Bay Area residents, fed up with high housing costs, crime and other quality-of-life concerns, have packed up and left the region in droves since the start of the pandemic in 2020.
During that time, the Bay Area’s population dropped roughly 3% as more people, many liberated by remote work, fled to less expensive parts of the state and country.
That phenomenon contributed to Austin, Texas, last week officially knocking off San Jose as the country’s 10th largest city. Still the Bay Area’s largest city, with a population of around 970,000, San Jose has shed some 50,000 residents since before the pandemic, dropping to 12th place nationally.
While there are signs the exodus is slowing, a falling population is threatening to upend everything from school enrollment to tax revenue to business vitality – raising the prospect of a dreaded economic “doom loop.”
Here are five charts that help explain the exodus out of the Bay Area and California – who’s moving out, where they’re going and what neighborhoods they’re leaving behind.
1. California’s population is declining
California’s population fell 1.2% between 2020 to 2022 to just over 39 million people. The exodus was just part of that trend: A decline in births, an increase in deaths and a pause in most international migration to the state were also factors.
Why did more people leave?
While many have pointed to reasons ranging from homelessness to high taxes to political “wokeness,” experts and economists say one cause outweighs the rest: exorbitant housing costs.
Even as California’s population fell, the cost of housing continued to soar as the state’s notoriously tight housing supply failed to keep up with demand amid a pandemic home-buying spree and a surge of people dumping roommates to live on their own.
The state’s median single-family home price has spiked 34% since the start of the pandemic to $815,340, according to the California Association of Realtors.
At the same time, ex-Californians flocked to more affordable sunbelt states, which have undergone building booms in recent years.
“It’s because we don’t build enough housing,” said Chris Thornberg, founder of Los Angeles-based Beacon Economics. “It’s not complicated. We don’t have to overthink it.”
2. The Golden State’s loss is the Lone Star state’s gain
In 2020, more than 100,000 Californians moved to Texas – roughly equivalent to the entire city of San Mateo decamping for the Lone Star state.
Meanwhile, over 63,000 Californians left for Arizona. Nevada, Washington and Florida were also top destinations.
Vickie Sims plans to sell her longtime East Oakland home and move to Nevada when her partner retires in the coming years. The couple loves the city’s diversity but are growing tired of the crime and gun violence in their neighborhood.
“I’m getting older, and sometimes I just feel like a sitting duck in Oakland,” she said.
Sims, 63, said that buying elsewhere in the Bay Area – where the median single-family home price now tops $1.2 million – simply isn’t an option.
“Prices have gone up so much, we wouldn’t be able to afford another house in the Bay Area.”
3. People fled to the suburbs
The region’s preeminent cities have experienced the worst of the exodus since the pandemic began, with residents leaving by the thousands.
Downtown areas, in particular, have seen some of the biggest declines, but few portions of major metros have been spared. Nearly every ZIP code in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose saw a net decline in numbers of households since the pandemic began.
Meanwhile, hundreds more households – many whose members are no longer tied to offices and seeking out more living space – have poured into bucolic areas like San Ramon, Carmel, and portions of Sonoma County than have left.
So why are people moving out of city centers?
“Certainly, a lot of what we saw happen during the during the pandemic was related to the ability to work remotely,” said Hans Johnson, demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California.
Johnson says it remains to be seen if people will continue leaving downtown areas in the future, as a lot will depend on whether remote work persists.
MAJOR METRO EXODUS
Search your ZIP code by clicking on the magnifying glass, or click on a ZIP code to see how many households have moved in and moved out since the start of 2020. If the ZIP code is red, that means more households moved out than moved in. If it’s blue, that means more households moved in. The more intense the color, the greater the change. On mobile, click the ZIP number that pops up on the bottom right to see the results.
Note: Migration is calculated from the movement in single-member, group and family households, rather than from changes in population.
Source: USPS change-of-address data
4. How bad is the exodus problem, really?
The nine-county Bay Area region has lost a net 292,050 households since the pandemic began, according to data from the USPS. That’s a staggering toll which would spell financial ruin for the region if it persisted.
But more recently, the pace of the exodus has slowed.
In the summer and fall of 2020, a net ten thousand households were quitting the region every month. But since the start of 2023, the region’s net migration figures have returned to levels reminiscent of pre-pandemic months. In April, only around 4,000 more households left the region than entered.
Johnson said that all this new data could mean that “some of the dramatic changes that we saw during the pandemic were really one-time phenomena.”
5. Wealthier workers fled for greener pastures
As wealthy residents embraced the newfound freedom of remote work, many said goodbye to some of the Bay Area’s core counties, including Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco.
Even so, the majority of people that departed were lower-income residents struggling to afford the region. But an increase in white-collar workers moving out since the start of the pandemic is beginning to strain local tax bases, said Abby Raisz, research director with Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
A smaller tax base means less money for essential services at a time when the region’s largest cities are struggling to reinvigorate their emptied-out urban cores. The fear is that could trigger a doom loop scenario for local downtowns, should property and sales tax revenues crater as workers see little reason to return to job centers.
“The workplace and the home became one and the same,” said Raisz.
The shift to remote work spurred many high-income earners to leave Silicon Valley and San Francisco for greener pastures in the suburban North Bay, a trend reflected in the high average move-in income for Sonoma, Napa and Marin counties.
Source: www.mercurynews.com