San Francisco Bay Area is getting workers back after pandemic spill

Not surprisingly, people are still moving to Austin, Texas. Even more amazing, people are moving to San Francisco as well.

Over the past 12 months, San Francisco has recorded the second-largest increase in the working-age population in the United States, according to LinkedIn. For every 100,000 LinkedIn users, 83 of them moved to San Francisco in the last 12 months, according to his January data, which measures when people update their location on their profiles. Workers came primarily from Los Angeles, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Washington, DC.

Where people move and where they leave has a huge impact on the economic success of those cities and the industries that can thrive there. Remote work had the potential to spread more affordable, high-paying jobs from superstar coastal cities like New York and San Francisco to the economically struggling Heartland area. But new data from LinkedIn suggests that the gravitational pull of major cities may still be strong, even in cities hit hard by the pandemic.

This data represents a significant shift in San Francisco’s demographic trends, which has seen no significant net growth in LinkedIn data since 2017. The San Francisco metropolitan area saw the largest population decline in 2020-2021, losing more than 125,000 residents. According to the latest census data available.

One reason for the decline was the lack of affordable housing. This meant that even tech workers with six-figure salaries couldn’t afford to live there. When the pandemic hit, the Bay Area had a concentration of people working in remote-friendly tech jobs, allowing many to leave in search of cheaper, greener pastures. Reasons include: high homelessness and income inequality facing the region, Reports of San Francisco’s urban hellscape may have been exaggerated.

In fact, more people are coming to San Francisco today than they are leaving. By the end of last year, he was visiting the metropolitan area for nearly 2 people for every 1 of her who left the metropolitan area (LinkedIn has been unable to provide a net change in community membership since the start of the pandemic). bottom). The area beat Austin, where prices are still relatively cheap and there is no income tax, but it has been for years.

Why are people moving to San Francisco? In a way, popular cities remain popular. So people still find value and work there. The Bay Area is culturally rich with people, cultures and food from all over the world. Tech companies have cut jobs recently, but the region is still home to huge, profitable businesses, and there are still plenty of opportunities for workers.

There is reason to believe that people are returning to San Francisco and not just because they want to. The setback also represents a tightening of remote work policies, with many companies falling on the side of hybrid work and still expecting to work in the office. In other words, people who might have wanted to move elsewhere permanently were forced back to the Bay Area, even though they were probably in a different place than they were before.

The decision to move back to the Bay Area can also come from employees who want to see their bosses face-to-face before a potential recession. and are likely to be considered for promotion.

Still, it’s just that people seem to enter the office from time to time. Kastle’s data shows that San Francisco and its neighboring areas have one of the lowest office occupancy rates in the nation. Kastle provides businesses across the country with swipe cards for building access, giving them visibility into when people go to their offices. Office occupancy for the week of December 29 to January 4 was about 20% of pre-pandemic levels, while the national average was 33%.

Many people did not leave the city and moved to suburban areas where housing rents are more affordable. They may still have to commute to the office, but if they only need to commute a few days a week, a longer commute isn’t so bad, WFH Research says employers post-pandemic On average, office workers are expected to continue working from home an average of 2.3 days per week, according to a December survey of plans for .

Of course, LinkedIn data only includes people who have updated their profiles, so its scope is limited to professionals who keep their LinkedIn profiles up-to-date. A reversal in population decline has yet to appear in other data sources, but lagging data from the U.S. Postal Service shows far fewer people are leaving the San Francisco Bay Area than earlier in the pandemic. Based on the number of change-of-address forms filed in San Francisco, the number of people leaving San Francisco fell to 12,000 last year, down to about 48,000 in 2020 and 2021, according to change-of-address data collected by the U.S. Postal Service. down from about 18,000 a year. Riordan Frost, senior his research analyst at the Harvard Center for Co-housing Research, said:

“It’s fair to say that there’s been some recovery going on in terms of people moving there,” Frost told Recode.

California as a whole recorded a deficit of 343,000, with more people leaving than entering in 2022, down from a net population of nearly 500,000 in 2021. 2022 county-level census data will be released in March, but so far we can only see 2021.

All these represent natural compromises, perhaps as people try to find both better quality of life and opportunities. For many, it may again be in the suburbs outside the big city.