US Postal Service data suggests significant population decline in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

US Postal Service data suggests significant population decline in San Francisco

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162 pointsedward184 comments

I do not understand the apocalyptic takes so many people have. The major problem SF has had for a long time is housing is too expensive. People leaving the city will help counter this, which is going to probably benefit the city in the long term.

In the short term though SF is still an expensive place to live and you aren't getting nearly the benefit because SF, like all cities, is just a shell of itself right now.

To imagine that once the Pandemic is over SF will not burst back into life is crazy. SF is a wonderful city due to its weather, geography, culture, density, parks, public transit, and many other great things about it. One bad year is not going to destroy the city.

And many people not in the tech community have been a little upset at the monoculture that seemingly has developed in the past 10 years related to the tech boom. Guess what... If a bunch of those tech companies leave, the city is going to be less of a monoculture. That's good! Change isn't always bad.

Housing prices are both cause and effect of things like population, it's a very silly thing to generalize about.

> And many people not in the tech community have been a little upset at the monoculture that seemingly has developed in the past 10 years related to the tech boom.

Everyone hears this sentiment. But I can't think of a community that "got better" when its best earners left. It's just such backwards thinking.

Your sentiment implies that high earners are a necessary thing, or even something that should be optimized for, for “better” outcomes.

Better means different things to different people. An artist, an old-money socialite, a tech bro, and a blue-collar worker all have varying definitions of the word “better.”

High income earners trickle down their money to other sectors of the economy --they have more disposable income. This is why on the one hand conspicuous consumers are good; on the other hand that means it does not get invested in longer term things like R&D, infrastructure, etc.

They can afford the iconic $14 guacamole on toast that encourages chefs and restauranteurs to try new things and in turn those people spend and support other areas of the economy.

If you only have median income people, then, it's not bad, but it's not as vigorous an economy and things change less.

This is only a good thing as long as the trickle down is actually keeping up with cost of living, and when employees actually benefit from the trickle down; you're not going to see that money go to artists, really, for example.

When you have teachers and other necessary basic employees commuting from as far afield as the Central Valley to afford housing, then a correction is needed.

They're a necessary thing if the city has grown dependent on their tax income to provide basic services. The reason Rust Belt cities like Detroit are doing so poorly isn't because of the people who live there or the politicians they elect, it's because their tax base disappeared. And now the city is stuck paying for infrastructure that they can't afford to maintain because the people who paid the majority of city taxes left.

I live in a small town in the Midwest and my town is doing great... as long as the factory stays here. The next town over? The last factory in town left 15 years ago and they've had to close some schools (they're still paying the bonds for those buildings and the land though) and maintain water lines to residential neighborhoods that don't exist anymore and pave roads that only handle 1/4 the traffic they were built for. The big city nearby discontinued bus service to that town a few years ago because it was such an unprofitable line without the factory. The town recently stopped city trash service and now residents have to pay for their own waste disposal, raising the cost of living in a town where economic prospects are decreasing.

An artist may prefer a more down-scale San Fransisco, but if the city has been taking the tax revenue from high-paid engineers and using it to build infrastructure for people who don't live there anymore and don't pay taxes there anymore... well no one likes crumbling roads and collapsing bridges and failing dams and abandoned bus stations. It's really hard for a city to go down a level once it's used to higher tax revenue. They don't turn into SoHo Beyond Broadway, they turn into Detroit and Flint.

> I can't think of a community that "got better" when its best earners left. It's just such backwards thinking.

Among other things, rents seem likely to go down, which will make a huge difference to many people's quality of life.

I'm curious if rents have gone down for existing tenants or just for new leasees.

Anecdotally (Sunnyvale) I didn't see any offers to drop our rent to match what new tenants were getting, but you can always hack that by moving. Hell, maybe a bunch of 124,131 change of addresses are people moving internally to take advantage of reduced rents. (FWIW, offering 1-2 months free rent seems to be much more popular than actually reducing rent, too.)

for sure, I remember back in college days we'd play the pass the buck on the tv/internet account from one roommate to the next to secure the sign on deals and discounts. Makes sense.

I'm in the south bay too and I haven't seen as much as a dropoff as SF. I'm definitely anchored here with schools etc for a few more years and most of my neighbors are too. The folks I know who have been out of the area are mostly going to second houses in the Tahoe area, not moving permanently.

Yeah, housing prices in the south bay have been solid/trending upward throughout all of this. Lots of good deals on apartments though.

It's been mixed. One of my friends had a landlord that wouldn't budge, so he and his wife moved to a new place (larger but with the same monthly rent, and with the first few months free). But I've heard from a couple others who asked for and got rent decreases. Unclear if their landlords were thinking about that more as a COVID hardship decrease, or a decrease reflecting the new, lower market rates.

