16 ms·

US Postal Service data suggests significant population decline in San Francisco

162 points by edward 6y ago

qppo 6y ago
I vote we dig up the mountains and fill in the bay with the dirt. Take care of the shortage of land and fire risk at the same time. Let the masses flow back into affordable housing in the new interburbs between the peninsula and East Bay
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  I see this idea get floated around a few times, and I actually think it makes sense for being macro-environmentally friendly. While there's environmental destruction of this area, it's the size of half of SF proper. The possibility is that a megopolis can be erected on top of it, with the density and height of downtown SF. This would be a clean slate to house 5m+ people, a new New York, and completely unwind the supply-side issues of housing in the US, effectively lowering house prices and rent across the entire country. Back to the net-effect on the environment; while the local wildlife would suffer, the benefits of reduced emissions and sprawl elsewhere on the globe would be immense. Imagine the de-carbonization that would occur elsewhere with plentiful, dense, and cheap housing and jobs in this area.
  - qppo 6y ago
    It's mostly a joke. We can't even get ecological clearance to build medium density housing in most of the area, let alone blow up a couple mountains. What can happen is slow encroachment into the bay from the sides. It's already happened over many years (and dredging is continuous). And it wouldn't look like a megapolis, more like Venice meets Santa Clarita
rossdavidh 6y ago
Interesting, but I would have preferred to see how these numbers compare to the same time period a year ago.
mholm 6y ago
I can't say I'm surprised. Cities aren't nearly as fun when other people have to be considered biohazards. The question that remains to be seen is what percentage are gone forever?
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Yeah, this isn't like downturns in populations of other cities, like Scranton, that reflect deep systemic or economic issues. This flight is a direct response to COVID, and I'd expect to see it reverse relatively quickly after the pandemic resolves.
- duxup 6y ago
  Even in non San Francisco areas: On the internet there were a lot of questions from folks in the city asking about a non crowded park. Most of the answers were "just drive out to the suburbs", and even folks who said they didn't want to ... were eventually giving that advice to others pretty fast. I don't know that we're going to see permanent type decisions made, but in an epidemic like COVID, and you wanted to go outside, it was hard to avoid that you needed to head out of town to do any distancing.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  Especially since the best parts of city-living (restaurants, clubs, bars, concerts, shows, etc.) aren't an option during a pandemic.
- ProfessorLayton 6y ago
  Forever might be a bit of a stretch, but I believe there's a lot to be concerned about the negative feedback loop that awaits SF and cities like it. A lot of businesses that make the city desirable to a lot of people (read: tax base) are on an indefinite hiatus due to the virus, meaning there's little reason to pay exorbitant prices to live in SF for the time being. The problem is that a lot of businesses won't be able to survive this recession, and the city's tax base will shrink further. Yes, those businesses will eventually be replaced, but it won't be a quick affair if we reach the point of no return. Further complicating this matter for the businesses that do survive will be the fact that new businesses will be able to run much leaner due to being able to lock in much cheaper leases and not shackled with debt. While I don't believe SF is doomed by any means, I do think that it's in for a day of reckoning unless it can reconcile its hugely bloated budget with the fact that it'll be a prolonged climb to where it was. Now with a vaccine on the way it may be able to avoid this if it's distributed fast enough, but I do think the window is closing rapidly.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
Since the beginning if the quarantine, 90,000 people left San Francisco. Nothing shocking when just spelt out.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Absent anything else, I think 10% population drop is fairly significant. I guess we'll see in the city budget next year. Interestingly, because of the rapid growth in the city population over the last decade, this just puts it at 2010 numbers.
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    This data doesn't tell us about anyone moving into San Francisco, so the drop may be much smaller.
    - WalterSear 6y ago
      IIRC I read that U-haul rentals from SF to Phoenix are currently $1500. From Phoenix to SF? $300.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    I think the budget for next year was already destined to be a mess because of the quarantine.
- trianglesphere 6y ago
  10% of the population leaving isn't a small number. Though I'm not sure what a normal turnover is for SF and how this compares.
  - ardit33 6y ago
    SF used to be about 780k in 2010, before the pandemic, it was over 880k, so it is reverting back to 2010 levels... It is not alarming right now, but if the trend continues next year, it is going to be a major problem for the tax revenue. Raising taxes will not help in stoping the bleeding and make things worse... (SF is a city of renters, and they can easily leave)
nicolashahn 6y ago
Would love to see similar stats for NYC.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  https://www.nationalreview.com/news/more-than-300000-new-yorkers-have-fled-city-since-pandemic-began/ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/more-than-300000-new-yor... (National Review: More Than 300,000 New Yorkers Have Fled City Since Pandemic Began) Source of data is Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for change of address stats from USPS. EDIT: Y'all shouldn't use this single data point alone for anything of value.
  - peterbonney 6y ago
    I think change of address data isn't reliable in a city where so many people own or rent vacation homes within driving distance. The article only posits that the USPS data may miss some people who moved and didn't change their address officially, but it also likely misses people who officially changed their address because they planned to be away for an extended period (6 months or more) but will still return permanently in the future. The plural of anecdote is not data, but for what it's worth I personally know of more people in the second bucket than the first. Time will tell, of course.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    There's alot of noise about this; the NY Post in particular is talking about "everyone" moving out, with the most popular destination being the Hamptons. I'm in NYC 3-5 times a month. It's slower with fewer office workers in Manhattan, but it's still NYC. Manhattan is less busy in some areas anyway as the new construction of money laundering condo units get built. Queens, Brooklyn, etc look pretty much the same, but then the scope of "everyone" fleeing to their Hamptons beach homes is limited in scope.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  I think a difference is that NYC was probably more of a shift from cramped apartments downtown to larger apartments/homes in the suburbs. I don't know if that many people fled the greater NYC metro, whereas SF has a lot of flight to other regions entirely. Anecdote: my parents live in an outer suburb of NYC, about an hour driving with zero traffic, that has a train line to Hoboken (with a couple options to transfer to NYC, or just take a ferry from hoboken) that takes like 90 minutes one-way. They've actually seen a ton of people move into the developments around them this year. People want the space, the lower cost, and it's a pretty area near hiking trails and nice parks. Schools aren't top-tier but they're pretty good. Sure, nobody wants a 90 minute+ train ride every day, but if you only have to do it a couple times a week, and there are tech jobs in NJ itself to eventually seek out, it's not a bad choice.
