Digital transition and cities: How tech workers reshape ethnic and class-based segregation

The digital transition is reshaping cities, transforming both labor and housing markets. While its impact on labor markets is increasingly well documented, its consequences for residential choices and segregation remain poorly understood. New jobs—especially in the tech sector—concentrated into cities, potentially reinforcing the residential clustering of highly skilled workers. At the same time, higher incomes and the flexibility of remote work provide tech workers with greater freedom to choose where to live, both within and beyond urban areas. It is unknown whether the residential decisions of minority tech workers are primarily ethnicity-based, reinforcing clustering and segregation, or class-based, facilitating dispersal and ethnic desegregation. Here we show that minority tech workers increasingly cluster in large cities, where they contribute to ethnic desegregation. However, this trend simultaneously intensifies class-based residential segregation, as the spatial isolation of non-tech minority workers becomes more pronounced. This dual dynamic underscores the need for urban policy responses that address not only ethnic integration but also the deepening class-based inequalities emerging from the digital transition.