Our building just handed out rent decreases, unsolicited. I've heard similar from others. Ours was a 10% discount, ive heard of up to 30%.

The "best earners" in the Bay Area tend to own homes in the foothills (or Atherton). They're not leaving, at least any more than they already do because they own homes everywhere else too. Folks in the Mission, SOMA, Mission Bay, Nob Hill tend to be junior engineers at tech companies. They will likely be back when they realize that being close to the actual best earners (VCs, angel investors, and executives) is the best way to advance their careers.

I think you're being too narrow with your definition of "best". The people in the foothills/Atherton are your VP-level-and-above type wealthy earners. I think the parent's reference to "best earners" includes a lot of non-executive types who make north of $150k a year, which is a lot of people when it comes to tech.

(I don't entirely agree with the parent's premise overall, though I do believe there's some truth to it.)

Sure, but my point is that the magnets in the Bay Area are the folk who control the corporate coffers, those multi-billion-dollar treasuries that can determine whether you make $1-2M/year or $150K/year. As long as being geographically close to them gives you a much better shot at making multi-millions a year, people will move back. The junior engineers are moving to Vegas because it's close and cheap and right now nobody's advancing quickly in anything, so it doesn't matter. They'll all snap back (or be replaced by other people who do) as soon as the next technology wave starts.

I always find it funny that everyone I know complains about San Francisco's "monoculture" but they all have a completely different idea of what that monoculture actually is.

Maybe there are multiple non-overlapping cultures so nobody gets a chance to escape their monoculture bubble?

I think it's possible that there's a wonderful diversity of cultures, each of which is possible to completely immerse yourself in.

I think it's more than just expensive housing, it's the quality of life that comes with it. A lot of people like to ignore this, but people don't want to spend millions on a house and then have homeless people take a dump on their front steps or dodge needles when walking around or deal with high property crime and unchecked craziness.

Maybe... we should tax the people that can afford millions on a house more so that we can build housing for everyone and eliminate homelessness.

There will always be homelessness. Always. How much and at what cost is the question.

All good growth involves ebb and flow, spring and winter, budding and pruning.

The data is useless without comparing it to the same period a year ago. People already move in and out of (and within) San Francisco a lot, especially in summer months. Are there a significant number of extra moves this year? Are there fewer people moving in to SF than normal?

And even if there is a major disparity, the big question is how many of those households intend to stay away for good.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/08/921769579/wheres-everyone-mov...

Yes, NYC and SF are having slight population declines. It's not that bad though (yet). Most people are moving to cheaper cities a few hours away.

This was my thought. Showing a single year chart is a red flag that it's clickbait.

I have adjusted my beliefs about people leaving SF downward as a result of this article. I had expected lots of people to be leaving, I am personally considering leaving San Mateo, but the small rise from earlier in the year suggests this just isn't happening.

I can't say I'm surprised. Cities aren't nearly as fun when other people have to be considered biohazards. The question that remains to be seen is what percentage are gone forever?

Yeah, this isn't like downturns in populations of other cities, like Scranton, that reflect deep systemic or economic issues.

This flight is a direct response to COVID, and I'd expect to see it reverse relatively quickly after the pandemic resolves.

Even in non San Francisco areas:

On the internet there were a lot of questions from folks in the city asking about a non crowded park.

Most of the answers were "just drive out to the suburbs", and even folks who said they didn't want to ... were eventually giving that advice to others pretty fast.

I don't know that we're going to see permanent type decisions made, but in an epidemic like COVID, and you wanted to go outside, it was hard to avoid that you needed to head out of town to do any distancing.

Especially since the best parts of city-living (restaurants, clubs, bars, concerts, shows, etc.) aren't an option during a pandemic.

Forever might be a bit of a stretch, but I believe there's a lot to be concerned about the negative feedback loop that awaits SF and cities like it. A lot of businesses that make the city desirable to a lot of people (read: tax base) are on an indefinite hiatus due to the virus, meaning there's little reason to pay exorbitant prices to live in SF for the time being.

The problem is that a lot of businesses won't be able to survive this recession, and the city's tax base will shrink further. Yes, those businesses will eventually be replaced, but it won't be a quick affair if we reach the point of no return. Further complicating this matter for the businesses that do survive will be the fact that new businesses will be able to run much leaner due to being able to lock in much cheaper leases and not shackled with debt.

While I don't believe SF is doomed by any means, I do think that it's in for a day of reckoning unless it can reconcile its hugely bloated budget with the fact that it'll be a prolonged climb to where it was. Now with a vaccine on the way it may be able to avoid this if it's distributed fast enough, but I do think the window is closing rapidly.

> At least 34,803 of the address change requests, or 28%, were to new addresses within San Francisco

So... not quite the >100k number that the article starts off with.