wskinner 6y ago
It would be interesting to see the raw data and compare to the base rate (exodus / ingress over the last few years). The article doesn’t seem to link to its data source.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  You can calculate net ingress/egress using the ACS data for SF County. Num address change requests is a proxy for ingress/egress that's maybe less accurate (i.e. doesn't capture non-US immigrants leaving the country permanently who maybe frequently do not forward mail).
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Too bad the Census was conducted early this year instead of sometime next year as the events of this year likely have caused a significant migration event that will be difficult to understand fully.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Oh don't worry, there will be a "significant migration" anyway thanks to the malicious ineptitude of the census.
  - idoh 6y ago
    What ineptitude?
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      Something like 50 million households were not counted as of September.
paxys 6y ago
The data is useless without comparing it to the same period a year ago. People already move in and out of (and within) San Francisco a lot, especially in summer months. Are there a significant number of extra moves this year? Are there fewer people moving in to SF than normal? And even if there is a major disparity, the big question is how many of those households intend to stay away for good.
- Wohlf 6y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2020/10/08/921769579/wheres-everyone-moving-to https://www.npr.org/2020/10/08/921769579/wheres-everyone-mov... Yes, NYC and SF are having slight population declines. It's not that bad though (yet). Most people are moving to cheaper cities a few hours away.
- kevinpet 6y ago
  This was my thought. Showing a single year chart is a red flag that it's clickbait. I have adjusted my beliefs about people leaving SF downward as a result of this article. I had expected lots of people to be leaving, I am personally considering leaving San Mateo, but the small rise from earlier in the year suggests this just isn't happening.
dboreham 6y ago
New idea: perhaps it would be cost effective to pay liberal-leaning voters to move from SF and NYC into the rural red-state districts?
- paxys 6y ago
  This has already been happening for a while. Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Virginia were all solid red states, but are now turning blue mainly because of migrants from California and New York. As for the payment part - who has enough of an incentive to coordinate and fund it?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - SilasX 6y ago
    Maybe these people have that money? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105867
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    Please show a source that Arizona turning blue is "mainly" due to migration from California.
    - lizknope 6y ago
      I can't say that it is why Arizona turned blue but these articles have numbers for the people moving from CA to AZ. Whether they vote blue or red isn't really stated but considering that CA is a blue state it is not crazy to think that many of the people who move will vote blue. https://azbigmedia.com/business/economy/lots-of-californians-moving-to-arizona-but-its-not-a-one-way-street/ https://azbigmedia.com/business/economy/lots-of-californians... https://www.azeconomy.org/2020/09/economy/destination-arizona-where-are-people-moving-from-and-why/ https://www.azeconomy.org/2020/09/economy/destination-arizon... Californians have been beating a path to the Grand Canyon State and moving to Arizona for more than the last decade – but it’s not exactly been a one-way street. While close to 500,000 people moved from California to Arizona from 2010 to 2018, just over 308,000 people were moving in the other direction, according to state-to-state migration flow data released this fall by the Census Bureau.
pauval99 6y ago
lo siento
stickyricky 6y ago
Currently live in Chicago, visited San Fran a few months ago. It's eerily and completely dead. Like no-cars-no-people-no-life-at-all-dead. Compared to Chicago where there are thousands of people going about their day (walking, biking, driving). SF is much more low rise though. Could just be all the commuters that no longer commute that contributed to the feeling of... apocalypse.
- papito 6y ago
  Not to state the obvious, but "a few months ago" was the height of lockdowns.
  - xoxoy 6y ago
    I live in SF and can confirm that downtown is very dead.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      I live a few blocks from Union Square -- can confirm.
    - papito 6y ago
      But what about the residential areas? NYC is very spotty, for example. Residential areas are hopping because that's where people live and work now, and midtown is shuttered. Usual salad and coffee places near the offices have no reason to be open right now.
    - mistersquid 6y ago
      Downtown is dead, yes, but Polk Gulch and Valencia Street (for example) are very much alive.
      - xoxoy 6y ago
        the city is so small that any exodus of existing residents isn’t going to be that noticeable because there are still people moving here everyday. but yes the residential areas feel pretty much the same as far as crowdedness goes.
BrianOnHN 6y ago
"The city full of people most economically capable of moving anywhere in the country experiences population decline during a period when living in a city is less than ideal." Well, Duh. Edit: "It has to be mentioned that said city also ranks among the highest in remote-work capabilities."
- tolbish 6y ago
  I don't think it's that obvious, and I don't think it's about one's capability of moving. Otherwise every wealthy city would be dying. This just looks like San Francisco isn't a very livable city outside of a few specific interests.
  - BrianOnHN 6y ago
    I suppose you "live there" and have "a lot more data points." Even so, I'm going to bet on Occam's razor for this one.
    - tolbish 6y ago
      Wait I thought my point was based on Occam's razor.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > every wealthy city would be dying Sincere question: what cities of comparable or larger size are considered as wealthy as San Francisco? Manhattan (not a city)?
    - tolbish 6y ago
      Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and Paris are all probably far more wealthy and do not seem to be dying.
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        > Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and Paris are all probably far more wealthy All four of those cities have average incomes less than SF, and all but Paris are less than half that of SF.
cbhl 6y ago
Earth Class Mail defaults to issuing addresses in Beaverton, Oregon. So if USPS is receiving a lot of Change of Mail address requests to Beaverton, it doesn't necessarily mean folks are moving to Beaverton.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Anecdotal evidence is that heavily in favor of the "If I can work from home, I'm going to work from a less expensive home." Which I find a bit surprising since a number of people at Google worked in Mountain View and rode the GBus from San Francisco. There is also the COVID factor which is to say if you can't go out to eat or drink at bars, there may be less appeal to living in the city. So next year at this time, post vaccine, will be an interesting comparison. And of course the city politics are always entertaining, but perhaps less so as people get older and start families. Personally I'm looking forward to all of the interesting data sets that include 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. That 5 year stretch should be really interesting to dive into.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 6y ago
