Silicon Valley may look very different after the pandemic

After four months of working from home during the pandemic, Reeba Akram decided to change where home was.

Akram, who works for Google, moved with her husband and two young children from Los Altos — a 15-minute drive from the company's Silicon Valley headquarters — to Dallas, Texas. The biggest reason for the move, she said, was cost of living. "We were paying three times the mortgage of our house that we have here in Texas, but we had one-third of the space," she said. Her choice of where to live is now "the question of the year," she says, with Google's September deadline approaching for employees to decide between moving offices, coming back or staying remote.