ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. (AP) — Lori Matthias and her husband had tired of Atlanta traffic when they moved to St. Augustine, Florida, in 2023. For Mike Waldron and his wife, moving from the Boston area in 2020 to a place that bills itself as “the nation's oldest city” was motivated by a desire to be closer to their adult children.
They were among thousands of white-collar, remote workers who migrated to the St. Augustine area in recent years, transforming the touristy beach town into one of the top remote work hubs in the United States.
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Aliyah Meyer, an official with the St. Johns County Chamber of Commerce, walks through a downtown neighborhood in St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
An oversized alligator model sits on top of a truck's trailer at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park, a top tourist attraction in St. Augustine, Fla. on Thursday, March 13, 2025.
Walkers make their way through the downtown historic district in St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
A welcome sign greets visitors to St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
Health care sales executive Mike Waldron works out of his home office in St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
Health sales care executive Mike Waldron looks at a cumquat tree in the sunroom at his home in St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
Matthias fell in love with St. Augustine’s small town feeling, trading the hour-long commute she had in Atlanta for bumping into friends and acquaintances while running errands.
“The whole pace here is slower and I’m attracted to that,” said Matthias, who does sales and marketing for a power tool company. “My commute is like 30 steps from my kitchen to my office. It’s just different. It’s just relaxed and friendly.”
Centuries before becoming a remote work hub, the St. Augustine area was claimed by the Spanish crown in the early 16th century after explorer Juan Ponce de Leon’s arrival. In modern times, it is best known for its Spanish architecture of terra cotta roofs and arched doorways, tourist-carrying trollies, a historic fort, an alligator farm, lighthouses and a shipwreck museum.
In St. Johns County, home to St. Augustine, the percentage of workers who did their jobs from home nearly tripled from 8.6% in 2018 to almost 24% in 2023, moving the northeast Florida county into the top ranks of U.S. counties with the largest share of people working remotely, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.
Only counties with a heavy presence of tech, finance and government workers in metro Washington, Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte and Dallas, as well as two counties in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, had a larger share of their workforce working from home. But these were counties much more populous than the 335,000 residents in St. Johns County, which has grown by more than a fifth during this decade.
Scott Maynard, a vice president of economic development for the county’s chamber of commerce, attributes the initial influx of new residents to Florida’s lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in businesses and schools in the fall of 2020 while much of the country remained locked down.
“A lot of people were relocating here from the Northeast, the Midwest and California so that their children could get back to a face-to-face education,” Maynard said. “That brought in a tremendous number of people who had the ability to work remotely and wanted their children back in a face-to-face school situation.”
Public schools in St. Johns County are among the best in Florida, according to an annual report card by the state Department of Education.
The influx of new residents has brought growing pains, particularly when it comes to affordable housing since many of the new, remote workers moving into the area are wealthier than locals and able to outbid them on homes, officials said.
Many essential workers such as police officers, firefighters and teachers have been forced to commute from outside St. Johns County because of rising housing costs. The median home price grew from $405,000 in 2019 to almost $535,000 in 2023, according to Census Bureau figures, making the purchase of a home further out of reach for the county's essential workers.
Essential workers would need to earn at least $180,000 annually to afford the median price of a home in St. Johns County, but a teacher has an average salary of around $48,000 and a law enforcement officer earns around $58,000 on average, according to an analysis by the local chamber of commerce.
“What happened was a lot of the people, especially coming in from up North, were able to sell their homes for such a high value and come here and just pay cash since this seemed affordable to them,” said Aliyah Meyer, an economic researcher at the chamber of commerce. “So it kind of inflated the market and put a bit of a constraint on the local residents.”
Waldron, a sales executive in the health care industry, was able to sell his Boston home at the height of the pandemic and purchase a three-bedroom, two-bath home in a gated community by a golf course outside St. Augustine where “things really worked out to be less expensive down here."
The flexibility offered by fast wireless internet and the popularity of online meeting platforms since the start of the pandemic also helped.
“If I was still locked in an office, I would not have been able to move down here,” Waldron said.
Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social
Aliyah Meyer, an official with the St. Johns County Chamber of Commerce, walks through a downtown neighborhood in St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
An oversized alligator model sits on top of a truck's trailer at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park, a top tourist attraction in St. Augustine, Fla. on Thursday, March 13, 2025.
Walkers make their way through the downtown historic district in St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
A welcome sign greets visitors to St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
Health care sales executive Mike Waldron works out of his home office in St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
Health sales care executive Mike Waldron looks at a cumquat tree in the sunroom at his home in St. Augustine, Fla., which has become a top remote work hub in the U.S. during the 2020s, on Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider.)
Scott Adams, whose popular comic strip “Dilbert” captured the frustration of beleaguered, white-collar cubicle workers and satirized the ridiculousness of modern office culture until he was abruptly dropped from syndication in 2023 for racist remarks, has died. He was 68.
His first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, announced the death Tuesday on a livestream posted on Adams’ social media accounts. “He’s not with us right anymore,” she said. Adams revealed in 2025 that he had prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Miles had said he was in hospice care in his Northern California home on Monday.
“I had an amazing life,” the statement said in part. “I gave it everything I had.”
At its height, “Dilbert,” with its mouthless, bespectacled hero in a white short-sleeved shirt and a perpetually curled red tie, appeared in 2,000 newspapers worldwide in at least 70 countries and 25 languages.
