What do remote workers owe the cities they move to?
Thirty-five million people now identify as digital nomads. Cities and governments have been competing to attract them with visas, tax breaks, and coworking infrastructure. A few have done it well. Most have created a problem they are still trying to solve
The competition began, as most competitions in the modern economy begin, with a visa.
Estonia launched the world’s first digital nomad visa in 2020, a twelve-month permit designed to attract remote workers to a small, digitally advanced country that understood it had something to offer the post-pandemic workforce: reliable infrastructure, a functioning e-government system, and a location in the European Union. Barbados, Bermuda, and Croatia followed within months. By 2025, more than 50 countries had introduced some form of remote-worker permit. Governments that had previously competed for tourists were competing for something more valuable: workers who would stay longer, spend more consistently, and bring foreign income into the local economy without taking local jobs.
In 2024, an estimated 35 million people globally identified as digital nomads, with a collective spending power of over $700 billion annually. The city that captures even a fraction of that spending captures a meaningful economic input. The city that does it well captures a repeating annual dividend.
The cities that have done it well share a set of characteristics that are not complicated to identify. The cities that have done it badly share a different set that are, in retrospect, equally obvious.
TBILISI: THE CITY THAT ABSORBED WITHOUT BREAKING
The coworking space on Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi opens at 8 am and is full by 9. The people working at the long tables are a mix: Georgian architects and developers who have always worked this way, and a newer group of Europeans, Americans, and Indians who arrived after 2022 and stayed—the conversations at the coffee counter switch between Georgian and English without an announcement. Outside, the street looks the way it has looked for decades: the Soviet-era apartment buildings, the Orthodox churches, the specific morning light of a city in a river valley. The nomads arrived atop something that was already there. The question of whether they changed it, and for whom, has different answers depending on who you ask.
Nino Beridze, a Georgian freelance designer, watched her rent on Vera Street double in eighteen months as the nomad community arrived in her neighborhood. She did not leave. She raised her rates, started charging in dollars, and now earns more than she did before. She is not sure how she feels about this. “The people coming here made my neighborhood more expensive,” she says. “They also made my work more valuable. I’m not sure if that’s fair or just lucky.”
Tbilisi’s relative resilience compared to Lisbon or MedellĂn stems from three factors that arrived together rather than sequentially. Monthly living expenses ranging from $500 to $1,200 made it accessible to a wide range of remote workers, resulting in a community that arrived economically diverse rather than concentrated at the high end. The coworking infrastructure grew organically alongside the nomad community. And the neighborhoods most popular with remote workers were already functioning mixed neighborhoods — the nomad layer arrived on top of something real rather than replacing it.
The city’s simple legal framework helped: a visa-on-arrival policy, low flat tax rate, and straightforward banking made Tbilisi legible in a way that more bureaucratically complicated destinations were not. Geographic distribution did the rest. Unlike in Lisbon or MedellĂn, the remote-worker community did not concentrate in a single neighborhood—the rent effect spread across the city rather than detonating in one place.
Tbilisi is not a model, exactly. It is a city that got lucky in the right ways at the right moment. The question is whether its luck can be turned into policy.
THE LISBON LESSON
Portugal is the most instructive case study precisely because it did everything right and still created a problem it cannot solve.
In October 2022, Portugal launched the D8 digital nomad visa, throwing open its doors to the global remote workforce. The visa was well-designed, the country had genuine natural advantages — climate, culture, cost of living, brand recognition — and the response was significant. Lisbon became one of the most talked-about remote work destinations in the world.
Housing prices in Lisbon jumped up to 100% over the last six years, according to the International Monetary Fund. The profitability of short-term rentals drove landlords to convert long-term residential stock into holiday lets. The neighborhoods most popular with remote workers became unaffordable for residents who had lived there for generations. Anti-gentrification protesters gathered at the gates of Web Summit, Lisbon’s annual tech conference.
Ana has been teaching at the same primary school in Mouraria for eleven years. Three of her colleagues moved out of Lisbon in the past two years — one to Setúbal, one to Almada, one back to her parents’ house in Braga. Ana is still there because her mother owns the apartment she lives in. “If I was renting I would have left already,” she says. “Most people I know who are renting have left already.”
Portugal’s response was to swerve in two directions simultaneously: promote the D8 visa with one hand; restrict short-term rentals, tighten residency rules, and abolish tax breaks with the other. Three years after the D8 launch, Portugal had never tracked digital nomad retention rates. The community it had attracted was quietly shrinking.
The Lisbon lesson is not that remote workers are bad for cities. It is that attracting remote workers without a concurrent housing policy is not a strategy. It is a subsidy to landlords funded by the displacement of existing residents.
WHERE MEDELLĂŤN IS NOW
MedellĂn’s trajectory tracks Lisbon’s with a two-year lag and a higher concentration effect. The city, already navigating the tension between its success in social urbanism and the gentrification it produced, received a second wave of displacement pressure from the influx of remote workers in the early 2020s.
Camila Restrepo grew up in Laureles. She is in her late twenties and works as a graphic designer. Her rent increased 60% in two years. She now shares an apartment with two other people to stay in the neighborhood where she grew up. “The people who came here because it was affordable have made it unaffordable for the people who were already here,” she says. “I understand why they came. I just wish they understood what it costs.”
The digital nomad economy did not cause MedellĂn’s gentrification problem. But it accelerated it significantly in the neighborhoods where the community concentrated, and it introduced a new actor — the dollar-earning remote worker — whose spending power relative to local incomes made the acceleration faster than the city’s policy infrastructure could absorb. The residents being displaced were often the same residents the city’s social urbanism program had specifically attempted to stabilize.
THE QUESTION NO VISA ANSWERS
Every digital nomad visa answers the same question: Can you legally be here? None of them answer the harder question: what do you owe the city you are moving into?
A remote worker earning a Western salary and spending it in Tbilisi or MedellĂn or Lisbon is extracting a significant quality-of-life premium — a premium created by the infrastructure, culture, climate, and community that the city’s existing residents built and maintain. They are consuming a place they did not build.
That is not an argument against remote work. It is an argument for a different kind of accounting. The remote worker who participates in the local economy — who pays local taxes, hires local professionals, learns the language, builds relationships that persist after the laptop closes — is contributing to the city they are extracting value from. The one who treats the city as a backdrop for their professional life and leaves when the rent rises is not.
No visa requires the second kind of contribution. The cities that have gotten this right are the ones that found ways to make genuine participation possible and, in some cases, expected. Tallinn actively promoted remote worker settlement across different city districts, distributing the rent effect rather than concentrating it. Some programs have introduced community participation requirements, local tax contributions, and integration into local professional networks. The remote worker who joins a local professional association and pays local taxes is a different kind of city resident from the one who treats the city as a temporary amenity. The first has a stake in the city’s future. The second does not.
The cities that have done this well are still exceptions. The majority of digital nomad visa programs remain extraction agreements dressed as welcome programs: come, spend, stay as long as you like, leave when you choose. The city absorbs the cost. The resident absorbs the displacement. The landlord captures the premium.
The next wave of nomads will build semi-permanent lives, requiring schools, legal support, and business networks. The cities that recognize this shift and build the institutional infrastructure to support it — while simultaneously protecting the residents who already live there — will be the ones that turn the remote worker economy into a durable asset.
The most interesting experiment in the next five years will not be which country launches the best visa. It will be which city figures out how to make remote workers actual residents rather than high-spending tourists who stay longer.