Also not clear if there's any data being considered about people moving into SF from outside. Yes, I expect this to be a smaller number, but it's still irresponsible to breathlessly talk about an exodus without factoring it in.

So looks like the total "exodus" is less than 89,328. Which... is that a lot? No data on a similar period for last year, so nothing to compare it to.

And just not sure why this matters? It's been pretty obvious to those of us here that a lot of people have been leaving during the pandemic, mostly people who've had to be here for work (and no longer need to be), but either never wanted to live here, or wanted to but have found the cost not to be worth it. I will not shed a tear for the people who never wanted to live here. For the people for whom it's a stretch to afford living here but want to, that genuinely sucks, and we still have a lot of work to do to fix that, pandemic or not.

But it's not like the city's population or housing market is collapsing. Rents have dropped, but they're still unaffordably high for a lot of people. Home sale prices have mostly held up. There's a lot of worrying around commercial real estate, and I think that's a legitimate thing to worry about, but I don't think the sky is falling just yet.

Interesting, but I would have preferred to see how these numbers compare to the same time period a year ago.

Currently live in Chicago, visited San Fran a few months ago. It's eerily and completely dead. Like no-cars-no-people-no-life-at-all-dead. Compared to Chicago where there are thousands of people going about their day (walking, biking, driving).

SF is much more low rise though. Could just be all the commuters that no longer commute that contributed to the feeling of... apocalypse.

Not to state the obvious, but "a few months ago" was the height of lockdowns.

I live in SF and can confirm that downtown is very dead.

I live a few blocks from Union Square -- can confirm.

But what about the residential areas? NYC is very spotty, for example. Residential areas are hopping because that's where people live and work now, and midtown is shuttered. Usual salad and coffee places near the offices have no reason to be open right now.

Downtown is dead, yes, but Polk Gulch and Valencia Street (for example) are very much alive.

the city is so small that any exodus of existing residents isn’t going to be that noticeable because there are still people moving here everyday.

but yes the residential areas feel pretty much the same as far as crowdedness goes.

July/August? That was the low-point of lockdowns. At least here in Chicago. It almost looked like a real city for a moment there.

The SF Bay Area was taking the pandemic seriously in the summer.

Things are very different today than they were from March to ~July. The weather has been amazing the last few months. A lot of neighborhoods have closed off main streets to vehicle traffic. Outdoor dining has been on in full swing. Parks, beaches and outdoor areas have been generally full (a bit too much for comfort, in fact). IMO the city has been amazing to live in the last few months.

Of course now with the rains and rising cases nationwide it's probably time to hibernate again.

I agree, except for the heatwave-smoke thing. I welcome the rain despite the pandemic risks.

we're in the middle of a global pandemic

I see plenty of people in GG park and on the beach during nice days. Traffic in the burbs is still rather constant as usual.

This makes some sense. Covid cases are booming in Chicago. SF is seeing some rise too, but it's doing quite well compared to the rest of the country. Chicago is seeing 48k new cases per 1M in the last 60 days, while SF is seeing about ~6k. (though also being a smaller city makes it easier to implement policies)

Thanks for the per capita numbers. As someone currently undergoing Chicago-like weather, I wonder how much climate has anything to do with it.

The Windy City is near freezing people near me that were begrudgingly complying with the guidelines took advantage of our Indian summer, choosing to eat on patios and social distance in backyards, have given up entirely and are choosing to dine in and gather in houses.

> I wonder how much climate has anything to do with it.

I'm going to opine that climate in SF helps a lot.

I've lived in SF 25 years. All summer the uniform is long sleeve shirt w/under shirt. Light jacket for evenings/outings. Light to moderate wind. Only a week or so of hot/90F temperatures.

It's turning toward winter now, so we're adding a sweater and water-resistant jacket. Moderate winds. I've never needed a down coat.

In other words, we can pretty easily socialize outside and/or keep windows open, so any Covid virus tends to quickly disperse.

Probably commuter work areas. Usual outdoor leisure spots were pretty packed all year, e.g. golden gate park.

Yeah that's fair. The beaches were packed when I was there (August). I meant downtown exclusively which could have been better communicated. I'm just not used to seeing a downtown look like that. Chicago was kind of the opposite. The beaches were closed but the streets were open. Probably enough to explain why my experience was so jarring.

The SF downtown/financial district/SOMA kind of always died out on weekends, so now it probably looks like a perpetual Sunday morning - not a soul in sight.

No way, homes. Downtown is hosed, but like the Marina is still popping. Even on the cold days there's a wait to sit under the heat lamps and stuff. Hard af to get an Aziza reso let alone something at Atelier Crenn.

Like the only thing we're allowed to do is go sit in the cold next to a flame and drink so folks is doing that.

How cold is cold right now for you folks?

50-55 degrees at the moment in the Outer Sunset, on the coldest edge of SF.