  It's been pretty common over the past couple of decades for younger college-educated people to live in a city but move out at some point as they get older. Anecdotally, this seems to have pushed up the timeframe for a lot of people though I also know a few in the "never imagined I'd leave Brooklyn" camp. I suspect most of those people will not move back especially if they can continue working remotely. One question is whether a fresh cohort moves in when things open back up. That's been the pattern but it's certainly not a law of nature (and wasn't from about the 50s through the 90s).
- thehappypm 6y ago
  The thing is, Mountain View is hardly cheaper than San Francisco. That's what makes the Bay so weird. There's no way to escape the high prices. I've lived all over the Northeast and the Northeast is definitely expensive but there are absolutely cheap places out there. You can live in a suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, and commute one hair on a direct train to downtown Boston. You can live in much cheaper Lowell or Lawrence and commute, again, one hour to downtown Boston. You can live in Worcester, again, one hour to downtown Boston. And the city has little pockets of affordability, albeit in less nice/higher crime parts, but they do exist. SF really doesn't have this. The public transit is lacking so it's basically cheaper => closer to the jobs, with few exceptions.
kepler1 6y ago
Well, I don't wish to be too negative, but SF is really reaping what it sowed. Up to now the problems were just papered over by enough benefits for people working there to outweigh all SF's issues. The government and people of SF squandered years of opportunity to clean up the city, make it more affordable to live here (is there pride to be had in being the most expensive place to live?), implement sound policies, focus on the right things, and get people to make long term better decisions. They did very little of that preparation. It's like building up points for when hard times come. Instead, they continued to enable housing restrictions to drive up rents like crazy (acknowledging that this is a California-wide problem I admit), letting entrenched owners interests combine with ridiculous things like rent control and "neighborhood preservation", failing to take a harder line on open air drug use and crime, letting Muni and Bart become public toilets that charge optional admission fees where you also are at risk of getting stabbed, etc. etc. the list goes on and on. Overlooking quality of life issues in favor of being tolerant of anything that someone would object to having restrictions on or less charitable approaches to. And now, as the reality of the virus situation has exposed what people really prefer to do, they fled, and the impact to local businesses, tax base, etc. will be felt for years to come. Parts of the city are lawless and a danger for people to venture into. Good thing that all the supervisors were concerned with gender neutral bathrooms while fewer and fewer people could afford to live here to enjoy them. I'm not a conservative. I'm not a Trump supporter. But even I can see that SF shot itself in the foot.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  > Parts of the city are lawless and a danger for people to venture into. What planet are you living on? This is not the case in any major US city, let alone San Francisco.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    I mean, there are certainly places in SF that are pretty sketch late at night, which is not something I've encountered in any other US city. I've lived in cities my entire life.
    - 6y ago
thinnerlizzy 6y ago
Anecdotal of course but I left and don’t plan to return. I also don’t know anyone who still lives there that doesn’t want to leave. That was mostly true pre-pandemic however.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  Yep. I left too. There was huge pent up desire to leave (pre-COVID) amongst most of the software dev / designer set I run with. COVID finally delivered the push it took for everyone to actually do it. And no one is missing SF honestly.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > I also don’t know anyone who still lives there that doesn’t want to leave. Probably because many came for their jobs. Plenty of people want to live in SF.
- tbatchelli 6y ago
  I just moved to a 3x bigger apartment for a 50% rent increase. Not everyone is wanting to move out, many people here seem to be trading places to improve their quality of life, leveraging the lower rents and higher availability. The city is starting to remind me the SF of mid-2000s, minus the rave parties.
lazyasciiart 6y ago
The log of FOIA requests received by the USPS is fascinating - In September somebody used the process to request a job application, and there were at least 8 requests for Change of Address data. I'm very tempted to request it for my own state just to see if there's anything interesting - I wonder how many requests would justify adding it to their Frequently Requested Data section https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/library.htm https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/library.htm https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/documents/foia-logs/september-2020.pdf https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/documents/foia-logs/se...
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  If you make the request through https://muckrock.com https://muckrock.com, the request as well as the response and data is then publicly available to all on the platform. Happy to chip in for a crowdfunded data collection effort in this regard (report back with a link to the campaign) [1]. [1] https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/nov/02/crowdfund-guide/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/nov/02/crowdfund...
mamon 6y ago
I wonder how much of that effect is because of this: https://barbadoswelcomestamp.bb/ https://barbadoswelcomestamp.bb/
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  100%
asveikau 6y ago
I am seeing a huge number of for sale or for rent signs in neighborhoods I frequent. If you are like me and you like it here, there are probably incredible deals to be had. Nobody will be able to predict when, but I think it's pretty likely boom times will be back eventually.
- jackmodern 6y ago
  yeah I am moving from a Jr. 1 BR to a modern 2 BR and reducing my rent in the process. :)
- vorhemus 6y ago
  I wonder if citizens of Detroit made the same predictions in the 1970s. It's tempting to just linearly project the status quo into the future but looking at this graph here (https://cdn.howmuch.net/articles/61-c98f-5e41.jpg https://cdn.howmuch.net/articles/61-c98f-5e41.jpg) it is highly possible that IT/Tech will play a less dominant role in 2067 than today including that the next big corporations potentially grow and rise in completely different areas than SF and Silicon Valley.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    > I wonder if citizens of Detroit made the same predictions in the 1970s. This is a good point, and I have spent time in the rust belt and great lakes regions so it isn't lost on me. This was frankly my reaction when I moved to the west coast. (Example from further north: it was hard to see glitzy retail in a place like Bellevue, WA and not think it is overly dependent on the rotting corpse of MSFT. Sorry for a blunt description.) But in my understanding, though, I think San Francisco in particular has had the boom and bust cycles even before tech was most dominant and before a bunch of tech moved north from the valley. It's famously hard to predict things like this. I just have a hunch that some form of housing scarcity will return to SF.
  - werber 6y ago
    Detroit's white flight started happening in the 1950's, that's when the city population started shrinking and the suburbs became the mess we have now. My family left the city proper starting in the late 1950's onto the early 1980's. I think by the time the Rebellion happened in '67 that prediction was considered pretty mainstream.
birken 6y ago
