A few years ago, Gwynne Rivers was a born-and-raised New Yorker who’d never owned a car nor given a thought to shoveling her front walkway. But after a divorce and some financial turbulence, “I felt like things were getting complicated,” she said.

A friend who’d also grown up in Manhattan suggested Rivers join him in Portland — the one in Maine.

“I followed my heart and took a little bit of a leap of faith,” Rivers told MarketWatch. In return, she found a vibrant community with a more impressive “foodie” scene than New York’s, she said, plus great coffee shops, excellent schools and “fresh open country air for kids.”

Portland, Oregon, has spawned a hipster television show proclaiming it “the place where young people go to retire” and a slew of national media coverage of its appeal to priced-out Californians and lifestyle-oriented migrants. But across the country, a very different kind of influx is also reshaping the Portland on the eastern seaboard.

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There’s little data to directly back up the assertion that Portland, Maine, is drawing highly educated professionals, many from Boston and New York, but in some ways that’s precisely the point. While the Oregon city is booming in part because of its success in luring technology jobs, Portland, Maine, thrives by attracting individuals. And those transplants come with different work arrangements.

They’re entrepreneurs and small-business owners, people who occasionally freelance, like Rivers, and, in a sign of what might be the future for smaller cities around the country, people in well-paying professional jobs that can be done far from company headquarters.

Such “remote workers” are of great interest to economists like Ryan Wallace, a Massachusetts native asked to lead a group at the University of Southern Maine studying the phenomenon. “We were interested because you’re taking your salary with you from a higher-income place to a relatively lower cost of living,” Wallace said. Soon after he arrived, the local newspaper ran an article about the practice and sponsored a discussion about it.

Suddenly, dozens of people were calling and emailing Wallace. “Remote workers were coming out of the woodwork and saying, ‘Hey, that’s me,’ ” he said.

Coming out of the woodwork — remote workers are changing the face of Portland, Maine. Shutterstock

Many of the people who contacted Wallace were established professionals at large corporations like Cisco CSCO, -1.38% or General Dynamics GD, -1.10% , working in such roles as project manager or software engineer. Some manage teams made up of workers from various locations. Most had some connection to Maine, such as having vacationed there in childhood.

For Wallace, the most compelling part of the remote-worker diaspora is the way it upends traditional notions of economic development. “It’s spinning that traditional focus on industry as an economic-development driver, shifting it to a focus on the workers,” he said. It’s also a real-life example of the vague, overused term “knowledge economy,” he said.

Dan Farnbach, who arrived in Portland in 2012 and worked remotely for a publishing company based in Cincinnati, initially worked solely as an editor but soon proposed to his company that he start up a new national sales group.

Farnbach was quickly enchanted by the Portland lifestyle, and the fact that it’s so easy to “walk down to the water or go sailing,” he said. But he also believes that such a lifestyle nurtures a more engaged workforce, and that, along with what he calls the “small-town old-fashioned values” of Portland, keeps him there, now as a consultant working for himself, he said.

Some Mainers are investing in efforts to bring in more people like Farnbach. Jess Knox has devoted most of his time over the past four years to cultivating entrepreneurship in Portland, including through an annual event called Maine Startup and Create Week.

“We can’t compete with the big budgets in California or New York,” Knox said. But through networking events like the Startup and Create Week, he hopes to cultivate “authentic messengers.”

It’s tough to find enough service workers in Portland, Maine. Shutterstock

For Knox, the economic-development need is even more fundamental. “We’re desperate for people,” he said. “We have a significant gray tidal wave. For my money, I’m trying to attract people who have a diversity of perspective; that’s where we’re going to create and provide more prosperity.”

Since 2000, Maine’s population has grown just 4%, while the country’s has swelled 14%, according to Census Department data. The over-65 population of the state was nearly 4 percentage points higher than that of the whole nation as of 2014.

That’s even setting up a jobs crunch for plain-vanilla jobs in the service sector supporting the “knowledge workers” and entrepreneurs Knox and Wallace are focused on.

“The thing this state desperately needs is young workers,” Fred Williams, who moved from New York to Portland in 1980 and founded investment management firm Old Port Advisors, said in an interview. “I can tell you that, as an employer, it’s difficult to find employees because it’s so competitive.”

“ People are like, ‘What do you mean you want $5 for a coffee and $2 for a scone?’ ” — Susan Morris, real-estate developer

Portland’s unemployment rate is 2.8%, nearly two full percentage points lower than that of the country as a whole. It has the 18th-lowest metropolitan unemployment rate of nearly 400 metro areas in the country.

Williams said he thinks Portland’s cultural vibe should help attract young talent. His favorite measurement of gentrification is the recent explosion of craft breweries and distilleries.

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But he’s the first to point out one of the biggest challenges that comes with the influx of better-paid transplants. “The housing stock hasn’t kept up with inflows,” he said.

Jonathan Smoke, the chief economist for Realtor.com, has called what’s happening in Portland, Maine, a “spillover effect.” (News Corp., which owns MarketWatch, also owns Realtor.com, the listing website of the National Association of Realtors.)

Portland house listings on Realtor.com attract a slightly higher than average number of non-local page views — 51% compared with 49% across the country — but an outsize proportion, 17%, come from people in Boston. New York is the next-biggest driver of views.

In February, the average home listing price in the New York metro area was 78% higher than in Portland. In Boston, it was 54% higher. Smoke said he thinks Portland’s “hotness” is all about that bottom line.

But, he argued, it’s not just that higher prices in Boston or New York make Portland look better by comparison. “It acknowledges that once housing has positive momentum, with that comes new construction, and that plays an outsize role on the economy,” he said. “You jump-start something that contributes to the economy and then reinforces it.”

Susan Morris, a real-estate developer originally from Washington, D.C., has been working in Portland for the past three years. She and her partner built an upscale condo development called 118 Munjoy Hill that sold out before construction was completed, even though units had price tags of $800,000 to $1 million.

Morris said she sees anecdotal evidence of the remote-worker phenomenon constantly and “would like to quantify it.” The inflows have been good for Morris and her company, and she gives back by working with boosters like Jess Knox and also mentoring small businesses and startups.

But Morris acknowledged that attracting people with higher incomes and different expectations to a smaller municipality can have a downside.

“Gentrification is something that is happening here,” she said. “Portland is without a doubt at the cusp of turning a corner where it’s going to be an unbelievably popular place to live and work. But people are like, ‘What do you mean you want $5 for a coffee and $2 for a scone?’ ”

Dan Farnbach, the publishing executive, saw the effect of rapid development in his own hometown of Boulder, Colo. “In the 1990s every time I went home there was a new subdivision spreading out across the Plains.”

He wrestles, he conceded, with the question of how to balance the community that was in place when he arrived with the sort of change he knows he represents. “Sometimes I think our stated goals are in conflict with the existing values for a lot of people here. You can’t say money doesn’t change things.”