The Exodus From the San Francisco Bay Area

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in a file photo. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

News Analysis

San Franciscans started to feel the effects of a massive exodus starting with the COVID-19 pandemic and continuing as crime skyrockets.

Residents have found that there aren’t as many people walking the streets downtown now. Usually, there are more tourists than office workers, even during lunch hour.

Crowds of people no longer line up waiting for public transit at the end of the day’s work.

Many workers in the technology sector moved to larger houses farther from their offices during the pandemic. They successfully resisted going back to work for full office hours after the pandemic restrictions were lifted.

The office vacancy rate in San Francisco rapidly climbed to 31 percent, the worst on record. In the heart of the city, 18.4 million square feet of real estate is available, enough to house 92,000 employees, according to a report from San Francisco Chronicle using data from real estate brokerage Lee & Associates.

During the Pandemic

U.S. Census Bureau data show that 55,000 people moved out of San Francisco in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s more than 6 percent of the population of the city.

As people faced the new highly contagious and potentially deadly virus, they did their best to keep their families safe by moving away from crowded metro areas to suburban ones.

The net change in U.S. Postal Service address requests by people leaving San Francisco shows the dynamics of this exodus. The tide of leaving San Francisco began in March 2020, when address requests increased by more than 2,000, and it slowed down significantly by May 2021. The peak month was August 2020, with 6,961 requests.

University of California Consumer Credit Panel data show that more than 72,000 people moved out of San Francisco between January 2020 and September 2021.

A California Policy Lab report states that approximately two-thirds of people who moved out of San Francisco remained within the 11-county Bay Area economic region.

Still, a portion of those who left San Francisco contributed to the number of roughly 93,000 people who left Silicon Valley during the first two years of the pandemic. The exodus has erased population gains from the past decade, according to the Silicon Valley Index report issued in February.

The exodus hasn’t ended yet.

Why People Are Still Leaving

The massive exodus from San Francisco in the first 14 months of the pandemic was unprecedented. The only similar exodus during the same period was from Manhattan. Seattle, Denver, and Dallas also experienced trends of people moving out.

The exodus from the Bay Area is continuing at a slower pace now.

According to data from the California Department of Finance, the number of people living in the Bay Area on Jan. 1 was about 34,000 fewer than on Jan. 1, 2022.

High-tech entrepreneur and investor George Haber told The Epoch Times: “The reasons causing tech workers to leave en masse in the San Francisco Bay Area are simple—the cost-benefit analysis of what you get for what you pay, plus the declining public education of the Bay Area. [It costs] a huge amount of money to have a decent life there these days.”

He said things are also getting much worse in terms of security and crime.

“In bigger cities—San Francisco, San Jose, even Palo Alto—the dirt and misery and drug addiction are just horrific,” Haber said.

He said that people moving in and out of California, for either a good life or employment, is “not just normal, but a testament to the state’s rich and diverse allure.”

He described California as “a vibrant, dynamic landscape where the ebb and flow of people is as natural as the changing tides.”

“California, the Golden State, has long been emblematic of this very essence,” he said.

According to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, the pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 1.12 million people in the United States.

It has affected people in many ways. More than 3 million Americans decided to retire early during the first 18 months of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported.

Commonly cited issues within California include crime, the high cost of living, and homelessness. These are factors that people consider when deciding whether or not to leave, but these issues were already there before the pandemic.

For any particular person, the decision to leave the Bay Area can be personal and emotional, yet related to the pandemic experience. In Haber’s case, he sold his $8 million house in the Bay Area and moved to Virginia in 2022 just because he couldn’t enjoy the beautiful beaches around the Bay Area during the pandemic.

According to former San Francisco Supervisor Tony Hall, crime and lawlessness is the No. 1 reason people and companies are leaving San Francisco.

“People just don’t feel safe anymore,” Hall told The Epoch Times. “Cops are not allowed to do their job here because of the warped sense of justice that the Board of Supervisors operates with.”

Also, during the pandemic’s work-from-home phase, many people discovered that the locale where they spent their working hours wasn’t as important as they had thought, and they wanted to be happy and in control of their setting and subject to less hassle, according to Hall.

