9 ms·

It's somewhat interesting that some numbers are based on the bay area (drop in bay area tech workers inflow/outflow, what percentage of bay area workforce will

by godot 5y ago

It's somewhat interesting that some numbers are based on the bay area (drop in bay area tech workers inflow/outflow, what percentage of bay area workforce will remain remote), while other numbers based on San Francisco alone (drop in SF residents, SF GDP, business tax revenue, etc.). I know that outside of California, the world views "SF" and "the bay area" mostly as one and the same. Based on anecdotes I feel like this doesn't tell the full story, though maybe it does give you a high level overview (like this site does). Among both personal friends and coworkers, ex-coworkers (from a decade+ of working in the bay area) -- surely there are people who move out of state (to Denver, Austin, Miami, etc.); but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving out to the east bay / surrounding areas; and people who were already in the east bay before move even further away (Sacramento area, etc.). Another interesting bit -- Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. I moved here before the pandemic, and witnessed the housing market rise more than the east bay (where there's already an influx of SF people moving to) this past year. All I'm saying is there's a lot of nuances in this general exodus!

dotBen 5y ago
Keep in mind SF.citi is a policy advocate/lobbying group for San Francisco legislation rather than the Bay Area more generally. But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage. Remember if you live in Oakland or Redwood City but are employed in San Francisco city/county, some of your payroll tax is being generated to benefit the city of San Francisco even if you are not a resident there. That's why SF City is worried about SF based businesses and SF Bay Area workers. (BTW this is also why cities such as Mountain View and Cupertino want to attract large business campuses like Google and Apple but don't want to build homes - they get more income from growing payroll tax but don't then have to spend more on schools, services etc for a growing population - they shift the burden onto other cities and counties that house those workers as they then have to generate tax revenue from other means)
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage. SF doesn’t have local payroll tax, it has a local income tax that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on income earned in SF. EDIT: Actually, this is wrong, too; despite a lot of sources indicating it. Sab Francisco had a 1.5% payroll expense tax, but voted to phase it out in 2012, and then (while it had declined to a much lower but nonzero number), voted to eliminated it last year, both times in favor of a gross receipts tax on business
  - lemoncucumber 5y ago
    > SF doesn’t have local payroll tax, it has a local income tax that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on income earned in SF. This is false. There are some low-quality websites that have incorrect information about a nonexistent 1.50% SF income tax, if that's where you're getting your information. San Francisco used to have a payroll tax up until last year, when Prop F replaced it with a gross receipts tax. [1] [1] https://sftreasurer.org/prop-f-overhaul https://sftreasurer.org/prop-f-overhaul
    - bumby 5y ago
      Do you happen to know the reason for favoring a gross receipts tax over the previous payroll tax? Just curious as someone who previously lived in an area with a Griggs receipt tax, it seems it was universally despised.
      - jonahhorowitz 5y ago
        Hilariously, it was done because the tech companies, particularly Twitter, which had small gross receipts and high payroll, pushed for it.[0] Later, Square, founded by the same person as Twitter got pretty badly screwed by this very same tax [1], and it got worse when Prop C passed. [0]: https://www.spur.org/news/2012-09-28/time-now-business-tax-reform https://www.spur.org/news/2012-09-28/time-now-business-tax-r... [1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Square-is-suing-San-Francisco-over-its-tax-bill-14447790.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Square-is-suing...
burlesona 5y ago
This matches my experience as well. Sacramento is underrated IMO. It’s a nice city, and being under 3 hours to both SF and Lake Tahoe is great.
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
I have heard a lot of people say online that most people are suburbizing but not leaving the bay, but this does not match my experience. Many, many people only moved to the bay in the first place because of job availability and not for the reasons others describe (e.g. the weather, the people, the policies, the cosmopolitanism). And many of us left behind our families and friends to do so. Of this group of people, many many have returned, almost my entire group of friends from college. I myself moved closer to my parents and embraced fully remote work. The bay area is lionized, especially on sites like this, but many tech workers dislike it for various reasons and are happy to get the ticket to jump ship.
slownews45 5y ago
This for sure. East bay, north bay all getting SF exodus. Then my friends in richmond moved even further away but still extended bay area. The place with the most at risk is SF. Still huge concentration of wealth, but the non- employment factors have been hurt. Gone very light on crime - super light. At some point folks just get tired of dealing / seeing consequence free crime right in front of them. I think families with kids being impacted there particularly.
- BurritoAlPastor 5y ago
  What crime? I’ve got complaints about living in SF, but it’s basically crime-free from my experiences.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Not the OP, but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving (e.g. running reds including cops, ppl cutting across three lanes to make a left from the right lane, etc), guests who visited me were flashed by randos, a dude was jerking into a newspaper box by the BART, neighbors would smoke inside nonsmoking apartments with shared ventilation, etc. I'd move back again for work if I have to, but it would take a lot of $$$$ to convince me.
    - olyjohn 5y ago
      Sounds like parts of just about every big city.
      - mc10 5y ago
        Many of these are absent in New York, including very visible homeless encampments, so no, these are not in “just about every big city”; many of these are specific to West Coast cities due to a failure in public policy.
gopalv 5y ago
> Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. Sacramento also has a train line that takes you to Santa Clara, which is better than driving - this has made it a better choice for a few of the folks to consider that over Dublin or Pleasanton in the most recent migration (Amtrak is close to a lot of hardware-lab specific jobs like Nvidia, Lockheed, Marvell, GlobalFoundries and Arista), though that connectivity might shift if BART finally loops around to SJC. Also Sacramento has good schools, decent federal funding pull (over say Tracy) and an airport with a few direct flights from Seattle or NYC. The only downside pretty much is the weather in comparison and that too not by much.
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  > The only downside pretty much is the weather in comparison and that too not by much. Sports, bars, culture, muni metro, proximity to the ocean, proximity to nature (I can be alone in natural parks with less than 30 minutes of driving from my house in SF), jobs, dating, restaurants, I could go on. I'm not even someone that plans on staying in SF (I actually don't like it that much), but there are lots of downsides if I left for Sacramento. I realize there are upsides as well, but I think it's disingenuous to say 'Sacramento is as good or better than San Francisco except for the weather'
  - vincentmarle 5y ago
    Endless homeless people and camps, needles on the streets, feces on the streets, yelling drunks, crime and burglaries. Yeah, SF definitely has a “lot” going for it. Glad I left.
    - Animats 5y ago
      The backlash against homeless people is coming.[1] There's a GoFundMe for a scheme for national homeless concentration camps.[2] "The plan calls for the construction of 6 Homeless Help Campuses. These would be built on Federal Land by the Army Corps of Engineers and would be funded by the Federal Government through grants to the hosting states. Targeted states are California, Washington, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and Georgia. Each campus will hold up to 50,000 residents. The campuses will include all services required by the residents including K-12 education, a trade tech college, physical and mental health care programs and will even include a local community based policing agency." [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/California-s-reopening-is-colliding-with-an-16174581.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/California-s-reope... [2] https://homelesshelpamerica.com/ https://homelesshelpamerica.com/
nr2x 5y ago
I'm relocating to Bay Area right now, would love to live in SF, but the schools are grossly mismanaged so I'm going to MV instead. I doubt I'm the only person.
eagsalazar2 5y ago
Anecdotal but this isn't my personal experience at all. Almost everyone I know is moving home to be closer to family like the midwest, east coast, etc or to awesome lifestyle towns like Park City, Truckee, Jason Hole, Boise, SLC, Boulder, etc, etc. Of 20 people I can name off the top of my head who've left SF area, only a couple migrated from SF to Oakland, etc.
- lacker 5y ago
  I would like to counteranecdote and say that the nice east bay neighborhood I live in is getting flooded by families leaving San Francisco right now.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    I'm in same boat. One problem - SF folks are RICH (relatively). It's nuts what tech pays, what stock options have done for folks if they are 10-12 years in at facebook / google etc. Ugh.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Anecdotal but this isn't my personal experience at all Yes, but there have been plenty of nonanecdotal studies, and the surge in Bay Area (and broader urban coastal California) outmigration around the pandemic has been overwhelmingly to inland California, particularly (in the Bay Area case) the Sacramento region. (California had a preexisting net domestic outmigration, too, but that’s separate from the more recent “San Francisco tech exodus”, which is specifically part of the pandemic urban outmigration.) Unfortunately for my finances (being a Sacramento-area homeowner that isn’t going to sell right now), that’ll reverse when the reasons people valued the coastal urban centers are restored with full economic reopening.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    While I wait for my employer to finally decide the "full remote" question, we have been low-key looking for homes out there, from Sac to Folsom all the way to Placerville. I think we missed the boat and should have gambled on remote by pulling the trigger earlier. Prices have just shot up since the beginning of the pandemic, and our Bay Area house hasn't risen in value comparatively. Also, inventory is way down. He who hesitates...
davidw 5y ago
> but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving out to the east bay / surrounding areas Emily Badger had an article in the NYT recently showing exactly this. People are moving from the core to the "suburbs".
playingchanges 5y ago
I know three people who separately just moved to sac from the east bay. And a couple who are thinking about it... didn’t realize this was a trend. As someone who grew up in Sac, don’t do it guys! It might be a quick drive but it’s a different California.
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  i enjoy it much better than bay area. to each his own
- gnicholas 5y ago
  The first sentence of your comment gives away that you grew up in Sacramento. It was only when I left the area as an adult that people told me they thought it was weird that people referred to it as "Sac" (and "East Sac", "West Sac", etc.). Apparently for the uninitiated, this reminds people (at least young men) of a body part.
scruple 5y ago
> Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. So many of our "professional" friends have converged on Sacramento. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, and also tech people. We have a very strong pull towards the area, as a result. Previously, all of these different people and couples were spread all over California and/or the country. They've all moved there in the last 1-5 years and are establishing roots through families, etc... My wife and I intend to join them in the next 1-3 years, relocating from Orange county.
zeruch 5y ago
"Based on anecdotes I feel like this doesn't tell the full story" Not even remotely. Within a compact area, the three major poles (SF, Oakland/Berkeley nd San Jose) have different histories, and narrative threads that lead to different spaces between. Even by age, you'll see widely divergent attitudes about what constitutes "home" (SF is the most insular and aloof in general, and not always in a derogatory way), San Jose the most maligned (sometimes legitimately, sometimes very much not) and Oakland (until recently) treated as a crucial but often 'a part, yet apart' microcosm unto itself, with Berkeley its neighboring city-state. People in different stages of life have often moved around and between the three, for varying reasons. Many who are from here and certainly many who have moved TO here, move "around" the area more than truly exodus out.

