commuter bus fleet, which caters exclusively to uptown workers. Ridership on those express routes is down 75% compared to 2014.