I'm leaving San Francisco next month also. I just see no reason to continue living here. The weather is nice in California, but the city is so mismanaged it's a joke. The homelessness has been an issue for decades now and local politicians always talk about it, but what do they actually do to help? I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go. I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet in Tenderloin every day for decades tech bros have stepped over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year. Why didn't they build more houses here? Oh, the views would be spoiled! Right. People can continue shitting in the street then. We don't mind that view.
I may as well represent a different perspective here.<p>I am not leaving San Francisco. It's beautiful here. I'm excited to see it get weirder. I will always choose to live somewhere that is exciting over somewhere that will be the same forever. Everything about San Francisco has always been "temporary." This city is boom/bust, constantly changing. It's interesting, having a front-row seat to the ways that people and culture change over time.<p>Some of the most interesting, most cherished times for native San Franciscans was the 60s/70s, when crime was way higher than today, there was no real tech presence, and the art scene here was booming. It was expensive then, too. It's probably always going to be expensive to live here.<p>If you're here, you can probably already feel the city starting to get into the bust times, the times when the culture really starts to get shaken up and things start evolving into something new. It's not for everyone, but for a certain kind of person — it's better than anywhere else.<p>You probably won't agree with me, and that's okay. I don't expect, or want, everyone to. But the changes I've seen in SF recently — personally, I like them. There's so much potential.<p>EDIT: The level of hostility in the comments here is a little staggering. Please, readers, consider that others may have a different perspective than you. Obviously, I am not condoning any further human suffering. If that's all that you can see in my comment, consider if the cynicism in your comment may effect others.
SF needs to get the message fast that there are serious issues there that need to be fixed. Money is not going to fix a lot of these issues, policy changes will. Coming from someone who left for Colorado.
First, the underlying report is at : <a href="https://www.capolicylab.org/calexodus-are-people-leaving-california/" rel="nofollow">https://www.capolicylab.org/calexodus-are-people-leaving-cal...</a><p>Interesting to notice the title for the report vs. the title the LA Times headline writers selected.<p>Second, much of the data is being reported as Year over year deltas and ratios of %, which is mathematically accurate but hard to interpret. A increase of over 900% in people leaving S.F. sounds pretty spectacular, but the same metric has Alameda at over 400%, and LA is over 130%<p>I got estimates of the populations from <a href="https://www.california-demographics.com/counties_by_population" rel="nofollow">https://www.california-demographics.com/counties_by_populati...</a>, and used that to normalize the exit rate by percent of population.<p>S.F definitely leads, with 2.3% net leaving, but only 19 of 57 California Counties in the report actually grew.<p>L.A., San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Orange Counties all shrunk, but the "Everyone hate on S.F." bandwagon gets more clicks.
I left SF 8 months ago after renting a small room for 5 years at ~$2k/month with housemates. By moving ~150 miles away I was able to buy my first house, ~2100 sqft on 4 acres (!) for ~$600,000. Any thoughts on what to do when the pandemic ends and employers make us come back to the Bay Area office?<p>I really do love San Francisco, it's so naturally beautiful, the hills give perspectives of communities, so many neighborhoods and main streets, so much stimulation, I learned about deep learning from housemates there in 2015 and was able to make a living out of it that I probably wouldn't have been able to elsewhere. Wish I listened to my other housemates espousing bitcoin and the original ethereum ico...<p>I made $200k salary last year and yet have no prospect for ownership of a nice home anywhere in the Bay Area, let alone San Francisco, and I'm one of the lucky ones. Even the shitty houses where I grew up near Compton, CA are asking more than half a mil now. Not sure how this all ends...
As someone it tech who has spent the last two decades or so thumbing my nose at SF/bay from the East Coast, making bold predictions that the entire house of cards paying 400k for talent you could get for half that or less on the East Coast... Now that it's happened/happening I am not happy about it at all. Having wages collapse there is going to put a drag on the rest of the market across the country. I've spent a lot of time sneering at SF tech-scene from across the country, but I'm cheering for it now.
Ive left SF before as well.<p>Homelessness issue is a joke to the city. Transportation was horrible. The non-tourist parts of town were a toilet for people (way more than you'd even think, without seeing it). I am a younger white guy who doesn't necessarily <i>look</i> timid, and even then I've been threatened in the BART by drunk dudes on multiple occasions.<p>It's expensive. It's politics 24/7. It's crowded (not just bustling, but more as though you took a large city and squeezed it into a small city).<p>The local governments have failed everyone there.
I love SF but they stole shit from my car, ran over my motorcycle, and then stole my motorcycle when I fixed it. Like, dude, I'll be back eventually because it has great geography and I have lots of friends I adore there.<p>But Jesus, man, I need a break. This is too much for so little time.
