The New York Times found space for a 1,200-word article about how many city dwellers, priced out of buying a place in town, have decided to buy a vacation home or investment property far from where they live full time.

Breaking news? Not so much.

Adam Doolittle bought his investment property back in 2020, and even then he was not exactly on the curve.

At the time, Doolittle was working as a paid media advisor at Better.com, a fintech that provides mortgage origination and related services through an online platform. He knew he wanted to buy but he knew his price point was far below anything he could find in the city.

So he looked north, and he looked west. He zeroed in on Narrowsburg, NY, a town about 2.5 hours from Manhattan that sits along the Delaware River in the western foothills of the Catskill Mountains. 

He saw a prime opportunity for an income-producing short-term rental, one that could be had for less than $300,000.

Narrowsburg offered a number of advantages over other towns in the Catskills:

And he looked and looked and looked and looked …

On Tuesday morning, I leave my house in the western Catskills and begin a commute that, by almost any conventional measure, makes no sense. My home is in Narrowsburg, New York, a small town about 120 miles from Manhattan. 

I bought a roughly 1,000-square-foot cottage there in 2020, right as the pandemic transformed the geography of white-collar work. The house sits on four wooded acres, and I put in a pond down the hill back in 2022. On summer nights, if the weather cooperates, the sky is dark enough to photograph the Milky Way’s reflection in the water.

My job is in New York City.

Getting there involves driving roughly 40 minutes to a train station and then spending more than two hours on New Jersey Transit. Door to door, the trip can consume three or four hours. Five days a week, it would be madness. But I don't do it five days a week.

My employer requires three days in office. Instead of commuting home each night, I have begun experimenting with something different. I travel to New York once, stay from Tuesday night to Thursday and travel back to the Catskills when my office days are finished.

And in Manhattan, I sleep in a hostel. Recently, three nights cost me about $216.

This is not glamorous. A hostel bunk is not a pied-à-terre. There is no doorman, no view of Central Park, no place for storage when I’m not there. But that may be precisely the point.

I don’t need a New York apartment. I need access to New York for three days.

Another advantage to buying the second home first is that it can produce income if it is located in a desirable village — such as Narrowsburg — through short-term rentals. When the main house is rented, I can stay in an apartment above my garage. The income from the property helped with expenses when I was between jobs.

For most of modern American history, a career dictated your location. If the job was in New York, you generally lived in New York or near enough for a reasonable daily commute. The same logic applied to Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Chicago and other major employment centers. Where you worked largely determined where you lived.

That relationship is beginning to loosen.

Researchers are now finding something remarkable in the post-pandemic labor market. Americans are not merely working from home more frequently. They are living substantially farther from their employers.

Between 2019 and 2024, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper using matched employer and employee data, the average distance between workers' homes and their employers' worksites increased by more than 70 percent.

Among workers hired after March 2020, 12 percent lived at least 50 miles from their employer by 2024. That’s roughly three times the pre-pandemic share. The increase was especially pronounced among highly paid workers and people in their 30s and 40s, particularly those working in finance, information and professional services.

Something bigger than remote work appears to be happening. The geography of the American labor market is stretching. And if that continues, the consequences will reach far beyond the office.

They could reshape housing markets, transportation networks, small towns, cities and even one of the most basic assumptions of American adulthood: what place is called home.

And millions of Americans now have work schedules capable of supporting some version of this arrangement.

Federal Reserve survey data found that 41 percent of U.S. workers worked from home at least some of the time in 2024. Eighteen percent worked entirely from home and 22 percent worked from home some of the time. Those levels were broadly unchanged from 2023.

Hybrid work, in other words, increasingly looks less like a temporary residue of the pandemic than a durable feature of professional life.

More recent research suggests that hybrid schedules are developing their own geography in time.

A 2026 study analyzed approximately 41 billion mobile-geolocation records from 73.5 million people across America's five largest metropolitan areas. Before the pandemic, researchers classified 42% of observed workdays as office-based. That fell to about 20% percent in 2022 before recovering to nearly 30% percent in 2023.