Haha whoops forgot you're used to worse weather there. 13 C / 55 F.

Too much shit on the street, for starters, not to mention it's definitely more dangerous to walk, especially at night. Lived there for 15+ years. I had to move, the rent was not justifiable, and it was clear the problems were getting worse. shrugs

I thought the SF Tourist industry was taking a stab at turning things around like about 2 years ago. Were they not able to put a dent in things?

I guess not. For a while the tourist areas were relatively clean, but it seems it was just displacing the problems to the other areas. I'm not sure tbh, but once the lockdown started, there were days downtown looked straight out of the Walking Dead.

Where did you live? People always talk about shit on the streets, but I only really see it as an issue in like downtown(SOMA,Tenderloin,etc) and tourist areas. I've lived in the residential areas (usually within a block of a major street with shops and restaurants) for 6+ years and it has never been an issue.

And the areas I've lived in definitely have massively more "SF culture" than downtown.

SOMA, and I'd say Mission, parts of Castro also had similar issues. Of course there are still unaffected areas, but it's hard to dismiss so many affected ones.

Why in the world did you travel from Chicago to SF a few months ago? I hope you work in something essential.

I lived in SF briefly, 1 year, back in '94 during the 3D graphics boom that I was a part - and then it was too crowded and too expensive to live, forget about owning a home without startup equity wealth. I moved back to Los Angeles, and from then till now I rarely visited for the simple reason that once there in SF there is no place to park your car (all filled, gotta leave the city) and lunch at a non-franchise was $50 10 years ago.

Only old money, youth that knows no better, tech hope gambles, and those trapped in debt remain. The city is unhospitable.

I actually like visiting SF--but then I'm mostly on an expense account. Rarely have a car when I'm there unless it's to pick one up to go out of town somewhere.

I had a couple opportunities to move to the Bay Area in the mid-90s. Even then it felt like a quality of life downgrade because of CoL. And I didn't even live in an especially cheap area--west of Boston.

Where in LA do you live? LA can be just as bad as SF.

I've lived all over LA: San Monica, W. Hollywood, Westwood, Downtown, & various valley locations. With the exception of San Monica, one can park without consideration on the block of their destination, and non-franchise eateries of many ethnicities outside the fashionable expensive vortex are still common. As far as "crime bad", LA's reputation is a product of Hollywood and nothing like its dangerous reputation - people here are generally nice to strangers because everyone is a stranger. And who knows, if a stranger are dangerous, be nice as a default and you won't find out. Most other cities trying to "live up to LA" over do it and are much more unfriendly towards strangers.

> It's eerily and completely dead. Like no-cars-no-people-no-life-at-all-dead.

I view this as a good thing, considering we're doing much better with our COVID caseload than many other places are. I suspect Chicago isn't doing quite as well as we are in that regard if you've see a lot of people out and about all the time (looks like your caseload per capita is ~8x ours per a sibling comment?).

To be completely fair, though, things have changed a lot since a few months ago. I go for an evening jog two or three nights a week and see a good number of people out walking, running, driving, and biking, and outdoor dining in many places (North Beach, Hayes Valley, even my little corner of the Dogpatch) has made the city feel more vibrant in some ways than in pre-pandemic times.

It's raining out now, but I plan to walk up to Potrero this evening for dinner where there's a semi-covered outdoor space.

Obviously I would not wish this pandemic -- or the associated increase in financial/housing insecurity for a lot of people -- on anyone, but in several ways I like how SF has changed because of it. There's not been a lot to be proud of with how SF has handled homelessness and the housing crisis over the past several years, but pandemic response has been pretty great, all things considered.

Since the beginning if the quarantine, 90,000 people left San Francisco. Nothing shocking when just spelt out.

Absent anything else, I think 10% population drop is fairly significant. I guess we'll see in the city budget next year. Interestingly, because of the rapid growth in the city population over the last decade, this just puts it at 2010 numbers.

This data doesn't tell us about anyone moving into San Francisco, so the drop may be much smaller.

IIRC I read that U-haul rentals from SF to Phoenix are currently $1500. From Phoenix to SF? $300.

I think the budget for next year was already destined to be a mess because of the quarantine.

10% of the population leaving isn't a small number. Though I'm not sure what a normal turnover is for SF and how this compares.

SF used to be about 780k in 2010, before the pandemic, it was over 880k, so it is reverting back to 2010 levels...

It is not alarming right now, but if the trend continues next year, it is going to be a major problem for the tax revenue. Raising taxes will not help in stoping the bleeding and make things worse... (SF is a city of renters, and they can easily leave)

It's also an egg in the face for the pro-growth "YIMBY"s.

Maybe people wouldn't be leaving if they weren't paying $8k/mo for an apartment that's an hour commute from their office?