I do not understand the apocalyptic takes so many people have. The major problem SF has had for a long time is housing is too expensive. People leaving the city will help counter this, which is going to probably benefit the city in the long term. In the short term though SF is still an expensive place to live and you aren't getting nearly the benefit because SF, like all cities, is just a shell of itself right now. To imagine that once the Pandemic is over SF will not burst back into life is crazy. SF is a wonderful city due to its weather, geography, culture, density, parks, public transit, and many other great things about it. One bad year is not going to destroy the city. And many people not in the tech community have been a little upset at the monoculture that seemingly has developed in the past 10 years related to the tech boom. Guess what... If a bunch of those tech companies leave, the city is going to be less of a monoculture. That's good! Change isn't always bad.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  Housing prices are both cause and effect of things like population, it's a very silly thing to generalize about. > And many people not in the tech community have been a little upset at the monoculture that seemingly has developed in the past 10 years related to the tech boom. Everyone hears this sentiment. But I can't think of a community that "got better" when its best earners left. It's just such backwards thinking.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Your sentiment implies that high earners are a necessary thing, or even something that should be optimized for, for “better” outcomes. Better means different things to different people. An artist, an old-money socialite, a tech bro, and a blue-collar worker all have varying definitions of the word “better.”
    - mc32 6y ago
      High income earners trickle down their money to other sectors of the economy --they have more disposable income. This is why on the one hand conspicuous consumers are good; on the other hand that means it does not get invested in longer term things like R&D, infrastructure, etc. They can afford the iconic $14 guacamole on toast that encourages chefs and restauranteurs to try new things and in turn those people spend and support other areas of the economy. If you only have median income people, then, it's not bad, but it's not as vigorous an economy and things change less.
fairity 6y ago
Very odd that the article fails to compare the volume of "change-of-address" requests to pre-pandemic periods. It simply states that they received "more than 140,000 change-of-address requests during the pandemic period". Without any comparison points, this is pretty meaningless?
- ardit33 6y ago
  From my memory it used to be 50-80k at its peak.... so, this is at least 60-70k more folks moving... in a city of 850k people, that's almost 9% of the population... which is not the end of the world, but if it doesn't stop, then it will become a problem.. SF used to be about 780-800k in the early 2010, so it is basically reverting back to that number
proc0 6y ago
I suspect most were tolerating the shit (pun intended) because work was there. With remote work, the rent prices make no sense. So now we should see if the problem was really housing, and there should be a huge decrease in people living outside, but I think probably not and the problems were never housing and instead bad incentives and programs that lure people who have no chance at surviving in an expensive city.
kickingvegas 6y ago
SF native here. Those neighborhoods are highly transient. As others have mentioned in this thread, the people who moved out are largely migrants here for work. Now that the work has dried up, why stay?
dmtroyer 6y ago
Las Vegas? Really? I am so confused.
- fairity 6y ago
  The closest place to SF with no income tax.
  - suyash 6y ago
    That would actually be Reno, NV.
    - babesh 6y ago
      Also Stateline, NV depending on where you are coming from... or Incline Village, NV.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Why? As others have noted, no income tax. Relatively cheap housing. And while it isn't to my taste, a lot of people like the SW desert climate, it's not the worst thing if you can deal with the blazing hot summers. There's no real city there but you're near a lot of recreational activities including being within a few hours of some of the best national parks.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    Also same time zone, which is important when you still have to VC with your CA-based team. Vegas is probably the cheapest major city you can live in and still be in Pacific time.
    - thehappypm 6y ago
      Interesting. I can think of a few other ones. Bakersfield, Spokane, a few spots in Oregon like Corvallis.
Zenst 6y ago
With all the work from home and people moving back with parents or out of expensive area's that make no sense for them due to WFH. I wonder if we are seeing a wealth distrubition that for the outer cities will be a boost and sharp reverse in the decline many seen. So be interesting to see the data for other parts - would love to see a heatmap of change over time for various parts of the World - certainly Amazon etc would have such data and country postal services would have another source. But biggest one would be for Americans shown by states taxes and is the shift within states or seeing some states loose workers to other states. Whatever it is, this whole pandemic will be a source of data analysis and debate for decades to come.
cwt137 6y ago
This was a poorly written article. Although it had numbers, there was nothing to compare it with. For example, the same time period in the previous year or to other big cites, etc.
toomanyrichies 6y ago
In my mind, the situation is so drastic because (I would expect) the massive population flight will have long-term negative implications for the tax base, which means less money for social programs and upkeep of city infrastructure. Judging by the lack of sanitation in many of the city's neighborhoods, my uninformed guess is that there was already a lack of such funds before COVID hit. The impact of this flight on the tax base could be even more severe if the people leaving are higher-than-average earners (which, given their mobility, my guess is they are). Moving to a new city is a non-trivial life change, and once people move, they're unlikely to move back anytime soon. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I can't help but wonder if we'll be comparing San Francisco with Detroit in 5 years. I hope I'm wrong.
- burnthrow 6y ago
  Unfortunately the Bay Area has squandered (or simply exhausted) its imagination capital. The region is more associated with the political shenanigans of social media users and companies than creation of cool, subversive technology. And as far as the VC pull, it's diminished with capital flight, and I expect the next boom will see a lot of startup activity on the Front Range.
kelnos 6y ago
> At least 34,803 of the address change requests, or 28%, were to new addresses within San Francisco So... not quite the >100k number that the article starts off with. Also not clear if there's any data being considered about people moving into SF from outside. Yes, I expect this to be a smaller number, but it's still irresponsible to breathlessly talk about an exodus without factoring it in. So looks like the total "exodus" is less than 89,328. Which... is that a lot? No data on a similar period for last year, so nothing to compare it to. And just not sure why this matters? It's been pretty obvious to those of us here that a lot of people have been leaving during the pandemic, mostly people who've had to be here for work (and no longer need to be), but either never wanted to live here, or wanted to but have found the cost not to be worth it. I will not shed a tear for the people who never wanted to live here. For the people for whom it's a stretch to afford living here but want to, that genuinely sucks, and we still have a lot of work to do to fix that, pandemic or not. But it's not like the city's population or housing market is collapsing. Rents have dropped, but they're still unaffordably high for a lot of people. Home sale prices have mostly held up. There's a lot of worrying around commercial real estate, and I think that's a legitimate thing to worry about, but I don't think the sky is falling just yet.