Hybrid work was supposed to change where we work. It may be changing something much bigger: where we can afford to buy a house.

New Yorkers have been trying to escape New York while continuing to depend on it for generations.

The Catskills in particular have long functioned as an alternative for city dwellers: close enough to remain economically and culturally connected, distant enough to feel like somewhere else.

In 2008, the real estate publication The Real Deal ran an article about young New Yorkers priced out of city ownership who were buying houses in the Catskills while continuing to rent apartments in New York.

A Sullivan County broker had a memorable phrase for them:

They were buying their "second home first."

The numbers were already significant. Sullivan County later reported that second-home ownership had increased 65 percent between 2001 and 2007, from 6,089 owners to 10,085. Thousands more people who lived elsewhere owned vacant land in the county.

The pandemic supercharged the phenomenon.

Cheap mortgages, urban lockdowns and remote work caused demand for vacation homes to soar. At the peak in March 2021, Redfin estimated second-home demand was 95 percent above its pre-pandemic baseline.

But the vacation-home boom eventually collapsed.

Americans took out just 86,604 mortgages for second homes in 2024, according to Redfin's analysis of federal mortgage data, the lowest number in records going back to 2018. That was roughly one-third the volume seen during the pandemic boom. Second homes represented only 2.6 percent of mortgages, down from 5 percent in 2020.

High mortgage rates mattered. So did high home prices and the return of office work.

If the story were simply "Americans discovered vacation homes during Covid," it would be ending.

Instead, another pattern is emerging.

In March, Realtor.com documented New Yorkers who continue renting in the city while purchasing houses in the Hudson Valley, Catskills and other destinations. The recent New York Times story repeated the trope: households reversing the traditional property ladder by purchasing the weekend house before the primary urban home.

The phrase from 2008 has returned.

Second home first.

The demographic realities of few children being born across the US is being felt in the education sector as Realtor.com reported that more 1,000 schools were shuttered in some 700 communities last year, and home values are threatened as these community assets disappear. “When a school closes or kids get reassigned, nearby home values typically fall,” explained Jiayi Xu, an economist at Realtor.com. “Sometimes the impact goes further, signaling broader neighborhood decline, which can scare off family buyers and depress prices even more.” The school closures that have the biggest impact are those involving elementary schools, as young families typically target these communities for their school-age children.

Signs of the shift to a buyer’s market are spreading — in 38 of the 50 largest housing markets in the US, homes sold for less than their asking price, according to Redfin. Many buyers realized they could negotiate harder, if they could afford the record prices (the median price of a home was just below $410,000). Texas and Florida had the biggest discounts, with omes in Miami and West Palm Beach selling for nearly 5% less than their asking price on average, while buyers across much of the South typically paid 2% to 3% below asking in June. Nationally, only about 25% of homes are selling above their asking price, down from roughly 55% at the pandemic-era peak in 2022, according to Redfin.

JUST BECAUSE

Iceland is not an easy place to live, even with all the modern conveniences. But back when central heat, electricity, insulated windows and other such niceties did not exist, Icelanders made do with turf houses. Since the only wood available for building was the driftwood that washed up from shipwrecks and distant forests, Icelandic construction consisted of just a few posts and roof beams, along with carefully stacked stones along with turf cut into chunks from the peat bogs. When built correctly, the turf would grow together and form a cohesive, insulating layer. These houses were small, packed with people (and animals on the coldest days) and rather pungent, as one traveler described: The thick turf walls, the earthen floors kept continually damp and filthy, the personal uncleanliness of the inhabitants, all unite in causing a smell insupportable to a stranger… There is no mode of ventilating any part of the house; and as twenty people sometimes eat and sleep in the same apartment, very pungent vapours are added in no small quantity, to the plentiful effluvia proceeding from fish, bags of oil, skins, &c.

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