by godot 5y ago

dotBen 5y ago

Keep in mind SF.citi is a policy advocate/lobbying group for San Francisco legislation rather than the Bay Area more generally. But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage. Remember if you live in Oakland or Redwood City but are employed in San Francisco city/county, some of your payroll tax is being generated to benefit the city of San Francisco even if you are not a resident there. That's why SF City is worried about SF based businesses and SF Bay Area workers. (BTW this is also why cities such as Mountain View and Cupertino want to attract large business campuses like Google and Apple but don't want to build homes - they get more income from growing payroll tax but don't then have to spend more on schools, services etc for a growing population - they shift the burden onto other cities and counties that house those workers as they then have to generate tax revenue from other means)

dragonwriter 5y ago
> But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage. SF doesn’t have local payroll tax, it has a local income tax that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on income earned in SF. EDIT: Actually, this is wrong, too; despite a lot of sources indicating it. Sab Francisco had a 1.5% payroll expense tax, but voted to phase it out in 2012, and then (while it had declined to a much lower but nonzero number), voted to eliminated it last year, both times in favor of a gross receipts tax on business
- lemoncucumber 5y ago
  > SF doesn’t have local payroll tax, it has a local income tax that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on income earned in SF. This is false. There are some low-quality websites that have incorrect information about a nonexistent 1.50% SF income tax, if that's where you're getting your information. San Francisco used to have a payroll tax up until last year, when Prop F replaced it with a gross receipts tax. [1] [1] https://sftreasurer.org/prop-f-overhaul https://sftreasurer.org/prop-f-overhaul
  - bumby 5y ago
    Do you happen to know the reason for favoring a gross receipts tax over the previous payroll tax? Just curious as someone who previously lived in an area with a Griggs receipt tax, it seems it was universally despised.
    - jonahhorowitz 5y ago
      Hilariously, it was done because the tech companies, particularly Twitter, which had small gross receipts and high payroll, pushed for it.[0] Later, Square, founded by the same person as Twitter got pretty badly screwed by this very same tax [1], and it got worse when Prop C passed. [0]: https://www.spur.org/news/2012-09-28/time-now-business-tax-reform https://www.spur.org/news/2012-09-28/time-now-business-tax-r... [1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Square-is-suing-San-Francisco-over-its-tax-bill-14447790.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Square-is-suing...

