Clermont, Florida Correspondent — Central Florida is the receiving end and I can report what it actually looks like.

We’re getting households with coastal incomes and no coastal commute. That’s money arriving, and it’s good for the tax roll and for the restaurants.

It is also pricing out the people who were already here. A teacher who could buy a house in this county two years ago can’t now, and the reason is somebody arriving with a salary set in a market she doesn’t compete in.

So the gap between regions narrows and the gap inside the receiving region widens. Both are happening at once and only one gets celebrated.

Orange County, California Correspondent — Remote work moves income. It does not move the thing that generates income.

Headquarters, capital, and the deal-making that creates high-value jobs remain concentrated, and a receiving town gets a household rather than an ecosystem. The household is real and it isn’t the same as a firm.

The measurable effect so far is smaller than the discourse. Most estimates put fully remote at something under a fifth of the workforce and heavily concentrated in a few occupations.

What’s changed decisively is the option, and options get exercised over years rather than in one migration season.

Owatonna, Minnesota Correspondent — Some dispersion is occurring and whether it narrows anything depends on the receiving places generating new activity rather than only absorbing salaries.

The historical pattern is discouraging. We’ve had previous predictions that communications technology would disperse economic activity — the telephone, the interstate, the internet — and concentration increased through all of them.

There’s a reason for that, which is that firms cluster to hire from each other. Remote work weakens it. It hasn’t repealed it.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent — Money and people are moving here and I’d say the local effect is mostly housing.

We had a workforce housing problem before any of this. Now we have people paying cash from out of state for properties that used to house the people who staff the restaurants.

Whether that reduces regional inequality nationally I can’t tell you. Locally it’s a redistribution from the people who work here to the people who own here.

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — A little of this reached us and I’d temper the enthusiasm.

The remote worker who moves to a cheap place picks a cheap place with amenities. That’s Asheville, Boise, Bozeman. It isn’t a valley with a closed mill and a broadband map full of holes.

So the dispersion is real and it’s flowing to a second tier of already-attractive towns. The bottom tier gets a warehouse, if it’s lucky, and the same story it’s had for forty years.

Reducing inequality between the coasts and the mountain west is not the same thing as reducing regional inequality.

Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent — Charlotte is the interesting case because it’s both a receiving city and a losing one.

We’re getting people from New York and California. We’re also losing people from Charlotte to the counties around it, including mine, because they can now work from a house they can afford.

That’s a ring expanding outward, and the ring is where the cost lands — roads that weren’t built for it, schools that weren’t sized for it, and long-time residents priced out by arrivals from a city they never lived in.

Long Island, New York Correspondent — This cuts both ways and the net isn’t a morality play.

Some high earners leave the core and take the tax base. Downtown lunch counters lose. An inland county gains a school-age child.

I’d flag the assessment consequence, since that’s my file. Commercial values in the region are being reappraised downward and the shortfall shifts onto residential, which means the homeowner who stayed pays for the office that emptied.

Nobody voted for that transfer and it’s happening in every reassessment cycle.

Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — A kitchen in a cheap county is a raise. That can shrink the gap if the county will take the household.

We’ve taken some. It’s helped, and it’s also made a modest housing problem into a real one, because we never built for it.

Take the household. Build the house. Don’t import the veto culture that made the place they left unaffordable.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — We’re seeing a little inward movement and a lot of leftover commercial vacancy in the old core.

The split I’d predict is between metros that convert and metros that wait. A downtown with residents has a reason to exist. A downtown that was only an office park with a skyline doesn’t, and a fair number of mid-size American cities built exactly that after 1970.

Inequality between metro fashion and ordinary places may ease slightly. Inequality inside metros gets worse if the service worker still has to live near a lunch rush that no longer exists.

Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — This valley runs on people in a room, so remote work doesn’t threaten the core business. It threatens the corporate annex.

We’re a receiving market and it’s visible in prices. Housing here moved as much as anywhere in the country this year and a share of it is people from California who kept the salary.

The service zip codes still need a bus and the bus didn’t improve. That’s the local version of the inequality question and it has nothing to do with regions.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent — The manufacturing footnote matters here because it complicates the whole frame.

Our engineering and purchasing functions went hybrid and stayed hybrid. Everyone who touches a machine comes in every day.

So inside one company you have two workforces with different geographic freedom, different housing options, and different exposure, and the difference tracks education. That’s an inequality effect operating at the level of a single employer rather than between regions.

Southeast Michigan gains nothing from dispersion. We’re not a destination and we’re not a source.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — There’s an international version of this that Americans discuss rarely.

If work can be done anywhere, it can be done here, and a modest number of firms have begun to notice. That’s an enormous opportunity for a region with an educated English-speaking population and no shortage of people who would very much like a salary set in dollars.

It also runs into the reason it hasn’t happened at scale: bandwidth, electricity that stays on, and immigration and tax arrangements written on the assumption that a worker is where the office is.

The regional inequality question you’re asking within one country is being asked between countries, and the answer will be determined by whether anyone updates the rules.