Companies expect employees not to return to the office for months, causing large cities to have high vacancies. FOX Business’ Kristina Partsinevelos and more.
San Francisco leaders are concerned that a significant flight of tech workers from the city due to remote employment could have a ‘powerful’ effect on the city’s economy in the coming years.
In a report outlining the city’s five-year financial plan, officials pointed to ‘dramatic evidence of emigration’, including a 25% drop in housing prices a year – which is highly concentrated in areas where tech workers lived.
“This suggests that office workers, who work remotely, are the group leading the exodus, and the non-low-wage workers who have become much more unemployed,” researchers wrote. “Migration, and not just working from home, is another consequence of the shift to remote office work during the pandemic.”
While some companies – such as Twitter and Facebook – have committed themselves to permanent flexibility at a distance, it is unclear what percentage of other workers will be asked to return to the office when the pandemic disappears.
SAN FRANCISCO TAX INCOME POINTS POINTS TO RESIDENT EXODUS
San Francisco leaders warn that if workers do not have to return to their downtown buildings, it could have a serious impact on the local economy.
“The private sector office operations that drive the entire economy of the city, and the tax revenues of the city, find themselves in the city center to access a workforce from the highly skilled and specialized labor that is in the Bay,” he said. leaders said. “If it is no longer necessary to physically bring workers to offices in the city center, or to live for the workers in the Bay, the consequences for the local economy could be serious.”
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The city previously announced a 43% drop in sales tax revenue during the pandemic by 43% year-on-year, which Ted Egan, San Francisco’s chief economist, attributed to a flight of individuals from the city, rather than ‘ a decrease in activity due to the pandemic.
Egan told Fox News that areas in California are experiencing a decline in sales tax, but that other cities are experiencing an increase in online sales, but San Francisco is not.
The data from relocation company United Van Lines listed San Jose, California, as one of the cities with the largest outflow of movers in 2020.
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