burlesona 5y ago

This matches my experience as well. Sacramento is underrated IMO. It’s a nice city, and being under 3 hours to both SF and Lake Tahoe is great.

notsureaboutpg 5y ago

I have heard a lot of people say online that most people are suburbizing but not leaving the bay, but this does not match my experience. Many, many people only moved to the bay in the first place because of job availability and not for the reasons others describe (e.g. the weather, the people, the policies, the cosmopolitanism). And many of us left behind our families and friends to do so. Of this group of people, many many have returned, almost my entire group of friends from college. I myself moved closer to my parents and embraced fully remote work. The bay area is lionized, especially on sites like this, but many tech workers dislike it for various reasons and are happy to get the ticket to jump ship.

slownews45 5y ago

This for sure. East bay, north bay all getting SF exodus. Then my friends in richmond moved even further away but still extended bay area. The place with the most at risk is SF. Still huge concentration of wealth, but the non- employment factors have been hurt. Gone very light on crime - super light. At some point folks just get tired of dealing / seeing consequence free crime right in front of them. I think families with kids being impacted there particularly.

BurritoAlPastor 5y ago
What crime? I’ve got complaints about living in SF, but it’s basically crime-free from my experiences.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Not the OP, but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving (e.g. running reds including cops, ppl cutting across three lanes to make a left from the right lane, etc), guests who visited me were flashed by randos, a dude was jerking into a newspaper box by the BART, neighbors would smoke inside nonsmoking apartments with shared ventilation, etc. I'd move back again for work if I have to, but it would take a lot of $$$$ to convince me.
  - olyjohn 5y ago
    Sounds like parts of just about every big city.
    - mc10 5y ago
      Many of these are absent in New York, including very visible homeless encampments, so no, these are not in “just about every big city”; many of these are specific to West Coast cities due to a failure in public policy.

gopalv 5y ago

> Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. Sacramento also has a train line that takes you to Santa Clara, which is better than driving - this has made it a better choice for a few of the folks to consider that over Dublin or Pleasanton in the most recent migration (Amtrak is close to a lot of hardware-lab specific jobs like Nvidia, Lockheed, Marvell, GlobalFoundries and Arista), though that connectivity might shift if BART finally loops around to SJC. Also Sacramento has good schools, decent federal funding pull (over say Tracy) and an airport with a few direct flights from Seattle or NYC. The only downside pretty much is the weather in comparison and that too not by much.

Judgmentality 5y ago
> The only downside pretty much is the weather in comparison and that too not by much. Sports, bars, culture, muni metro, proximity to the ocean, proximity to nature (I can be alone in natural parks with less than 30 minutes of driving from my house in SF), jobs, dating, restaurants, I could go on. I'm not even someone that plans on staying in SF (I actually don't like it that much), but there are lots of downsides if I left for Sacramento. I realize there are upsides as well, but I think it's disingenuous to say 'Sacramento is as good or better than San Francisco except for the weather'
- vincentmarle 5y ago
  Endless homeless people and camps, needles on the streets, feces on the streets, yelling drunks, crime and burglaries. Yeah, SF definitely has a “lot” going for it. Glad I left.
  - Animats 5y ago
    The backlash against homeless people is coming.[1] There's a GoFundMe for a scheme for national homeless concentration camps.[2] "The plan calls for the construction of 6 Homeless Help Campuses. These would be built on Federal Land by the Army Corps of Engineers and would be funded by the Federal Government through grants to the hosting states. Targeted states are California, Washington, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and Georgia. Each campus will hold up to 50,000 residents. The campuses will include all services required by the residents including K-12 education, a trade tech college, physical and mental health care programs and will even include a local community based policing agency." [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/California-s-reopening-is-colliding-with-an-16174581.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/California-s-reope... [2] https://homelesshelpamerica.com/ https://homelesshelpamerica.com/

nr2x 5y ago

I'm relocating to Bay Area right now, would love to live in SF, but the schools are grossly mismanaged so I'm going to MV instead. I doubt I'm the only person.

