Who picks up and moves to a brand new city during a pandemic?
Financial adviser Mariko Wilcox did.
Wilcox, a fourth-generation Coloradan, grew up in the Denver suburbs. Until 2020, she worked at the Centennial offices of a major national financial company. Then the office shut down, and Wilcox realized she could do her job from pretty much anywhere. And anywhere turned out to be Grand Junction.
“The pandemic was the catalyst and I'd been hoping, and kind of more dreaming, to move out here for about four to five years,” Wilcox said last week as locals and tourists browsed the shops on historic Main Street. “And I just saw my opportunity and ran with it.”
Knowing she’d be working entirely from home, Wilcox had something pretty specific in mind when she started house hunting.
“I can see the Colorado River from my house on one side. I can see the Colorado National Monument from my kitchen sink. I found a wonderful, beautiful house in a lovely neighborhood,” she said. “Place is very important to me so that part was really important — that the place I was going to actually work and spend all day long had to be enjoyable and beautiful, and I accomplished that.”
She signs on to work every day after breakfast, meeting remotely with clients across the country. She doesn’t have family in Grand Junction and says she doesn’t mind spending a lot of her time alone.
“When I'm working during the day I have company all day long. I'm talking to people all day long, which is really what fills my cup and that energizes me.”
Wilcox is a mountain biker and a nordic skier. She’s joined a swim club, a book club and a networking group that matches longtime Grand Junction business people with newbies like her.
“We're all kind of in the same boat,” she said. “We all moved here during the pandemic. We didn't necessarily have strong ties here and we were able to work remotely. So that's what brought us all together. And so we're actually a cohort of kind of pandemic remote workers.”
A community for remote workers
That networking group is called the Welcome Wagon. It’s run by a business group called the Grand Junction Economic Partnership, known locally as GJEP. Until last week, GJEP was headed by executive director Robin Brown, who says an influx of remote workers like Wilcox helped cushion the economic blow of the pandemic.
“In March of 2020, we got very nervous that we had undone all the good work we had done to diversify our economy and improve our economy. We were kind of panicked and then we very quickly realized the opposite happened. It just sped up our growth,” said Brown, who recently left the economic partnership for a job in fundraising at the local Colorado Mesa University.
“We saw a huge influx of people whose jobs went remote that could suddenly pick up and move to Grand Junction and bring their job with them,” she said. “We've seen huge growth in the tech industry and companies that, again, used to think they had to be located in certain cities that now realize they don't and they're picking up and coming here.”
There’s no reporting system to quantify the number of remote workers who’ve come to the area, Wilcox said, but their presence is reflected in rising demand and prices for housing. That trend began before the pandemic and it’s deepened, she said. Community leaders have begun working on solutions, including an easier permitting process.
“This time last year there were only, I think, 60 permits for new housing coming on … At this time a year later it's 600 permanent units to be built in the next year. So we're tackling it.”
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September 06, 2021 at 05:02PM
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Grand Junction Puts Out The Welcome Mat For Pandemic Remote Workers - Colorado Public Radio
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