And yet, a cheaper COL "build-up" city like NYC is experiencing similar flight due particularly to high density. And SF is (or was) the second densest large city in the US.

Only in the context of SF is NYC (esp. Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn) a cheaper CoL city. (Though I think it does demonstrate that building up isn't some magical elixir for housing prices. See also e.g. Hong Kong.)

San Francisco population decimated -- succinct, correct, but sounds shocking.

As pointed out in another comment, this is just the outflow number. No word on any inflows.

Personal anecdote - haven’t heard of anyone moving into SF in a while.

EDIT: as pointed out in another comment, this data also doesn’t cover international migration without the ability to do a change of address.

Correct by the historical meaning of decimated, but I'd argue that in typical modern usage it means more than a 10% decrease.

Earth Class Mail defaults to issuing addresses in Beaverton, Oregon.

So if USPS is receiving a lot of Change of Mail address requests to Beaverton, it doesn't necessarily mean folks are moving to Beaverton.

I am seeing a huge number of for sale or for rent signs in neighborhoods I frequent. If you are like me and you like it here, there are probably incredible deals to be had.

Nobody will be able to predict when, but I think it's pretty likely boom times will be back eventually.

yeah I am moving from a Jr. 1 BR to a modern 2 BR and reducing my rent in the process. :)

I wonder if citizens of Detroit made the same predictions in the 1970s.

It's tempting to just linearly project the status quo into the future but looking at this graph here (https://cdn.howmuch.net/articles/61-c98f-5e41.jpg) it is highly possible that IT/Tech will play a less dominant role in 2067 than today including that the next big corporations potentially grow and rise in completely different areas than SF and Silicon Valley.

> I wonder if citizens of Detroit made the same predictions in the 1970s.

This is a good point, and I have spent time in the rust belt and great lakes regions so it isn't lost on me. This was frankly my reaction when I moved to the west coast. (Example from further north: it was hard to see glitzy retail in a place like Bellevue, WA and not think it is overly dependent on the rotting corpse of MSFT. Sorry for a blunt description.)

But in my understanding, though, I think San Francisco in particular has had the boom and bust cycles even before tech was most dominant and before a bunch of tech moved north from the valley.

It's famously hard to predict things like this. I just have a hunch that some form of housing scarcity will return to SF.

Detroit's white flight started happening in the 1950's, that's when the city population started shrinking and the suburbs became the mess we have now. My family left the city proper starting in the late 1950's onto the early 1980's. I think by the time the Rebellion happened in '67 that prediction was considered pretty mainstream.

Not necessarily bullish on SF and california in general, but the bull case is:

California has GREAT weather and natural beauty. Frisco has the best west coast port and should continue which will allow it to capitalize on continued east asian growth.

The midwest is pretty awful from November to April (especially the lack of sunshine).

That's fair with the caveat that a lot of people don't really get to choose where they live based on climate and recreational opportunities--at least if they want to get paid at or near peak earnings potential. But I generally agree that, even if opportunities decrease in the Bay Area for tech workers, they'll probably remain decent for the foreseeable future even if they crash down to the level of other "tech" cities.

> The midwest is pretty awful from November to April (especially the lack of sunshine).

We get plenty of sunshine in the winter months. Not as bad as the Pacific Northwest where the sun can stay hidden for weeks. But alongside that sunshine you get, it’s still bitter cold.

I live in the sorta midwest (Rochester NY). Today is was basically pitch black outside at 5. I enjoy our winters for now, but I totally understand why people snowbird.

I live downtown, and my rent dropped 40%. Was paying $2950 - now $1875/mo.

The log of FOIA requests received by the USPS is fascinating - In September somebody used the process to request a job application, and there were at least 8 requests for Change of Address data. I'm very tempted to request it for my own state just to see if there's anything interesting - I wonder how many requests would justify adding it to their Frequently Requested Data section https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/library.htm

https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/documents/foia-logs/se...

If you make the request through https://muckrock.com, the request as well as the response and data is then publicly available to all on the platform. Happy to chip in for a crowdfunded data collection effort in this regard (report back with a link to the campaign) [1].

[1] https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/nov/02/crowdfund...

Very odd that the article fails to compare the volume of "change-of-address" requests to pre-pandemic periods.

It simply states that they received "more than 140,000 change-of-address requests during the pandemic period".

Without any comparison points, this is pretty meaningless?

From my memory it used to be 50-80k at its peak.... so, this is at least 60-70k more folks moving... in a city of 850k people, that's almost 9% of the population... which is not the end of the world, but if it doesn't stop, then it will become a problem..

SF used to be about 780-800k in the early 2010, so it is basically reverting back to that number

Anecdotal of course but I left and don’t plan to return. I also don’t know anyone who still lives there that doesn’t want to leave. That was mostly true pre-pandemic however.