Adams was the 1997 recipient of the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award, considered one of the most prestigious awards for cartoonists. That same year, “Dilbert” became the first fictional character to make Time magazine’s list of the most influential Americans.
“We are rooting for him because he is our mouthpiece for the lessons we have accumulated — but are too afraid to express — in our effort to avoid cubicular homicide,” the magazine said.
“Dilbert” strips were routinely photocopied, pinned up, emailed and posted online, a popularity that would spawn bestselling books, merchandise, commercials for Office Depot and an animated TV series, with Daniel Stern voicing Dilbert.
It all collapsed quickly in 2023 when Adams, who was white, repeatedly referred to Black people as members of a “hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans.” He later said he was being hyperbolic, yet continued to defend his stance.
Almost immediately, newspapers dropped “Dilbert” and his distributor, Andrews McMeel Universal, severed ties with the cartoonist. The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Massachusetts, decided to keep the “Dilbert” space blank for a while “as a reminder of the racism that pervades our society.” A planned book was scrapped.
“He’s not being canceled. He’s experiencing the consequences of expressing his views,” Bill Holbrook, the creator of the strip “On the Fastrack,” told The Associated Press at the time. “I am in full support with him saying anything he wants to, but then he has to own the consequences of saying them.”
Adams relaunched the same daily comic strip under the name Dilbert Reborn via the video platform Rumble, popular with conservatives and far-right groups. He also hosted a podcast, “Real Coffee,” where talked about various political and social issues.
After Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show on ABC was suspended in September in the wake of the host’s comments on the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Adams stood for free speech.
“Would I like some revenge?” Adams said. “Yes. Yes, I would enjoy that. But that doesn’t mean I get it. That doesn’t mean I should pursue it. Doesn’t mean the world’s a better place if it happens.”
Adams, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Hartwick College and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, was working a corporate job at the Pacific Bell telephone company in the 1980s, sharing his cartoons to amuse co-workers. He drew Dilbert as a computer programmer and engineer for a high-tech company and mailed a batch to cartoon syndicators.
“The take on office life was new and on target and insightful,” Sarah Gillespie, who helped discover “Dilbert” in the 1980s at United Media, told The Washington Post. “I looked first for humor and only secondarily for art, which with ‘Dilbert’ was a good thing, as the art is universally acknowledged to be… not great.”
The first “Dilbert” comic strip officially appeared April 16, 1989, long before such workplace comedies as “Office Space” and “The Office.” It portrayed corporate culture as a “Severance”-like, Kafkaesque world of heavy bureaucracy and pointless benchmarks, where employee effort and skill were underappreciated.
The strip would introduce the “Dilbert Principle”: The most ineffective workers will be systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management.
“Throughout history, there have always been times when it’s very clear that the managers have all the power and the workers have none,” Adams told Time. “Through ‘Dilbert,’ I would think the balance of power has slightly changed.”
Other strip characters included Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss; Asok, a young, naive intern; Wally, a middle-aged slacker; and Alice, a worker so frustrated that she was prone to frequent outbursts of rage. Then there was Dilbert’s pet, Dogbert, a megalomaniac.
“There’s a certain amount of anger you need to draw ‘Dilbert’ comics,” Adams told the Contra Costa Times in 2009.
In 1993, Adams became the first syndicated cartoonist to include his email address in his strip. That triggered a dialogue between the artist and his fans, giving Adams a fountain of ideas for the strip.
“Dilbert” was also known for generating aphorisms, like “All rumors are true — especially if your boss denies them” and “OK, let’s get this preliminary pre-meeting going.”
“If you can come to peace with the fact that you’re surrounded by idiots, you’ll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense of others,” Adams wrote in his 1996 book “The Dilbert Principle.”
In one real-life case, an Iowa worker was fired from the Catfish Bend Casino in 2007 for posting a “Dilbert” comic strip on the office bulletin board. In the strip, Adams wrote: “Why does it seem as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs?” A judge later sided with the worker; Adams helped find him a new job.
While Adams’ career fall seemed swift, careful readers of “Dilbert” saw a gradual darkening of the strip’s tone and its creator’s descent into misogyny, anti-immigration and racism.
He attracted attention for controversial comments, including saying in 2011 that women are treated differently by society for the same reason as children and the mentally disabled — “it’s just easier this way for everyone.” In a blog post from 2006, he questioned the death toll of the Holocaust.
In June 2020, Adams tweeted that when the “Dilbert” TV show ended in 2000 after just two seasons, it was “the third job I lost for being white.” But, at the time, he blamed it on lower viewership and time slot changes.
Adams’ beliefs began bleeding into his strips. In one in 2022, a boss says that traditional performance reviews would be replaced by a “wokeness” score. When an employee complains that could be subjective, the boss said, “That’ll cost you two points off your wokeness score, bigot.”
Adams put a brave face on his fall from grace, tweeting in 2023: “Only the dying leftist Fake News industry canceled me (for out-of-context news of course). Social media and banking unaffected. Personal life improved. Never been more popular in my life. Zero pushback in person. Black and White conservatives solidly supporting me.”
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump remembered Adams as a “Great Influencer.”
“He was a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn’t fashionable to do so. He bravely fought a long battle against a terrible disease,” the president posted on his social media platform Truth Social.
FLE - Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, poses for a portrait with the Dilbert character in his studio in Dublin, Calif., Oct. 26, 2006. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)
FILE - Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, talks about his work at his studio in Dublin, Calif., on Oct. 26, 2006. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)
