San Francisco residents are abandoning the city in droves, with a large number leaving to Texas and Florida, according to a report released Thursday by the commercial realty firm CBRE Group.
The city lost the most residents out of every major city between 2019 and 2020, with 70 percent moving to nearby Sacramento, according to data that was gathered from the United States Postal Service records through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Moves to Texas increased by 32.1 percent and to Florida by 46.2 percent.
“Many of the most ambitious people on the planet have lived here,” investor Keith Rabois, who recently moved from California to Florida, told Business Insider. “But post-COVID, I think the concentration of talent has atrophied, perhaps permanently.”
Many people left the Bay Area during the coronavirus pandemic, many in the tech industry who did remote work were offered a chance at residing in other towns — as many as 89,000 households moved out of San Francisco between March and November 2020.
“The pandemic came just as the bulk of the large and increasingly affluent millennial cohort had reached prime family formation age,” the report explains. “Consequently, millennials had been trending toward more suburban residencies even before COVID-19 came on the scene.”
Residential rents in the city were down 27 percent from a year ago in January, according to a report from Apartment List, with median rents at $1,992 for a one-bedroom apartment and $2,305 for a two bedroom.
New York is another city where residents are eyeing an exit after state lawmakers on Thursday passed a budget that will increase the personal income tax on the wealthiest New Yorkers and corporations to generate more than $4 billion in revenue.
”When wealthy people don’t like something, they don’t protest, they just leave,” said Geoffrey Weinstein, a tax attorney at Cole Schotz.
”The wealthy are under attack and they are seeing if there isn’t a way to lop off 15%. They are looking for options.”
Source: Newmax
