A week ago the New York Times ran a piece about people fleeing big cities to become remote workers during the pandemic. It started off like this:
In the two years leading up to the pandemic, for example, about 20,000 remote workers moved away from the San Francisco metro area. Then during 2020 and 2021, 110,000 did.
That was their first mistake. San Francisco is an insane outlier, unique for its combination of extraordinary appeal to new workers along with strict rules against building new housing to put them anywhere. It's a miracle the place is even able to operate.
So that's just not an example to use if you're serious about examining this stuff. The Times did include a little chart showing how many people have moved in and out of various other large cities, but for some reason they used raw numbers instead of adjusting for population. So I did that for them. Would you like to see it?
San Francisco is way out there on its own, with nearly triple the emigration rate of even New York and Los Angeles—which are no slouches themselves. In all, there are only three large cities outside the Bay Area where remote workers in 2021 left at a rate greater than 1%.
So there you have it. Yes, there was apparently some out-migration from wannabe remote workers during the pandemic, but only in a very few places. Aside from the Bay Area, it wasn't really that big a phenomenon.
I mean, yes, adjusting for size is a thing.
But also we shouldn't be discounting the size just because lots of people happen to live there. 110,000 people is about 0.3% of the entire California population, for example, and that's just SF.
This is how population shifts geography - a little at a time. I'm sure it will keep going, just at a lesser pace than the initial shock of the pandemic.
As a San Francisco resident, I don't really get moving out if you are a remote worker. Housing prices aside, it is a really good place to live even if you don't have to work there. There is more to life than having a .5 acre lot.
I would think housing prices would be a rather important component. It will determine to a great extent the neighborhood(s) where one can afford to live.
Housing prices aside, it is a really good place to live
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln...?
Without a doubt a lot of remote workers leaving the Bay Area are housing-stressed. Not all of them, of course. Some are indeed cashing in equity and buying a big spread outside Austin or Boise. But this popular-imagination stereotype belies the reality that many Bay Area residents would prefer to stay. They simply can't afford to.
Also, I think the "remote work" part throws folks, because we conjure up images of insanely well-paid tech bros on their laptops all day. But a lot of remote workers just make "normal" money: salaries that are pretty decent by the standards of most of the US (say, between 150k-200k), but condemn one to permanent renter status in the Bay Area.
I’m not sure what is meant by “San Francisco Metro Area”. If it’s the same thing as the San Francisco Bay Area then we are talking about a population of about 7.5 million and includes all of Silicon Valley. Texas has been luring tech companies lately and that might account for some migration being from one big city to another.
Good point:
“I’m not sure what is meant by “San Francisco Metro Area”. If it’s the same thing as the San Francisco Bay Area then we are talking about a population of about 7.5 million and includes all of Silicon Valley.”
San Francisco itself is both a city and a county. And the San Francisco Bay Area, as you indicate, is a much vaster area. But I rarely if ever hear anyone refer to a “San Francisco Metro Area.”
I like to think the NYT is careful, so they may have actually looked up and found a term with a precise definition spelled out somewhere. But I don’t know what that definition of “San Francisco Metro Area” might actually be …
As far as I can tell the NYT article is screwed up. At one point they talk about 110,000 remote workers in the SF Metro Area moving but in a chart they indicate San Francisco and San Jose as separate “metro” areas.
110,000 remote workers moving out of San Francisco in a two year period is absurd. The entire population of the City/County of San Francisco is 875,000. There were less than 13,000 home sales during that period.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/892605/home-sales-san-francisco/
How much of the population of San Francisco are remote workers? Did gigantic numbers of apartments suddenly become available in San Francisco making apartment prices plummet? I sure haven’t heard anything like that!
Kevin's graph indicates he's split the Bay Area into two, which is how the federal government handles the MSAs (SF and SJ). The Bay Area combined statistical area (CSA) aggregates the SF and SJ metros, for a total of about 9.8 million (not sure where you got the 7.5 million figure). This is similar to the Boston CSA (includes Providence) or Washington CSA (includes Baltimore). In some metros (say, Atlanta) there's not much difference between the MSA and the CSA. In some metros, the difference is quite large:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area
The 7.5 million figure I used (actually 7.76) is the traditional 9 county Bay Area, that is, counties which the San Francisco Bay touches. The CSA includes 5 additional counties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area
You should verify if you're tracking MSAs or cities, and you might want to wait for updated data. I know for a fact that the city of Portland has a net out-migration, but cities within the Portland MSA have seen a net in-migration.
Except for Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
Next question of course, is what does losing 1% of a city's (assuming, as D_Ohrk_E1 points out, we are talking the _city_ and not the Metropolitan Statistical Area) mean for the city's finances? Is the loss of population distributed evenly across the income spectrum and so local revenues, or does it skew one way or another?
Per: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/downtown-sf-retail-18076696.php That is the City, not an MSA. And of course it isn't just a matter of residents. The evaporation of office workers is a big chunk of that I assume.
Of course, perhaps it is just ... transient ... but that remains to be seen, or if recent upticks are merely the elastic response of a deceased feline striking pavement.
In some cases the companies themselves are closing offices in San Francisco. It is not just a matter of employees deciding to work remotely. Complicated issue.
This is somewhat orthogonal to the precise issue of departing remote workers, but many US cities—and quite a few US metros—have seen modest overall population shrinkage since 2020 due a crunch in international immigration in 2020-2021. Part of this goes back to pre-pandemic days: the Trump administration did everything in their power to reduce immigration inflows. Then the bottom fell out in 2020. (Numbers began to recover briskly last year, and I expect we'll see many metro areas bouncing back in terms of population growth as the decade proceeds).
My point is: housing has been very expensive for quite some time in our richest blue cities. This isn't a brand new phenomenon. Which means for a while now many such metros have been seeing virtually no population growth at all if international immigration is taken out of the mix. Which it substantially was once the pandemic arrived. Estimates are the the metropolitan areas of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco-San Jose, Washington, DC, Boston and Miami have all lost population on net so far (based on 2022 estimate) this decade. These are estimates for the entire metros, not just city propers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area
And yes, not having to find a new job in order to relocate surely helps turbocharge this process.