The number of Californians leaving the Bay increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly from San Francisco, according to a new study released Thursday.
Despite proposals for a California exodus to other states in recent months, most who leave the region are not moving far, although many Sierra provinces have seen a large influx of migrants from San Francisco compared to 2019.
The proportion of residents leaving the state has grown since 2015 – from 16% to 18% – a trend that continued in 2020 with ‘no clear increase’, the non-partisan California Policy Lab report said.
‘While a mass exodus from California clearly did not take place in 2020, the pandemic did change historical patterns. Fewer people, for example, have moved into the state to replace those who have left, ”Natalie Holmes, a research fellow at the California Policy Lab, said in a statement. “At the provincial level, however, San Francisco is experiencing a unique and dramatic exodus that is causing a 50% or 100% increase in Bay Area migration for some provinces in the Sierras.”
Since the start of the pandemic, net domestic emissions from the Bay have increased by 178% compared to pre-pandemic trends, with a 9% increase in departures and a 21% decrease in entrances during the last three quarters of 2020 the same period in 2019, ”according to the study.
During the last three quarters of 2020, San Francisco saw the largest percentage increase in residential exits in any province in the state.
In the second to fourth quarters of 2020, San Francisco exits were ‘31% higher than in the same period in 2019 ‘. New entrances were 21% lower, according to the study. Net outflows from San Francisco increased by almost 650% in the last nine months of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019 – from 5,200 net outputs to 38,800.
“There’s a trend in most urban areas, but it’s the most pronounced in San Francisco,” said Evan White, executive director of the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.
A portion of this flight from San Francisco, White said, could be the result of the big tech companies moving their offices to the foreseeable future. This kind of freedom may have led to workers moving to more affordable provinces, he said.
According to the study, most who left San Francisco stayed in the Bay Area economic area, and about 80% stayed in the state – a trend consistent with pre-pandemic patterns. Although Bay Area provinces and urban centers in Southern California tend to be the most popular destinations for those leaving San Francisco, provinces in the Sierra Nevada Mountains saw the Bay Bay’s largest population growth, especially in the last quarter of 2020.
“It will be interesting to see when the pandemic comes to an end, or the people withdraw,” White said.
The number of people leaving California usually follows the amount the state enters. But the findings show that this was not the case in the fourth quarter of 2020, when 267,000 people left the state and only 128,000 entered there.
“It does not look like we are going to see a major change in migration for the state as a whole,” White said. “There is not a big migration of people and therefore of businesses, and that is good news for the state, I assume.”
But in San Francisco, he said, the implications were “a little more interesting.”
“With people leaving, we saw that rents would drop quite dramatically,” he said. “If rents fall in the commercial and residential sectors, we can see businesses trying to take advantage of them.”