> I also don’t know anyone who still lives there that doesn’t want to leave.

Probably because many came for their jobs. Plenty of people want to live in SF.

I just moved to a 3x bigger apartment for a 50% rent increase. Not everyone is wanting to move out, many people here seem to be trading places to improve their quality of life, leveraging the lower rents and higher availability. The city is starting to remind me the SF of mid-2000s, minus the rave parties.

It would be interesting to see the raw data and compare to the base rate (exodus / ingress over the last few years). The article doesn’t seem to link to its data source.

You can calculate net ingress/egress using the ACS data for SF County. Num address change requests is a proxy for ingress/egress that's maybe less accurate (i.e. doesn't capture non-US immigrants leaving the country permanently who maybe frequently do not forward mail).

I suspect most were tolerating the shit (pun intended) because work was there. With remote work, the rent prices make no sense. So now we should see if the problem was really housing, and there should be a huge decrease in people living outside, but I think probably not and the problems were never housing and instead bad incentives and programs that lure people who have no chance at surviving in an expensive city.

In my mind, the situation is so drastic because (I would expect) the massive population flight will have long-term negative implications for the tax base, which means less money for social programs and upkeep of city infrastructure. Judging by the lack of sanitation in many of the city's neighborhoods, my uninformed guess is that there was already a lack of such funds before COVID hit.

The impact of this flight on the tax base could be even more severe if the people leaving are higher-than-average earners (which, given their mobility, my guess is they are).

Moving to a new city is a non-trivial life change, and once people move, they're unlikely to move back anytime soon. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I can't help but wonder if we'll be comparing San Francisco with Detroit in 5 years. I hope I'm wrong.

Unfortunately the Bay Area has squandered (or simply exhausted) its imagination capital. The region is more associated with the political shenanigans of social media users and companies than creation of cool, subversive technology. And as far as the VC pull, it's diminished with capital flight, and I expect the next boom will see a lot of startup activity on the Front Range.

With all the work from home and people moving back with parents or out of expensive area's that make no sense for them due to WFH. I wonder if we are seeing a wealth distrubition that for the outer cities will be a boost and sharp reverse in the decline many seen.

So be interesting to see the data for other parts - would love to see a heatmap of change over time for various parts of the World - certainly Amazon etc would have such data and country postal services would have another source. But biggest one would be for Americans shown by states taxes and is the shift within states or seeing some states loose workers to other states. Whatever it is, this whole pandemic will be a source of data analysis and debate for decades to come.

I wonder how much of that effect is because of this:

https://barbadoswelcomestamp.bb/

100%

Anecdotal evidence is that heavily in favor of the "If I can work from home, I'm going to work from a less expensive home."

Which I find a bit surprising since a number of people at Google worked in Mountain View and rode the GBus from San Francisco. There is also the COVID factor which is to say if you can't go out to eat or drink at bars, there may be less appeal to living in the city. So next year at this time, post vaccine, will be an interesting comparison.

And of course the city politics are always entertaining, but perhaps less so as people get older and start families.

Personally I'm looking forward to all of the interesting data sets that include 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. That 5 year stretch should be really interesting to dive into.

It's been pretty common over the past couple of decades for younger college-educated people to live in a city but move out at some point as they get older. Anecdotally, this seems to have pushed up the timeframe for a lot of people though I also know a few in the "never imagined I'd leave Brooklyn" camp.

I suspect most of those people will not move back especially if they can continue working remotely. One question is whether a fresh cohort moves in when things open back up. That's been the pattern but it's certainly not a law of nature (and wasn't from about the 50s through the 90s).

The thing is, Mountain View is hardly cheaper than San Francisco. That's what makes the Bay so weird. There's no way to escape the high prices.

I've lived all over the Northeast and the Northeast is definitely expensive but there are absolutely cheap places out there. You can live in a suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, and commute one hair on a direct train to downtown Boston. You can live in much cheaper Lowell or Lawrence and commute, again, one hour to downtown Boston. You can live in Worcester, again, one hour to downtown Boston. And the city has little pockets of affordability, albeit in less nice/higher crime parts, but they do exist.

SF really doesn't have this. The public transit is lacking so it's basically cheaper => closer to the jobs, with few exceptions.

And historically (and even today) most of the tech jobs aren't downtown in Boston anyway. Yes, if you want to pay a premium for urban living in Boston/Cambridge, you can do so. But you can escape it pretty easily if you don't want to pay a stiff premium for a personal preference to live in the city.

Hayward and San Leandro have home prices 2/5 of SF and Mountain View. It's within a 45 min. drive to many jobs and a 30 min. BART (public transit) into SF.

Interesting! How long does it take during a real rush hour? I can imagine that bridge is a nasty choke point. This is a problem with Seattle too -- there is plenty of cheap housing across the Sound in places like Bremerton, but they're a ferry ride away.

