Small Cities Are A Big Draw For Remote Workers During The Pandemic

Rising from the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, just south of the Canadian border, this distant city looks like a quaint throwback, with Victorian-era architecture, church steeples and a main shopping street laid with brick.

But over the last few years, Burlington has become home to an invisible economy of people who work remotely for the world’s most cutting-edge technology businesses — and the pandemic has only increased the number decamping to this bucolic enclave.

Exactly how many Burlington residents work remotely for companies such as Apple, Google, Twitter and IBM “is hard to gauge because we all are sort of like hermit crabs in our own little shells and under our own little rocks,” said Tyler Littwin, art director at the marketing software developer HubSpot. Littwin moved to Vermont from HubSpot’s headquarters outside Boston and started telecommuting in 2013.