162 points by edward 6y ago

qppo 6y ago

I vote we dig up the mountains and fill in the bay with the dirt. Take care of the shortage of land and fire risk at the same time. Let the masses flow back into affordable housing in the new interburbs between the peninsula and East Bay

reducesuffering 6y ago
I see this idea get floated around a few times, and I actually think it makes sense for being macro-environmentally friendly. While there's environmental destruction of this area, it's the size of half of SF proper. The possibility is that a megopolis can be erected on top of it, with the density and height of downtown SF. This would be a clean slate to house 5m+ people, a new New York, and completely unwind the supply-side issues of housing in the US, effectively lowering house prices and rent across the entire country. Back to the net-effect on the environment; while the local wildlife would suffer, the benefits of reduced emissions and sprawl elsewhere on the globe would be immense. Imagine the de-carbonization that would occur elsewhere with plentiful, dense, and cheap housing and jobs in this area.
- qppo 6y ago
  It's mostly a joke. We can't even get ecological clearance to build medium density housing in most of the area, let alone blow up a couple mountains. What can happen is slow encroachment into the bay from the sides. It's already happened over many years (and dredging is continuous). And it wouldn't look like a megapolis, more like Venice meets Santa Clarita

rossdavidh 6y ago

Interesting, but I would have preferred to see how these numbers compare to the same time period a year ago.

mholm 6y ago

I can't say I'm surprised. Cities aren't nearly as fun when other people have to be considered biohazards. The question that remains to be seen is what percentage are gone forever?

heavyset_go 6y ago
Yeah, this isn't like downturns in populations of other cities, like Scranton, that reflect deep systemic or economic issues. This flight is a direct response to COVID, and I'd expect to see it reverse relatively quickly after the pandemic resolves.
duxup 6y ago
Even in non San Francisco areas: On the internet there were a lot of questions from folks in the city asking about a non crowded park. Most of the answers were "just drive out to the suburbs", and even folks who said they didn't want to ... were eventually giving that advice to others pretty fast. I don't know that we're going to see permanent type decisions made, but in an epidemic like COVID, and you wanted to go outside, it was hard to avoid that you needed to head out of town to do any distancing.
macspoofing 6y ago
Especially since the best parts of city-living (restaurants, clubs, bars, concerts, shows, etc.) aren't an option during a pandemic.
ProfessorLayton 6y ago
Forever might be a bit of a stretch, but I believe there's a lot to be concerned about the negative feedback loop that awaits SF and cities like it. A lot of businesses that make the city desirable to a lot of people (read: tax base) are on an indefinite hiatus due to the virus, meaning there's little reason to pay exorbitant prices to live in SF for the time being. The problem is that a lot of businesses won't be able to survive this recession, and the city's tax base will shrink further. Yes, those businesses will eventually be replaced, but it won't be a quick affair if we reach the point of no return. Further complicating this matter for the businesses that do survive will be the fact that new businesses will be able to run much leaner due to being able to lock in much cheaper leases and not shackled with debt. While I don't believe SF is doomed by any means, I do think that it's in for a day of reckoning unless it can reconcile its hugely bloated budget with the fact that it'll be a prolonged climb to where it was. Now with a vaccine on the way it may be able to avoid this if it's distributed fast enough, but I do think the window is closing rapidly.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

Since the beginning if the quarantine, 90,000 people left San Francisco. Nothing shocking when just spelt out.

renewiltord 6y ago
Absent anything else, I think 10% population drop is fairly significant. I guess we'll see in the city budget next year. Interestingly, because of the rapid growth in the city population over the last decade, this just puts it at 2010 numbers.
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  This data doesn't tell us about anyone moving into San Francisco, so the drop may be much smaller.
  - WalterSear 6y ago
    IIRC I read that U-haul rentals from SF to Phoenix are currently $1500. From Phoenix to SF? $300.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  I think the budget for next year was already destined to be a mess because of the quarantine.
trianglesphere 6y ago
10% of the population leaving isn't a small number. Though I'm not sure what a normal turnover is for SF and how this compares.
- ardit33 6y ago
  SF used to be about 780k in 2010, before the pandemic, it was over 880k, so it is reverting back to 2010 levels... It is not alarming right now, but if the trend continues next year, it is going to be a major problem for the tax revenue. Raising taxes will not help in stoping the bleeding and make things worse... (SF is a city of renters, and they can easily leave)

nicolashahn 6y ago

Would love to see similar stats for NYC.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/more-than-300000-new-yorkers-have-fled-city-since-pandemic-began/ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/more-than-300000-new-yor... (National Review: More Than 300,000 New Yorkers Have Fled City Since Pandemic Began) Source of data is Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for change of address stats from USPS. EDIT: Y'all shouldn't use this single data point alone for anything of value.
- peterbonney 6y ago
  I think change of address data isn't reliable in a city where so many people own or rent vacation homes within driving distance. The article only posits that the USPS data may miss some people who moved and didn't change their address officially, but it also likely misses people who officially changed their address because they planned to be away for an extended period (6 months or more) but will still return permanently in the future. The plural of anecdote is not data, but for what it's worth I personally know of more people in the second bucket than the first. Time will tell, of course.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  There's alot of noise about this; the NY Post in particular is talking about "everyone" moving out, with the most popular destination being the Hamptons. I'm in NYC 3-5 times a month. It's slower with fewer office workers in Manhattan, but it's still NYC. Manhattan is less busy in some areas anyway as the new construction of money laundering condo units get built. Queens, Brooklyn, etc look pretty much the same, but then the scope of "everyone" fleeing to their Hamptons beach homes is limited in scope.
thehappypm 6y ago
I think a difference is that NYC was probably more of a shift from cramped apartments downtown to larger apartments/homes in the suburbs. I don't know if that many people fled the greater NYC metro, whereas SF has a lot of flight to other regions entirely. Anecdote: my parents live in an outer suburb of NYC, about an hour driving with zero traffic, that has a train line to Hoboken (with a couple options to transfer to NYC, or just take a ferry from hoboken) that takes like 90 minutes one-way. They've actually seen a ton of people move into the developments around them this year. People want the space, the lower cost, and it's a pretty area near hiking trails and nice parks. Schools aren't top-tier but they're pretty good. Sure, nobody wants a 90 minute+ train ride every day, but if you only have to do it a couple times a week, and there are tech jobs in NJ itself to eventually seek out, it's not a bad choice.

wskinner 6y ago

It would be interesting to see the raw data and compare to the base rate (exodus / ingress over the last few years). The article doesn’t seem to link to its data source.

renewiltord 6y ago
You can calculate net ingress/egress using the ACS data for SF County. Num address change requests is a proxy for ingress/egress that's maybe less accurate (i.e. doesn't capture non-US immigrants leaving the country permanently who maybe frequently do not forward mail).

