“We could never do that before”
Amid remote work, they can’t leave the Bay Area fast enough
SAN FRANCISCO» The Bay Area struck a hard bargain with its tech workers.
Rent was astronomical. Taxes were high. Your neighbors didn’t like you. If you lived in San Francisco, you might have commuted an hour south to your job at Apple or Google or Facebook. Or if your office was in the city, maybe it was in a neighborhood with too much street crime, open drug use and $5 coffees.
But it was worth it. Living in the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world was what mattered. The city gave its workers a choice of interesting jobs and a chance at the brass ring.
That is, until the pandemic. Remote work offered a chance at residing for a few months in towns where life felt easi
er. Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school.
They fled. They fled to tropical beach towns. They fled to more affordable places such as Georgia. They fled to states without income taxes such as Texas and Florida.
That’s where the story of the Bay Area’s latest tech era is ending for a growing crowd of tech workers and their companies. They have suddenly movable jobs and money in the bank — money that will go plenty further somewhere else.
But where? The No. 1 pick for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas, with other winners including Seattle, New York and Chicago, according to moveBuddha, a site that compiles data on moving. Some cities have set up recruiting programs to lure them to new homes. Miami’s mayor has been inviting tech people to move there in his Twitter posts.
The Times talked to more than two dozen tech executives and workers who have left San Francisco for other parts of the country over the past year. Here are some of their stories.
Ah, the normal life
“I miss San Francisco. I miss the life I had there,” said John Gardner, 35, the founder and CEO of Kickoff, a remote personal training startup, who packed his things into storage and left in a camper van to wander America. “But right now it’s just like: What else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
A couple of months later, Gardner wrote: “Greetings from sunny Miami Beach! This is about the 40th place I’ve set up a temporary
headquarters for Kickoff.”
Remote personal training happens to coincide well with remote life, but he said his startup’s growth this past year was also due to his leaving the tech bubble and immersing himself in more normal communities, a few days at a time.
The biggest tech companies aren’t going anywhere, and tech stocks are still soaring. Apple’s flying-saucer-shaped campus is not going to zoom away. Google is still absorbing ever more office space in San Jose and San Francisco. New founders are still coming to town.
But the migration from the Bay Area appears real. Residential rents in San Francisco are down 27% from a year ago, and the office vacancy rate has spiked to 16.7%, a number not seen in a decade.
“Moving into a $1.3 million house that we saw only on video for 20 minutes and said yes,” wrote Mike Rothermel, a designer at Cisco who moved from the Bay Area to Boulder with his wife last summer. “It’s a mansion compared to SF for the same money.”
Wait, no income tax?
“We’re selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?” Justin Kan, a serial entrepreneur who cofounded Twitch, asked on Twitter in August.
Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of software company Palantir, which moved from Silicon Valley to Denver, wrote back: “Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society.”
Also: no state income taxes.
Austin, population 1 million and the Texas city most would say is closest in spirit to the Bay Area, has long had a healthy tech industry. Computer giant Dell is based nearby. The University of Texas is one of the top public colleges in the country. And the music scene is eclectic and creative.
Now the local tech industry is rapidly expanding. Apple is opening a $1 billion, 133-acre campus. Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook have all either expanded their footprints in Austin or have plans to. Startup investor money is arriving, too: The investors at 8VC and Breyer Capital opened Austin offices last year.
Sahin Boydas, the founder of a remote-work startup who had lived in San Francisco and its suburbs over the last decade, saw all of that. He looked at his wife and two young children, working and learning from home while crammed into a Cupertino rental that had seen better days. Much of the late summer, the air was full of smoke from wildfires. For days, electricity would go in and out at his house.
“You start to feel stupid,” said Boydas, who is 37. “I can understand the 1% rich people, the very top investors and entrepreneurs, they can be happy there.”
So he and his family moved to Austin. For the same price as their threebedroom apartment in Cupertino, they have a fivebedroom home on an acre of land. For the first time, Boydas has outdoor space.
“We’re going to get a cat and a dog,” he said. “We could never do that before.”
Nevermind the mosquitoes
“Ok guys hear me out, what if we move Silicon Valley to Miami,” tweeted Delian Asparouhov, a principal at Founders Fund, which invests in startups.
The mayor of Miami wrote back last month: “How can I help?”
The San Francisco exodus means the talent and money of newly remote tech workers are up for grabs. And it’s not just the mayor of Miami trying to lure them in.
Topeka, Kan., started Choose Topeka, which will reimburse new workers $10,000 for the first year of rent or $15,000 if they buy a home. Tulsa, Okla., will pay you $10,000 to move there.
A program in Savannah, Ga., will reimburse remote workers $2,000 for the move there, and the city has created various social activities to introduce the newcomers to one another and to locals. “We try to make the transition easy,” said Jennifer Bonnett, vice president of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Savannah Economic Development Authority.
Keyan Karimi, 29 and a startup investor, took Savannah’s invitation to move there (though he didn’t ask for the reimbursement).
Seeing the inequality of billionaires in San Francisco’s wealthy Pacific Heights neighborhood and the homeless camps down the hill ground on him. So Karimi went home to his parents’ house in Atlanta to ride out some of the pandemic. Then he detected something strange. The city he thought was boring had gotten pretty interesting.
“I had no idea how much was going on here,” he said.
So just a few months after leaving his $4,000-a-month one-bedroom in San Francisco, he’s working with the local business development group to put together a maritime innovation center in Savannah to invest in and guide shipping and logistics startups. The only downside is mosquitoes, he said. “I get eaten alive.”
In Puerto Rico, Gillian Morris, founder of travel app Hitlist, is also recruiting. Her San Francisco breaking point came after her roommate was attacked on their street. She moved to San Juan in 2019, even though it also has a crime problem. But now she lives in a huge house in the middle of the city.
“I have 12 people leaving San Francisco over the next three months to join a coliving community I set up,” she said. “It’s amazing here.”