“So many of them are outsiders who just have not been able to assimilate into the long-valued social networks that have always characterized native San Franciscans,” Hall said.

The Epoch Times documentary “Leaving California” takes a deep dive into the reasons for the exodus from the state.

Sanja Pesich (C), senior manager for marketing communications with Cassia Networks, and CEO and President Felix Zhao (L) at the IoT Tech Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., on May 18, 2023. Steve Ispas/The Epoch Times

Corporate Headquarters Depart

Following the exodus of people, the exodus of corporate headquarters from California accelerated in 2021, according to a 2022 report by the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

The report stated that 153 company headquarters left California in 2021, compared with 75 in 2020, 78 in 2019, and 46 in 2018.

San Francisco itself lost 52 company headquarters in 2021, which amounts to nearly 60 corporate headquarters per million population, far above the rate in other counties.

The report concluded that business headquarters relocations are “reflecting a California business environment that ranks near the bottom of all U.S. states in many dimensions, including taxes, regulations, litigation costs, labor costs, energy and utility costs, and employee cost of living.”

The exodus of corporate headquarters didn’t reverse its course in 2022 and 2023, according to the website Build Remote.

The site listed all companies with more than 200 employees whose headquarters left California between 2020 and May 1. Of the listed companies, 36 out of 61, or almost 60 percent, are from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Among the 36 companies, 10 left in 2020, 14 in 2021, eight in 2022, and four in 2023 as of May 1.

Fourteen of those headquarters ended up in Texas.

Farhad Arvin is the founder and CEO of Choovio IoT Solutions in Irvine, California. He told The Epoch Times that he has at least 10 friends who have left California and gone to other states, mainly because of the cost of living.

Cassia Networks is a technology company based in San Jose that focuses on long-range Bluetooth products and solutions and employs about a dozen people in San Jose.

Sanja Pesich, senior manager in marketing communications with Cassia Networks, told The Epoch Times that the company is there to stay.

“I think the decision to stay in the Bay Area has to do with the spirit of the valley,” Pesich said.

She said she thinks some companies probably grew too fast and may not have been as lean or as strategic as Cassia Networks, which made it more difficult to survive there.

“There are a lot of advantages, a lot of good universities here that want to use our products, that we can exchange a lot of information with,” Pesich said.

Retail Stores Leave

The pandemic also took a heavy toll on retailers in San Francisco. This, along with public safety and open drug issues, triggered a retail store exodus from San Francisco.

Since 2020, more than two dozen retailers have closed their stores in the city, including Amazon, CVS, Office Depot, and Walgreens, and global brands such as Uniqlo, Gap, and H&M.

Cookware retailer Williams-Sonoma announced on May 12 that its Union Square store is scheduled to close in 2024. This is the last of its stores in San Francisco.

Nordstrom announced it will not renew its lease in the Westfield Mall on Market Street.

San Francisco’s sales tax revenue in 2022 was about $141 million, which was 22 percent less than the $181 million (adjusted for inflation) in 2019.

Downtown revenues plunged even more. In the South of Market district, revenue fell to $14 million in 2022, or by 34 percent compared with $21 million in 2019. San Francisco’s Financial District and South Beach dropped by about 30 percent, from $41 million to $28 million.

The Whole Foods store in the basement of luxury apartment Trinity at Eighth Street and Market Street was forced into temporary closure after 13 months of being open because of retail theft and violent crimes. The New York Times reported that 568 emergency calls from this store were recorded, including a call about an assault on a security guard.

Ride-share service Lyft has laid off 383 employees at its headquarters, according to a company notice filed with the state on May 10, and it has closed its San Francisco driver center.

“The only way that this mass exodus will stop is when city officials are working together to make the city a happy, fun, safe, and exciting place to be as opposed to a haven for only the holier-than-thous and politically correct and the thugs and scam artists that have multiplied here, “ Hall said.

“The city has lost its soul, which has been replaced by unhappy sharks all trying to capitalize on the city’s former grandeur, and quite frankly, the people in San Francisco today are quite boring and do not seem to enjoy or value the spirit of life in itself.”