Mountain_Skies 6y ago

Too bad the Census was conducted early this year instead of sometime next year as the events of this year likely have caused a significant migration event that will be difficult to understand fully.

Spooky23 6y ago
Oh don't worry, there will be a "significant migration" anyway thanks to the malicious ineptitude of the census.
- idoh 6y ago
  What ineptitude?
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    Something like 50 million households were not counted as of September.

paxys 6y ago

The data is useless without comparing it to the same period a year ago. People already move in and out of (and within) San Francisco a lot, especially in summer months. Are there a significant number of extra moves this year? Are there fewer people moving in to SF than normal? And even if there is a major disparity, the big question is how many of those households intend to stay away for good.

Wohlf 6y ago
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/08/921769579/wheres-everyone-moving-to https://www.npr.org/2020/10/08/921769579/wheres-everyone-mov... Yes, NYC and SF are having slight population declines. It's not that bad though (yet). Most people are moving to cheaper cities a few hours away.
kevinpet 6y ago
This was my thought. Showing a single year chart is a red flag that it's clickbait. I have adjusted my beliefs about people leaving SF downward as a result of this article. I had expected lots of people to be leaving, I am personally considering leaving San Mateo, but the small rise from earlier in the year suggests this just isn't happening.

dboreham 6y ago

New idea: perhaps it would be cost effective to pay liberal-leaning voters to move from SF and NYC into the rural red-state districts?

paxys 6y ago
This has already been happening for a while. Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Virginia were all solid red states, but are now turning blue mainly because of migrants from California and New York. As for the payment part - who has enough of an incentive to coordinate and fund it?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- SilasX 6y ago
  Maybe these people have that money? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105867
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Please show a source that Arizona turning blue is "mainly" due to migration from California.
  - lizknope 6y ago
    I can't say that it is why Arizona turned blue but these articles have numbers for the people moving from CA to AZ. Whether they vote blue or red isn't really stated but considering that CA is a blue state it is not crazy to think that many of the people who move will vote blue. https://azbigmedia.com/business/economy/lots-of-californians-moving-to-arizona-but-its-not-a-one-way-street/ https://azbigmedia.com/business/economy/lots-of-californians... https://www.azeconomy.org/2020/09/economy/destination-arizona-where-are-people-moving-from-and-why/ https://www.azeconomy.org/2020/09/economy/destination-arizon... Californians have been beating a path to the Grand Canyon State and moving to Arizona for more than the last decade – but it’s not exactly been a one-way street. While close to 500,000 people moved from California to Arizona from 2010 to 2018, just over 308,000 people were moving in the other direction, according to state-to-state migration flow data released this fall by the Census Bureau.

pauval99 6y ago

lo siento

stickyricky 6y ago

Currently live in Chicago, visited San Fran a few months ago. It's eerily and completely dead. Like no-cars-no-people-no-life-at-all-dead. Compared to Chicago where there are thousands of people going about their day (walking, biking, driving). SF is much more low rise though. Could just be all the commuters that no longer commute that contributed to the feeling of... apocalypse.

papito 6y ago
Not to state the obvious, but "a few months ago" was the height of lockdowns.
- xoxoy 6y ago
  I live in SF and can confirm that downtown is very dead.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    I live a few blocks from Union Square -- can confirm.
  - papito 6y ago
    But what about the residential areas? NYC is very spotty, for example. Residential areas are hopping because that's where people live and work now, and midtown is shuttered. Usual salad and coffee places near the offices have no reason to be open right now.
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    Downtown is dead, yes, but Polk Gulch and Valencia Street (for example) are very much alive.
    - xoxoy 6y ago
      the city is so small that any exodus of existing residents isn’t going to be that noticeable because there are still people moving here everyday. but yes the residential areas feel pretty much the same as far as crowdedness goes.

BrianOnHN 6y ago

"The city full of people most economically capable of moving anywhere in the country experiences population decline during a period when living in a city is less than ideal." Well, Duh. Edit: "It has to be mentioned that said city also ranks among the highest in remote-work capabilities."

tolbish 6y ago
I don't think it's that obvious, and I don't think it's about one's capability of moving. Otherwise every wealthy city would be dying. This just looks like San Francisco isn't a very livable city outside of a few specific interests.
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  I suppose you "live there" and have "a lot more data points." Even so, I'm going to bet on Occam's razor for this one.
  - tolbish 6y ago
    Wait I thought my point was based on Occam's razor.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > every wealthy city would be dying Sincere question: what cities of comparable or larger size are considered as wealthy as San Francisco? Manhattan (not a city)?
  - tolbish 6y ago
    Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and Paris are all probably far more wealthy and do not seem to be dying.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      > Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and Paris are all probably far more wealthy All four of those cities have average incomes less than SF, and all but Paris are less than half that of SF.

cbhl 6y ago

Earth Class Mail defaults to issuing addresses in Beaverton, Oregon. So if USPS is receiving a lot of Change of Mail address requests to Beaverton, it doesn't necessarily mean folks are moving to Beaverton.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Anecdotal evidence is that heavily in favor of the "If I can work from home, I'm going to work from a less expensive home." Which I find a bit surprising since a number of people at Google worked in Mountain View and rode the GBus from San Francisco. There is also the COVID factor which is to say if you can't go out to eat or drink at bars, there may be less appeal to living in the city. So next year at this time, post vaccine, will be an interesting comparison. And of course the city politics are always entertaining, but perhaps less so as people get older and start families. Personally I'm looking forward to all of the interesting data sets that include 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. That 5 year stretch should be really interesting to dive into.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 6y ago
It's been pretty common over the past couple of decades for younger college-educated people to live in a city but move out at some point as they get older. Anecdotally, this seems to have pushed up the timeframe for a lot of people though I also know a few in the "never imagined I'd leave Brooklyn" camp. I suspect most of those people will not move back especially if they can continue working remotely. One question is whether a fresh cohort moves in when things open back up. That's been the pattern but it's certainly not a law of nature (and wasn't from about the 50s through the 90s).
thehappypm 6y ago
The thing is, Mountain View is hardly cheaper than San Francisco. That's what makes the Bay so weird. There's no way to escape the high prices. I've lived all over the Northeast and the Northeast is definitely expensive but there are absolutely cheap places out there. You can live in a suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, and commute one hair on a direct train to downtown Boston. You can live in much cheaper Lowell or Lawrence and commute, again, one hour to downtown Boston. You can live in Worcester, again, one hour to downtown Boston. And the city has little pockets of affordability, albeit in less nice/higher crime parts, but they do exist. SF really doesn't have this. The public transit is lacking so it's basically cheaper => closer to the jobs, with few exceptions.