We left the Bay Area to be closer to family. It was going to happen at some point, but the pandemic just accelerated the move. The Bay Area is still my favorite place though, so ironically I’m able to save up faster to buy a house there (for retirement) by not living there currently, assuming remote incomes don’t drop drastically after the pandemic.<p>Anecdotally, at our apartment complex in Asheville, there are three cars with California license plates right next to mine, so at least some people had the same idea as us with regard to where to move.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for about ten years and I’ve never been more excited about the future of this city. We have an incredible opportunity to build a city that works for everyone and not just a glorified dorm room complex for young tech workers. The next few years are looking very good!
Area is priced highly, jobs can be done from anywhere else in the world, so it is natural regardless of politics and all the other crap that people migrate to cheaper areas where they feel they can live out of. The SF/SV bubble is leaking out and pressure is being let out to the rest of the world mostly US. Obviously, SF isn't the only high priced area in the world that is leaking out.<p>With lowered rent prices, this should help alleviate economics on lower paid people. Who's to say these areas won't go sky high again though.
Those who left SF Bay Area, do you regret it? Why or why not?<p>I'm currently thinking about moving to a different state as it makes sense financially, but I have an attachment with the Bay Area and what it offers (especially as an immigrant), so I'm hesitant to move. I'm interested to hear experiences of people who recently left.
I never understood why companies paid the living costs of SF instead of locating in the Midwest or smaller cities. Someone told me it’s because SF is where all the talent goes so it would be unwise to locate elsewhere.<p>Maybe COVID has revealed that geography is not as important to success as people believed.
There are more people leaving California each year than being born in it. The study in the article focuses on movement between 2019-20. I’m not sure if they’re addressing the question the right way, as 2020 was a pretty unusual year and this has been going on for quite some time.
I haven't been to SF, but if it's the same as Downtown east side in Vancouver, it's understandable, it's been taken over by the homeless.
I'm from a 3rd world country and the situation is even below my standards.
I don't understand the framing of the article when they say<p>> The number of people leaving California typically tracks with the amount entering the state. But the findings show that wasn’t the case in the fourth quarter of 2020, when 267,000 people left the state and only 128,000 entered.<p>So that's 130k people leaving for one year (not a quarter like the way it's phrased, I've looked up the statistics and 130k a year makes more sense). And the negative growth of the state's population began before the pandemic. I'm failing to see how losing 0.3% of your population is not the beginning of an exodus?<p><a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/states/california/population" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrotrends.net/states/california/population</a>
More people are leaving California currently than coming to it. Perhaps that isn't a biblical level exodus quite yet, but it's coming with time. Just be patient. Rome didn't fall in a day.
Tl;dr: <i>not</i> the usual Californians-leave-in-droves-for-redder-pastures story. Exodus from SF city has drastically increased, but is mostly still within California, or even within the Bay Area economic area. It has also increased relatively more towards the Sierra Nevada area.
I like SF where it is. Close enough that I can take the bus there but far enough that I don't have to have a conversation about UFOs with a bum unless I choose to.
I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality.<p>The usual retort to this is “what will you do without California’s economic engine?” And that’s a fair point—America without California will be less wealthy. But that will be fine; and in fact probably better. Think about it. People reminisce about the 1950s and 1960s as the good times. What did America look like back then? It looked a lot more like Iowa. Poorer than California on average, but economically flat with a low ceiling (few high income people) and a high floor (few really poor people). There are few upper middle class people (very little knowledge industry jobs) and consequently very little of the ecosystem that upper middle class people bring with them (housing, retail, restaurants, etc., that are unaffordable to normal people). Upper middle class people are what drive malaise among the rest of the population.<p>People in places like San Francisco, Portland, etc., complain about the tech industry people moving in. And the response of tech industry people is “hey, we’re not billionaire, we’re working stiffs like everyone else.” Jeff Bezos might have oodles of money, but it’s just on paper. He’s not buying enough houses to move the market prices. It’s Amazon engineers that are buying houses with their high salaries in sufficient numbers to drive up property prices. And as a result, people can’t afford to live and raise kids where they grew up. And that imposes devastating costs on middle class people. For middle class people for whom child care is a major expense, being able to drop the kids off at their grandparents regularly is a huge boon economically and socially. (Remember, the median American adult lives less than 18 miles from their mom.) Then comes all the other stuff. The corner burger joint is replaced by a fancy one that charges $18 for a cheeseburger. The diner where you can get a $1.00 coffee is replaced by a fancy coffee that charges $5.00 for a coffee. Conveniences and frivolities become far more expensive. The local gymnastics studio where you can send your kid twice a week to get her out of your hair doubles it’s prices. Etc. Jeff Bezos, by contrast, has no impact on any of that.<p>I think the natives complaining about the influx of high income professionals actually perceive the reality correctly. Most of them aren’t qualified for high paying jobs at Google and Facebook anyway. These industries moving in won’t help them in that regard. It will simply create a large contingent of people who can now outbid them on access to fixed resources, which will make their lives worse.
The die-hard San Franciscan is probably saying "Good!" They don't want anyone living there that's above average, is able to earn a living, or doesn't want to poop on the sidewalk.<p>But good luck running a city when 100% of your population is incapable of contributing more than they take.