The Bay Bridge on the east is definitely a choke point. San Leandro is closer and could take almost an hour driving. Hayward could take an hour but you also have the option of crossing the San Mateo bridge further south and driving up 101, especially if your workplace is closer to the 101 exits on the south side. Ultimately public transport on BART is likely going to be the faster option, since it’s 25-30 mins once you’re on the train.

Would love to see similar stats for NYC.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/more-than-300000-new-yor... (National Review: More Than 300,000 New Yorkers Have Fled City Since Pandemic Began)

Source of data is Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for change of address stats from USPS.

EDIT: Y'all shouldn't use this single data point alone for anything of value.

I think change of address data isn't reliable in a city where so many people own or rent vacation homes within driving distance. The article only posits that the USPS data may miss some people who moved and didn't change their address officially, but it also likely misses people who officially changed their address because they planned to be away for an extended period (6 months or more) but will still return permanently in the future.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but for what it's worth I personally know of more people in the second bucket than the first. Time will tell, of course.

There's alot of noise about this; the NY Post in particular is talking about "everyone" moving out, with the most popular destination being the Hamptons.

I'm in NYC 3-5 times a month. It's slower with fewer office workers in Manhattan, but it's still NYC. Manhattan is less busy in some areas anyway as the new construction of money laundering condo units get built. Queens, Brooklyn, etc look pretty much the same, but then the scope of "everyone" fleeing to their Hamptons beach homes is limited in scope.

I think a difference is that NYC was probably more of a shift from cramped apartments downtown to larger apartments/homes in the suburbs. I don't know if that many people fled the greater NYC metro, whereas SF has a lot of flight to other regions entirely.

Anecdote: my parents live in an outer suburb of NYC, about an hour driving with zero traffic, that has a train line to Hoboken (with a couple options to transfer to NYC, or just take a ferry from hoboken) that takes like 90 minutes one-way. They've actually seen a ton of people move into the developments around them this year.

People want the space, the lower cost, and it's a pretty area near hiking trails and nice parks. Schools aren't top-tier but they're pretty good.

Sure, nobody wants a 90 minute+ train ride every day, but if you only have to do it a couple times a week, and there are tech jobs in NJ itself to eventually seek out, it's not a bad choice.

SF native here. Those neighborhoods are highly transient. As others have mentioned in this thread, the people who moved out are largely migrants here for work. Now that the work has dried up, why stay?

Too bad the Census was conducted early this year instead of sometime next year as the events of this year likely have caused a significant migration event that will be difficult to understand fully.

This was a poorly written article. Although it had numbers, there was nothing to compare it with. For example, the same time period in the previous year or to other big cites, etc.

Well, I don't wish to be too negative, but SF is really reaping what it sowed. Up to now the problems were just papered over by enough benefits for people working there to outweigh all SF's issues.

The government and people of SF squandered years of opportunity to clean up the city, make it more affordable to live here (is there pride to be had in being the most expensive place to live?), implement sound policies, focus on the right things, and get people to make long term better decisions. They did very little of that preparation. It's like building up points for when hard times come.

Instead, they continued to enable housing restrictions to drive up rents like crazy (acknowledging that this is a California-wide problem I admit), letting entrenched owners interests combine with ridiculous things like rent control and "neighborhood preservation", failing to take a harder line on open air drug use and crime, letting Muni and Bart become public toilets that charge optional admission fees where you also are at risk of getting stabbed, etc. etc. the list goes on and on. Overlooking quality of life issues in favor of being tolerant of anything that someone would object to having restrictions on or less charitable approaches to.

And now, as the reality of the virus situation has exposed what people really prefer to do, they fled, and the impact to local businesses, tax base, etc. will be felt for years to come. Parts of the city are lawless and a danger for people to venture into. Good thing that all the supervisors were concerned with gender neutral bathrooms while fewer and fewer people could afford to live here to enjoy them.

I'm not a conservative. I'm not a Trump supporter. But even I can see that SF shot itself in the foot.

> Parts of the city are lawless and a danger for people to venture into.

What planet are you living on? This is not the case in any major US city, let alone San Francisco.

I mean, there are certainly places in SF that are pretty sketch late at night, which is not something I've encountered in any other US city. I've lived in cities my entire life.

Skid row in LA? Parts of Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia, etc etc etc?

> Parts of Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia, etc etc etc?

Yeah, I think how "sketch" the mid-atlantic cities are is mostly overrated by people afraid of black people. The mentally ill on the street are much more concerning safety-wise for me.

Skid row LA is unreal. I did not think that level of poverty existed in the first world.

But it's pretty easy to avoid. SF seems to have more open air suffering spread throughout.

Really? You've never traveled much in Chicago, LA, NYC?

