If you work downtown two or three days a week, a new national study says you are doing it in the best-equipped city in the country for that arrangement. Hubble, a flexible workplace company owned by real estate software and data firm Yardi, scored 203 U.S. cities with 100,000 or more residents on hybrid-work readiness and put Atlanta at the top, a finish its analysts described as comfortable rather than narrow.
The ranking used 20 metrics grouped into five categories: quality of life, cost of living, workspace access, commute and mobility, and labor market. St. Louis finished second, followed by Pittsburgh, Ann Arbor and Boulder. The top 10 skewed heavily Midwestern and small; aside from Naperville, Illinois at No. 9, Atlanta is by far the largest market on the list.
The number that carried Atlanta is one downtown workers can see for themselves walking a few blocks: 41.7 coworking spaces per 100,000 residents, the highest density of any American city Hubble measured. Memberships here average $199 a month, which the company called among the lowest in any major U.S. market and comfortably under the $220 national median. The city also logged 470 hybrid job listings per 100,000 residents, and roughly a quarter of Atlantans currently report some flexible work arrangement.
Hubble's researchers tied that to employer behavior rather than to any single building or landlord, writing that large employers, the City of Atlanta included, are sticking with a mix of in-office attendance and remote work, which boosts demand for hybrid infrastructure and cements hybrid as a mainstay here. The context matters: office attendance nationally is still only just above half of pre-pandemic levels, so the cities that rank well are the ones that built out an alternative to the five-day desk.
The weak spots are the familiar ones, and they are the daily experience of anyone commuting into the central business district. Atlanta's average one-way commute runs close to 27 minutes, only 11.4 percent of workers use an alternative to driving alone, and the city scores 48 out of 100 on Walk Score and 42 on Bike Score. Those are city-wide averages that downtown's own street grid beats, but they are the figures that kept Atlanta from sweeping the categories. Hubble's methodology drew on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Federal Communications Commission, Walk Score, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Trust for Public Land, among other sources.
Original reporting: Urbanize Atlanta (2026-08-26)