We’ve all seen countless stories of San Francisco tech employees heading to Texas and Florida – but most of them move to the suburbs of the Bay Area, according to the U.S. Post Office change records, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The big picture: The Chronicle analyzed postal service records and found that “the top six destinations for those fleeing the city were all of the Bay Area counties: Alameda, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, and Sonoma.”
- Then came Los Angeles, San Diego, Napa and Riverside.
- Destination # 1 – Alameda County, where Oakland is the largest city – is right across from San Francisco Bay.
- Austin and Denver were the “only destinations outside of the state that made it into the top 20,” according to the Chronicle.
Details: It is true that many San Franciscans moved from the city during the eight months between March and November (which the Chronicle examined).
- “While the influx of new residents into the city remained constant between 2019 and 2020, the number of households leaving the city increased by more than 35,000 – from 45,263 in 2019 to 80,371 in 2020.”
- Approximately 41% of change of address requests were moves within San Francisco.
- These moving companies took advantage of falling rents – and the trend towards lower rents could be a happy and ongoing result of the pandemic, San Francisco economist Ted Egan tells the Chronicle.
Between the lines: The census is city specific and does not include all people coming and going in the Bay Area, which includes all counties near San Francisco.
- Numerous real estate, moving and transportation companies have tried to capture the patterns of migration and have fed reporters (like me) surveys that show where people are going.
- These results don’t always speak with one voice, but they show consistent patterns.
- For example: “Number 1 for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas, with other winners like Seattle, New York, and Chicago, according to moveBuddha, a website that compiles relocation dates,” writes Nellie Bowles in the New York times.
Reality check: With companies like Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise moving their headquarters out of the Bay Area (to Austin and Houston respectively), it makes sense that some employees will follow suit.
- But as Scott Rosenberg of Axios writes: “The powerhouses of Silicon Valley do not put up” moving sale “signs, even if a handful of high-profile departures raise questions about the status of the region.”
