The Bay Area, once a magnet for newcomers, saw the steepest decline of any region in California in the number of people moving to its counties, according to a new report released Wednesday that shows the pandemic has had a dramatic impact on where people are choosing to live.
Not only did fewer people migrate into the state, but Bay Area residents are some of the only ones in the state continuing to pack up and move — and they now make up an even larger share of those saying goodbye to the Golden State than before the pandemic.
Since the start of pandemic in 2020, the California Policy Lab report found, the Bay Area has experienced a staggering 45% drop in the number of people coming into the area, with the hardest hit counties being San Francisco (-52.2%), Santa Clara (−51.5%) and San Mateo (−47.6%).
In Santa Clara County, for example, roughly 10,000 adults were coming into the county at the start of 2020. This year, that number plummeted to about 4,500. The study did not measure foreign migrations, which historically have been a source of population growth for the region.
“I was a little surprised by just the magnitude of the drop in entrances,” said Natalie Holmes, a research fellow at the California Policy Lab.
The decline is particularly stunning considering that from 2016 to just before the pandemic, the Bay Area was consistently one of the top four regions in the state people were moving to — with tens of thousands flocking to the area’s high-paying tech jobs despite some of the highest housing costs in the nation. With months of travel and safety restrictions, other regions in the state experience drops in people migrating in, but their declines have been roughly 25 percent to 35 percent.
The Bay Area also stood out among all other regions when it comes to residents in the state choosing to move — which the researchers define as a ZIP code changing. ZIP code change could mean moving within the same county, a different one or outside of the state.
For the first time, a solid majority of residents — 56 percent — said they expect to leave the Bay Area in the next few years, according to poll conducted this fall for the Bay Area News Group and Joint Venture Silicon Valley.
When researchers first began looking at migration patterns during the pandemic, they found that throughout 2020, the number of Californians relocating was not that drastic.
“The story that I tell myself there is that people were kind of hunkering down, trying to figure out how this (pandemic) is going to play out,” said Holmes. “Was it going to be a quarter, two quarters, three years? That kind of thing.”
But late last year, Holmes and her team saw the numbers started to tick up in the Bay Area.
Compared to a year ago, almost every California county has seen a drop in the number of people moving — except the Bay Area. San Francisco is experiencing a whopping 26.8% increase in people making moves, while San Mateo has seen a 14.3% rise and Santa Clara just 9%. No other big metropolitan areas in the state are trending this way, including Los Angeles, Orange and Sacramento.
Steve Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Lab for Continuing Study of the California Economy, said the Bay Area’s cost of living is a key factor.
“We continue to be very expensive,” said Levy. “Except for very high-income people, it’s not surprising that the number of people dropped.”
But Levy thinks that the trend could reverse, noting that the Bay Area has seen an increase in the number of housing permits for low- and medium-income people and travel, particularly at the airports, also making a slow recovery.
“I think we’re gonna be okay down the road, but the policy report is certainly true for the pandemic,” he said.
In April, the California Policy Lab’s researchers released their first study that measured the pandemic’s affects on California population. It found that migrations out of the Bay Area had jumped by roughly 30% a year into the pandemic. Like the study released Wednesday, the researchers used data from a national credit bureau that has ZIP code information from anyone who has lived in California since 2004.
In their first report, the researchers said it was too soon to tell whether the number of people leaving the state was going to be a long-term issue.
But this time around, the report’s authors believe that the latest data goes against the so-called “Cal-exodus” that many have feared. Holmes pointed out that there was a slow trend of people leaving the state before the pandemic — and while the latest numbers continue to decline, they aren’t dropping off a cliff.
Exits out of the state are about 12% higher than before March 2020, which researchers said is within pre-pandemic levels.
“Media outlets and other commentators have speculated about the reasons for California’s net-outmigration, mostly focusing on exits rather than entrances,” the report said. “We find, however, that it is the substantial drop in new entrances to the state that is responsible for much of this net out-migration.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com