kepler1 6y ago

Well, I don't wish to be too negative, but SF is really reaping what it sowed. Up to now the problems were just papered over by enough benefits for people working there to outweigh all SF's issues. The government and people of SF squandered years of opportunity to clean up the city, make it more affordable to live here (is there pride to be had in being the most expensive place to live?), implement sound policies, focus on the right things, and get people to make long term better decisions. They did very little of that preparation. It's like building up points for when hard times come. Instead, they continued to enable housing restrictions to drive up rents like crazy (acknowledging that this is a California-wide problem I admit), letting entrenched owners interests combine with ridiculous things like rent control and "neighborhood preservation", failing to take a harder line on open air drug use and crime, letting Muni and Bart become public toilets that charge optional admission fees where you also are at risk of getting stabbed, etc. etc. the list goes on and on. Overlooking quality of life issues in favor of being tolerant of anything that someone would object to having restrictions on or less charitable approaches to. And now, as the reality of the virus situation has exposed what people really prefer to do, they fled, and the impact to local businesses, tax base, etc. will be felt for years to come. Parts of the city are lawless and a danger for people to venture into. Good thing that all the supervisors were concerned with gender neutral bathrooms while fewer and fewer people could afford to live here to enjoy them. I'm not a conservative. I'm not a Trump supporter. But even I can see that SF shot itself in the foot.

duskwuff 6y ago
> Parts of the city are lawless and a danger for people to venture into. What planet are you living on? This is not the case in any major US city, let alone San Francisco.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I mean, there are certainly places in SF that are pretty sketch late at night, which is not something I've encountered in any other US city. I've lived in cities my entire life.
  - 6y ago

thinnerlizzy 6y ago

Anecdotal of course but I left and don’t plan to return. I also don’t know anyone who still lives there that doesn’t want to leave. That was mostly true pre-pandemic however.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago
Yep. I left too. There was huge pent up desire to leave (pre-COVID) amongst most of the software dev / designer set I run with. COVID finally delivered the push it took for everyone to actually do it. And no one is missing SF honestly.
whimsicalism 6y ago
> I also don’t know anyone who still lives there that doesn’t want to leave. Probably because many came for their jobs. Plenty of people want to live in SF.
tbatchelli 6y ago
I just moved to a 3x bigger apartment for a 50% rent increase. Not everyone is wanting to move out, many people here seem to be trading places to improve their quality of life, leveraging the lower rents and higher availability. The city is starting to remind me the SF of mid-2000s, minus the rave parties.

lazyasciiart 6y ago

The log of FOIA requests received by the USPS is fascinating - In September somebody used the process to request a job application, and there were at least 8 requests for Change of Address data. I'm very tempted to request it for my own state just to see if there's anything interesting - I wonder how many requests would justify adding it to their Frequently Requested Data section https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/library.htm https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/library.htm https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/documents/foia-logs/september-2020.pdf https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/documents/foia-logs/se...

toomuchtodo 6y ago
If you make the request through https://muckrock.com https://muckrock.com, the request as well as the response and data is then publicly available to all on the platform. Happy to chip in for a crowdfunded data collection effort in this regard (report back with a link to the campaign) [1]. [1] https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/nov/02/crowdfund-guide/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/nov/02/crowdfund...

mamon 6y ago

I wonder how much of that effect is because of this: https://barbadoswelcomestamp.bb/ https://barbadoswelcomestamp.bb/

BrianOnHN 6y ago
100%

asveikau 6y ago

I am seeing a huge number of for sale or for rent signs in neighborhoods I frequent. If you are like me and you like it here, there are probably incredible deals to be had. Nobody will be able to predict when, but I think it's pretty likely boom times will be back eventually.

jackmodern 6y ago
yeah I am moving from a Jr. 1 BR to a modern 2 BR and reducing my rent in the process. :)
vorhemus 6y ago
I wonder if citizens of Detroit made the same predictions in the 1970s. It's tempting to just linearly project the status quo into the future but looking at this graph here (https://cdn.howmuch.net/articles/61-c98f-5e41.jpg https://cdn.howmuch.net/articles/61-c98f-5e41.jpg) it is highly possible that IT/Tech will play a less dominant role in 2067 than today including that the next big corporations potentially grow and rise in completely different areas than SF and Silicon Valley.
- asveikau 6y ago
  > I wonder if citizens of Detroit made the same predictions in the 1970s. This is a good point, and I have spent time in the rust belt and great lakes regions so it isn't lost on me. This was frankly my reaction when I moved to the west coast. (Example from further north: it was hard to see glitzy retail in a place like Bellevue, WA and not think it is overly dependent on the rotting corpse of MSFT. Sorry for a blunt description.) But in my understanding, though, I think San Francisco in particular has had the boom and bust cycles even before tech was most dominant and before a bunch of tech moved north from the valley. It's famously hard to predict things like this. I just have a hunch that some form of housing scarcity will return to SF.
- werber 6y ago
  Detroit's white flight started happening in the 1950's, that's when the city population started shrinking and the suburbs became the mess we have now. My family left the city proper starting in the late 1950's onto the early 1980's. I think by the time the Rebellion happened in '67 that prediction was considered pretty mainstream.

