San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Where Millennials who move to city come from
New data offers detailed glimpse with a few surprises
Where do San Francisco’s Millennials move here from? Mostly other places in California. But many moved from other large cities like Seattle, Chicago and New York, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. And young adults from a couple of places, Hawaii and Boston, arrived in numbers far larger than their populations would suggest.
The bureau, in partnership with Harvard University, recently published data that allows a detailed window into the migration patterns of young adults — specifically those born between 1984 and 1992, making up the bulk of the socalled Millennials. While the oldest of these
adults are now entering middle age, the data specifically tracks migration by looking at where each person was when they were 16 years old, and where they were at age 26.
According to the data, about 1 in 20 Millennial San Franciscans were living in the L.A. metro area as teenagers (5%), and 3.5% were from Sacramento originally. San Jose, San Diego and nearby Santa Rosa rounded out the top five California origins for the San Francisco area’s youngish adults.
When it came to outof-state migrants, the San Francisco area’s Millennials most often came from the Seattle metro area; nearly 1 out of every 100 San Franciscans ages 29 to 37 lived in Seattle when they were 16 (This author is one of them). This makes sense, given the Emerald City’s relative proximity and the other characteristics it shares with S.F.: It, too, is a midsize urban hub with lots of tech jobs and easy access to nature.
The Chicago metro area and New York City metro area also, unsurprisingly, are two of the top five out-of-state origins for San Francisco Millennials — they’re both in the top five largest metro areas in the country. The Boston and Washington, D.C., metro areas however, sent a far larger number of people to San Francisco than their population numbers might warrant.
The states that sent the overall largest numbers of Millennials to San Francisco — including New York, Texas and Florida — were
fairly obvious: They are also the most populous.
But a different set of states emerged when adjusting for population. Millennials from Hawaii, for instance, were more likely to move to San Francisco than Millennials from any other state: About 1,500 out of every 100,000 Millennial Hawaiians moved to San
Francisco, according to the data.
Millennials from Oregon, Vermont and Nevada also moved to the San Francisco area at very high rates. Meanwhile, states in the Southeast, including
Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky, saw the smallest Millennial migration to S.F.