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Those who fled San Francisco last year went to the suburbs, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
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USPS data shows that only a small percentage of people have left the state.
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Tech elites fleeing the area sparked the narrative that most people are moving to Florida and Texas.
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It’s true: people have been fleeing San Francisco since the start of the pandemic.
But while tech luminaries like Elon Musk or Keith Rabois may migrate to Texas and Florida, it appears that is not the case for most Bay Area residents.
Instead, they move to the suburbs.
JK Dineen of the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed United States Postal Service data from March through November and found that 80,371 households had left the city during that time, a 77% increase from 2019. But the data showed that most households leaving San Francisco did not. go very far.
According to the Chronicle, the top six destinations were Alameda, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, and Sonoma, all neighboring counties in the Bay Area. The only two destinations outside of California in the top 20 were Austin and Denver – 239 and 238 households, respectively, moved to those areas, the Chronicle reported.
The Chronicle’s findings highlight an abandonment of the expensive and overcrowded city during the pandemic. In August, Insider’s Katie Canales reported that the housing inventory in San Francisco was up 96% from the previous year, with residents listing their homes in droves.
This rush to leave town coincided with a shift in the value of working in the office: companies like Twitter, Square and Slack announced that employees could work remotely permanently, while others, like Facebook. , allow employees to move. with the manager’s approval.
But it appears that while many residents took advantage of the pandemic to leave the city, they did not move outside of commuting distance, overturning the popular theory that the majority of those who left San Francisco moved. in a whole new state. – a theory probably motivated by a series of high-level executives publicly leaving the region.
Last year, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly left California for Texas after arguing with lawmakers during state-mandated coronavirus lockdowns. Musk said this month on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” that he believed Austin, Texas would become “the biggest booming city America has known in at least 50 years,” describing the influx as a “megaboom”.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston has also reportedly moved to Austin; Douglas Merritt, CEO of software company Splunk, is heading to the city of Texas, The Information reported; and Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir who currently runs venture capital firm 8VC, already lives in Austin with his family and confirmed last year that he is moving there as well.
And last year, software giant Oracle announced it would also be moving its Bay Area headquarters to Austin.
Denver and Miami were also greeted by new expatriates from Silicon Valley. Palantir moved its headquarters to Denver following complaints from CEO Alex Karp that the Bay Area has a “monoculture,” and famous investor Keith Rabois has been a staunch supporter of Miami, telling Fortune that San Francisco is too poorly managed to stay.
Still, the data shows that perhaps primarily Silicon Valley’s most important titans have left the region, which Ted Egan, chief economist of San Francisco, told The Chronicle is a “silver lining.” The fact that the majority of people have not left the state means they could return to the city once the pandemic subsides.
“You won’t have to worry about getting them back from Boise,” he said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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