The number of Californians leaving the bay area increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly from San Francisco, according to a new study released on Thursday.
Despite suggestions for an exodus from California to other states in recent months, the majority of those leaving this region do not go very far, although many Sierra counties have seen a large influx of migrants from San Francisco compared to 2019.
The share of residents leaving the state has grown since 2015 – from 16% to 18% – a trend that continued into 2020 with “no sharp increase,” said the report by the non-partisan California Policy Lab.
“Although a mass exodus from California clearly did not take place in 2020, the pandemic has changed some historical patterns. For example, fewer people moved to the state to replace those who left, ”said Natalie Holmes, a researcher at the California Policy Lab, in a statement. “At the county level, however, San Francisco is experiencing a unique and dramatic exodus, which is causing 50% or 100% increases in internal migration from the Bay Area to some Sierras counties.”
Since the start of the pandemic, Bay Area’s net domestic outflows “have increased by 178% compared to pre-pandemic trends, with a 9% increase in departures and a 21% decrease in inflows in the last three quarters of 2020 compared to 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 from any county in the state, the data show.
From the second to the fourth quarters of 2020, departures from San Francisco “were 31% higher than during the same period in 2019”. New entries were 21% lower, the study said. San Francisco’s net outflows in the last nine months of 2020 increased by almost 650% compared to the same period in 2019 – from 5,200 net outflows to 38,800.
“There is a trend in most urban areas, but it is more pronounced in San Francisco,” said Evan White, executive director of UC Berkeley’s California Policy Lab.
Part of this flight from San Francisco, White said, may be the result of large technology companies moving their offices to remote work in the near future. That kind of freedom may have prompted officials to move to cheaper counties, he said.
The majority of those who left San Francisco remained in the economic area of the Bay Area, according to the study, and about 80% remained in the state – a trend consistent with pre-pandemic standards. Although Bay Area counties and urban centers in Southern California tend to be the most popular destinations for people leaving San Francisco, counties in the Sierra Nevada mountains experienced the largest population growth in the Bay Area, especially in the last quarter of 2020.
“It will be interesting to see, when the pandemic comes to an end, whether these people will return,” White said.
The number of people leaving California usually follows the number entering the state. But the findings show that it was not the case in the fourth quarter of 2020, when 267,000 people left the state and only 128,000 entered.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to see many changes in migration to the state as a whole,” said White. “There is not a big migration of people and, therefore, of companies, and that is good news for the state, I suppose.”
But in San Francisco, he said, the implications were “a little more interesting”.
“With the departure of people, we saw rents drop dramatically,” he said. “If rents go down in the commercial and residential sector, we can see companies trying to take advantage of that.”