I never felt unsafe anywhere in San Francisco. That was the least of my concerns while I was in that dystopian dump.

The city definitely has its rougher parts. I would not wander around Bayview/Hunter's Point area for fun at night.

NYC yes, Chicago and LA, only brief visits.

But yes, I was in the Tenderloin at 1 am on a weekday and felt unsafe and was followed by some people saying they would kill me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> I never felt unsafe anywhere in San Francisco. That was the least of my concerns while I was in that dystopian dump.

* I watched a man push another man into the street. The man pushed into the street drew a knife on the first man. This was around noon (we were out for lunch), in broad daylight. McAllister & Leavenworth

* I was openly approached to buy what was most likely not legal drugs. (I was noping out of there and trying to position myself between him & my now-finacée as fast as possible, so I couldn't really tell you.) ~10:30p, 8th & Folsom.

* Not technically SF, but a man entered the Caltrain car I was on screaming obscenities, muttering to himself, and making death threats to those in the car simply for looking at him. Sometime in the evening, slightly north of MTV. I believe he was detained at MTV.

Not to say I've not seen other stuff in other cities. But, "never felt unsafe anywhere in SF" … yeah, no. Esp. around Civic center, it's super sketch. (That said, the original "lawless" and "dangerous to enter into" comment is also overboard. SF is a fine city, parts of it are quite nice. But there are parts where you should have your wits about you, too.)

I went around the Civic Center once and didn't feel unsafe, but that was during the early-ish evening. Tenderloin was definitely sketch but I didn't feel personally unsafe. I've also seen a lot of awful things, like one dude beat the shit out of another in broad daylight, but again I didn't feel personally unsafe.

What I'm more used to is growing up in a bad neighborhood in Chicago in the 90s where I actually felt unsafe because the odds of getting robbed at gunpoint or getting beat up were very high. "Walking around" meant avoiding specific areas, avoiding alleyways, getting away from groups, not traveling alone, not having anything worth more than a dozen dollars on me or any clothing worth more than that, etc.

Sure. But there is an enormous gap between "an area that gets sketchy late at night" and "a lawless place that is dangerous to enter".

Las Vegas? Really? I am so confused.

The closest place to SF with no income tax.

That would actually be Reno, NV.

Also Stateline, NV depending on where you are coming from... or Incline Village, NV.

Why? As others have noted, no income tax. Relatively cheap housing. And while it isn't to my taste, a lot of people like the SW desert climate, it's not the worst thing if you can deal with the blazing hot summers.

There's no real city there but you're near a lot of recreational activities including being within a few hours of some of the best national parks.

Also same time zone, which is important when you still have to VC with your CA-based team. Vegas is probably the cheapest major city you can live in and still be in Pacific time.

Interesting. I can think of a few other ones. Bakersfield, Spokane, a few spots in Oregon like Corvallis.

I vote we dig up the mountains and fill in the bay with the dirt. Take care of the shortage of land and fire risk at the same time. Let the masses flow back into affordable housing in the new interburbs between the peninsula and East Bay

I see this idea get floated around a few times, and I actually think it makes sense for being macro-environmentally friendly. While there's environmental destruction of this area, it's the size of half of SF proper. The possibility is that a megopolis can be erected on top of it, with the density and height of downtown SF. This would be a clean slate to house 5m+ people, a new New York, and completely unwind the supply-side issues of housing in the US, effectively lowering house prices and rent across the entire country. Back to the net-effect on the environment; while the local wildlife would suffer, the benefits of reduced emissions and sprawl elsewhere on the globe would be immense. Imagine the de-carbonization that would occur elsewhere with plentiful, dense, and cheap housing and jobs in this area.

It's mostly a joke. We can't even get ecological clearance to build medium density housing in most of the area, let alone blow up a couple mountains.

What can happen is slow encroachment into the bay from the sides. It's already happened over many years (and dredging is continuous). And it wouldn't look like a megapolis, more like Venice meets Santa Clarita

"The city full of people most economically capable of moving anywhere in the country experiences population decline during a period when living in a city is less than ideal."

Well, Duh.

Edit: "It has to be mentioned that said city also ranks among the highest in remote-work capabilities."

I don't think it's that obvious, and I don't think it's about one's capability of moving. Otherwise every wealthy city would be dying.

This just looks like San Francisco isn't a very livable city outside of a few specific interests.

I suppose you "live there" and have "a lot more data points."

Even so, I'm going to bet on Occam's razor for this one.

Wait I thought my point was based on Occam's razor.

> every wealthy city would be dying

Sincere question: what cities of comparable or larger size are considered as wealthy as San Francisco? Manhattan (not a city)?

Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and Paris are all probably far more wealthy and do not seem to be dying.

> Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and Paris are all probably far more wealthy

All four of those cities have average incomes less than SF, and all but Paris are less than half that of SF.

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