From Soumya Karlamangla

New York Times

Since the early days of the pandemic, we’ve heard Californians giving up their normal lifestyles in favor of greener, cheaper pastures.

There are the San Franciscans who survived lockdown orders in Lake Tahoe and the Angelenos with new desert huts in Joshua Tree. There are many stories of Silicon Valley guys moving to Miami and Seattle or renting acres of land in Idaho.

The story goes like this: The coronavirus and the ability to work remotely have fundamentally changed the way we live – and major California cities, particularly San Francisco and Los Angeles, are not on the list.

But is that really true?

I start with the short answer. There has been no exodus from California, but the pandemic forces have shifted where people live within the state. These moving patterns reflect what we saw before COVID-19, but in full swing.

Here’s how that works out.

California’s population declined slightly in 2020, but that wasn’t due to mass migration to other states. This is due to coronavirus deaths, a lower birth rate and fewer international arrivals.

According to a report from the California Policy Lab, 82% of Californians who moved last year stayed in the state. That number has remained largely stable over the past five years.

“There are far more people moving within the state than outside the state,” said Eric McGhee, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “This movement usually takes place within a particular metropolitan area, and a large part of it is people moving to suburbs and outskirts.”

Californians are likely to move from Los Angeles to the Inland Empire or from San Francisco to the outskirts of the Bay Area or the Sacramento region, McGhee said. Because they want cheaper apartments, but not so far away that they have to change jobs.

It’s been like that for a long time. The largest net county-to-county migrations in California between 2015 and 2019, according to census data:

• San Francisco to Alameda (5,469)
• San Francisco to San Mateo (4,239)
• Los Angeles to San Bernardino (20,809 people)
• Los Angeles to Riverside (13,949)
• Los Angeles to Orange (11,879)
• Alameda to Contra Costa (9,246)
• Orange to Riverside (8,282)
• Los Angeles to Kern (6,032)
• San Diego to Riverside (5,892)
• Alameda to San Joaquin (4,134)

With the emergence of the pandemic in 2020, some of these trends got underway.

The Inland Empire tied Phoenix in 2020 for the nation’s largest increase in households from migration, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. The influx of people into Riverside and San Bernardino Counties has increased 50% year over year.

This reflects the desire of the Californians to escape the exorbitant home prices of other coastal regions. The average single-family home price in Riverside County was $ 570,000 in August, compared to $ 830,070 in Los Angeles County and $ 1.85 million in San Francisco.

Expensive San Francisco was experiencing one of the most significant churns in the pandemic, as the New York Times found in a recent analysis. While “migration patterns during the pandemic were very similar to previous migration patterns,” this is not the case for San Francisco, they wrote.

In The City, net outlets – the number of departures minus the number of people arriving – rose to 38,800 in the last three quarters of 2020, compared to 5,200 in the same period last year, according to the California Policy Lab report. It is estimated that the city lost an eighth of its total households in the past year.

But perhaps this is good news for those battling the myth of a California exodus: two-thirds of the San Franciscans who fled ended up in other parts of the Bay Area, and 80% stayed in the state.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The post Debunking San Francisco’s pandemic exodus delusion appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Big cities are alive and well.

City dwellers fled their cramped, expensive apartments to make more space in the suburbs. That was the story of 2020, as Insider reported several times. But millions of people live in big cities, and hundreds of thousands who have left could move back.

This is the argument taken from a recent Bank of America Research report, led by a team led by US economist Michelle Meyer, that the shift is not the urban exodus it appeared to be. BofA said that while the pandemic accelerated pre-existing migration from cities like New York City and San Francisco, these two are the only true examples of anything resembling an exodus, and that the reopening will trigger a return to both cities.

“Both have the potential for a speedy recovery,” the note said. “NYC and SF remain the top cities for young renters because of their economic, financial and cultural centers, and the decline in rents over the past year adds to their affordability.”

As house prices rose to record highs across the country, rents fell in NYC and San Francisco. According to Apartment List, rents in NYC fell to about 22% from March 2020 to January 2021, and rents in San Francisco fell to about 26% over the same period. Rents in both cities have started to recover, but both are still much lower than they were before the pandemic.

The decline has allowed young professionals in San Francisco and NYC to move to single or luxury condos for the first time and receive discounts of up to $ 1,000. Some have even signed leases that go beyond the typical year, which signals that they are not going anywhere anytime soon.

As both cities slowly reopen, signs of economic life are already evident. NYC brick and mortar retail spending was around 70% for the first three months of the year, while restaurant personal spending improved. According to separate BofA data, it is still 30% lower than two years ago until mid-April. This is still a significant improvement from the 70% decline at the end of January.

In San Francisco, card spending increased 10% in April compared to two years ago, though not quite as high as the 15% increase in NYC. Insider’s Melia Russell and Berber Jin reported that venture capitalists are confident that the Bay Area is making a comeback and will remain the global capital of entrepreneurship.

People plan to return to NYC and San Fran

BofA’s results reflect new data released earlier this week by USPS. Bloomberg reported the same data and viewed the urban exodus as more of an “urban shuffle”.

Overall, Manhattan saw temporary removals increase by 138%, according to USPS data, a number that may not even include those with second homes elsewhere. However, a closer look at the data shows that the moves were mostly local, often within the region or even the same city.

While 19,000 Manhattan residents moved to Florida, 10,000 said they wanted to go back. In fact, more residents – 20,000 – moved to neighboring Brooklyn than to Florida. Some of those who have left for the northeastern suburbs are already returning to the city, and that is also happening in the Bay Area. While the rate of permanent removals grew the most in San Francisco, according to USPS data, temporary removals in the area also more than doubled, compared to 17% nationally.

Many of those who moved permanently from the two cities did not get very far. Some San Franciscans made their way to Sacramento or Oakland, while some New Yorkers made their way east to Long Island, upstate to Westchester, or by train to Bridgeport, Connecticut or Philadelphia, according to Bloomberg.

Big cities are not dead, but they have changed – or have shrunk. In urban areas, spending is projected to decrease by 10% or more in an economy where more workers are remote. But the return of former residents, signs of increased spending, and government aid of $ 600 million for San Francisco and $ 5.6 billion for NYC are all signals of economic recovery, even if the landscape is different than it was before the pandemic.

As BofA put it, city flights are “more myth than reality”.

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