eagsalazar2 5y ago

Anecdotal but this isn't my personal experience at all. Almost everyone I know is moving home to be closer to family like the midwest, east coast, etc or to awesome lifestyle towns like Park City, Truckee, Jason Hole, Boise, SLC, Boulder, etc, etc. Of 20 people I can name off the top of my head who've left SF area, only a couple migrated from SF to Oakland, etc.

lacker 5y ago
I would like to counteranecdote and say that the nice east bay neighborhood I live in is getting flooded by families leaving San Francisco right now.
- slownews45 5y ago
  I'm in same boat. One problem - SF folks are RICH (relatively). It's nuts what tech pays, what stock options have done for folks if they are 10-12 years in at facebook / google etc. Ugh.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Anecdotal but this isn't my personal experience at all Yes, but there have been plenty of nonanecdotal studies, and the surge in Bay Area (and broader urban coastal California) outmigration around the pandemic has been overwhelmingly to inland California, particularly (in the Bay Area case) the Sacramento region. (California had a preexisting net domestic outmigration, too, but that’s separate from the more recent “San Francisco tech exodus”, which is specifically part of the pandemic urban outmigration.) Unfortunately for my finances (being a Sacramento-area homeowner that isn’t going to sell right now), that’ll reverse when the reasons people valued the coastal urban centers are restored with full economic reopening.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  While I wait for my employer to finally decide the "full remote" question, we have been low-key looking for homes out there, from Sac to Folsom all the way to Placerville. I think we missed the boat and should have gambled on remote by pulling the trigger earlier. Prices have just shot up since the beginning of the pandemic, and our Bay Area house hasn't risen in value comparatively. Also, inventory is way down. He who hesitates...

davidw 5y ago

> but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving out to the east bay / surrounding areas Emily Badger had an article in the NYT recently showing exactly this. People are moving from the core to the "suburbs".

playingchanges 5y ago

I know three people who separately just moved to sac from the east bay. And a couple who are thinking about it... didn’t realize this was a trend. As someone who grew up in Sac, don’t do it guys! It might be a quick drive but it’s a different California.

jiveturkey 5y ago
i enjoy it much better than bay area. to each his own
gnicholas 5y ago
The first sentence of your comment gives away that you grew up in Sacramento. It was only when I left the area as an adult that people told me they thought it was weird that people referred to it as "Sac" (and "East Sac", "West Sac", etc.). Apparently for the uninitiated, this reminds people (at least young men) of a body part.

scruple 5y ago

> Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. So many of our "professional" friends have converged on Sacramento. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, and also tech people. We have a very strong pull towards the area, as a result. Previously, all of these different people and couples were spread all over California and/or the country. They've all moved there in the last 1-5 years and are establishing roots through families, etc... My wife and I intend to join them in the next 1-3 years, relocating from Orange county.

zeruch 5y ago

"Based on anecdotes I feel like this doesn't tell the full story" Not even remotely. Within a compact area, the three major poles (SF, Oakland/Berkeley nd San Jose) have different histories, and narrative threads that lead to different spaces between. Even by age, you'll see widely divergent attitudes about what constitutes "home" (SF is the most insular and aloof in general, and not always in a derogatory way), San Jose the most maligned (sometimes legitimately, sometimes very much not) and Oakland (until recently) treated as a crucial but often 'a part, yet apart' microcosm unto itself, with Berkeley its neighboring city-state. People in different stages of life have often moved around and between the three, for varying reasons. Many who are from here and certainly many who have moved TO here, move "around" the area more than truly exodus out.