birken 6y ago

I do not understand the apocalyptic takes so many people have. The major problem SF has had for a long time is housing is too expensive. People leaving the city will help counter this, which is going to probably benefit the city in the long term. In the short term though SF is still an expensive place to live and you aren't getting nearly the benefit because SF, like all cities, is just a shell of itself right now. To imagine that once the Pandemic is over SF will not burst back into life is crazy. SF is a wonderful city due to its weather, geography, culture, density, parks, public transit, and many other great things about it. One bad year is not going to destroy the city. And many people not in the tech community have been a little upset at the monoculture that seemingly has developed in the past 10 years related to the tech boom. Guess what... If a bunch of those tech companies leave, the city is going to be less of a monoculture. That's good! Change isn't always bad.

an_opabinia 6y ago
Housing prices are both cause and effect of things like population, it's a very silly thing to generalize about. > And many people not in the tech community have been a little upset at the monoculture that seemingly has developed in the past 10 years related to the tech boom. Everyone hears this sentiment. But I can't think of a community that "got better" when its best earners left. It's just such backwards thinking.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Your sentiment implies that high earners are a necessary thing, or even something that should be optimized for, for “better” outcomes. Better means different things to different people. An artist, an old-money socialite, a tech bro, and a blue-collar worker all have varying definitions of the word “better.”
  - mc32 6y ago
    High income earners trickle down their money to other sectors of the economy --they have more disposable income. This is why on the one hand conspicuous consumers are good; on the other hand that means it does not get invested in longer term things like R&D, infrastructure, etc. They can afford the iconic $14 guacamole on toast that encourages chefs and restauranteurs to try new things and in turn those people spend and support other areas of the economy. If you only have median income people, then, it's not bad, but it's not as vigorous an economy and things change less.

fairity 6y ago

Very odd that the article fails to compare the volume of "change-of-address" requests to pre-pandemic periods. It simply states that they received "more than 140,000 change-of-address requests during the pandemic period". Without any comparison points, this is pretty meaningless?

ardit33 6y ago
From my memory it used to be 50-80k at its peak.... so, this is at least 60-70k more folks moving... in a city of 850k people, that's almost 9% of the population... which is not the end of the world, but if it doesn't stop, then it will become a problem.. SF used to be about 780-800k in the early 2010, so it is basically reverting back to that number

proc0 6y ago

I suspect most were tolerating the shit (pun intended) because work was there. With remote work, the rent prices make no sense. So now we should see if the problem was really housing, and there should be a huge decrease in people living outside, but I think probably not and the problems were never housing and instead bad incentives and programs that lure people who have no chance at surviving in an expensive city.

kickingvegas 6y ago

SF native here. Those neighborhoods are highly transient. As others have mentioned in this thread, the people who moved out are largely migrants here for work. Now that the work has dried up, why stay?

dmtroyer 6y ago

Las Vegas? Really? I am so confused.

fairity 6y ago
The closest place to SF with no income tax.
- suyash 6y ago
  That would actually be Reno, NV.
  - babesh 6y ago
    Also Stateline, NV depending on where you are coming from... or Incline Village, NV.
ghaff 6y ago
Why? As others have noted, no income tax. Relatively cheap housing. And while it isn't to my taste, a lot of people like the SW desert climate, it's not the worst thing if you can deal with the blazing hot summers. There's no real city there but you're near a lot of recreational activities including being within a few hours of some of the best national parks.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Also same time zone, which is important when you still have to VC with your CA-based team. Vegas is probably the cheapest major city you can live in and still be in Pacific time.
  - thehappypm 6y ago
    Interesting. I can think of a few other ones. Bakersfield, Spokane, a few spots in Oregon like Corvallis.

Zenst 6y ago

With all the work from home and people moving back with parents or out of expensive area's that make no sense for them due to WFH. I wonder if we are seeing a wealth distrubition that for the outer cities will be a boost and sharp reverse in the decline many seen. So be interesting to see the data for other parts - would love to see a heatmap of change over time for various parts of the World - certainly Amazon etc would have such data and country postal services would have another source. But biggest one would be for Americans shown by states taxes and is the shift within states or seeing some states loose workers to other states. Whatever it is, this whole pandemic will be a source of data analysis and debate for decades to come.

cwt137 6y ago

This was a poorly written article. Although it had numbers, there was nothing to compare it with. For example, the same time period in the previous year or to other big cites, etc.

toomanyrichies 6y ago

In my mind, the situation is so drastic because (I would expect) the massive population flight will have long-term negative implications for the tax base, which means less money for social programs and upkeep of city infrastructure. Judging by the lack of sanitation in many of the city's neighborhoods, my uninformed guess is that there was already a lack of such funds before COVID hit. The impact of this flight on the tax base could be even more severe if the people leaving are higher-than-average earners (which, given their mobility, my guess is they are). Moving to a new city is a non-trivial life change, and once people move, they're unlikely to move back anytime soon. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I can't help but wonder if we'll be comparing San Francisco with Detroit in 5 years. I hope I'm wrong.

burnthrow 6y ago
Unfortunately the Bay Area has squandered (or simply exhausted) its imagination capital. The region is more associated with the political shenanigans of social media users and companies than creation of cool, subversive technology. And as far as the VC pull, it's diminished with capital flight, and I expect the next boom will see a lot of startup activity on the Front Range.

kelnos 6y ago

> At least 34,803 of the address change requests, or 28%, were to new addresses within San Francisco So... not quite the >100k number that the article starts off with. Also not clear if there's any data being considered about people moving into SF from outside. Yes, I expect this to be a smaller number, but it's still irresponsible to breathlessly talk about an exodus without factoring it in. So looks like the total "exodus" is less than 89,328. Which... is that a lot? No data on a similar period for last year, so nothing to compare it to. And just not sure why this matters? It's been pretty obvious to those of us here that a lot of people have been leaving during the pandemic, mostly people who've had to be here for work (and no longer need to be), but either never wanted to live here, or wanted to but have found the cost not to be worth it. I will not shed a tear for the people who never wanted to live here. For the people for whom it's a stretch to afford living here but want to, that genuinely sucks, and we still have a lot of work to do to fix that, pandemic or not. But it's not like the city's population or housing market is collapsing. Rents have dropped, but they're still unaffordably high for a lot of people. Home sale prices have mostly held up. There's a lot of worrying around commercial real estate, and I think that's a legitimate thing to worry about, but I don't think the sky is falling just yet.