New data makes it official: Exodus from S.F. is over
“I’m really excited to be back in the city and see all my friends.” Brian Castro, who returned to S.F. last week
Brian Castro had to get out of San Francisco.
Last year, as the pandemic raged, he fled the Outer Sunset for a cabin on the scenic Olympic Peninsula near Seattle. “I was trapped in my apartment and going stircrazy like a lot of people,” he said.
But with lockdown restrictions lifted, events returning and friends ready to hang out again, Castro packed up his car and drove back to the Bay Area last week.
“Now as things are opening back up, I’m really excited to be back in the city and see all my friends,” he said.
He isn’t alone.
The net migration of people leaving San Francisco has fallen to prepandemic levels, according to United States Postal Service changeofaddress data analyzed by The Chronicle.
After reaching a peak monthly net loss of almost 7,000 households last August — calculated by the number of households leaving minus households moving in — net outmigration fell to a little over 1,400 households in May and about 1,600 in June, the smallest losses since March 2019. May was also the first time in 15 months that the number dropped below 2,000.
Data includes permanent moves only, and USPS excludes monthly clusters of moves from one ZIP code to another when total moves are 10 or fewer. Net migration statistics for major cities are generally negative because of limitations in the way USPS reports changeofaddress data.
Castro had considered staying in Washington, but he missed the energy of the city.
He lost his tech job a month into the pandemic when his former company laid off a third of staff. He’s now working for a startup parttime but looking for a new job in San Francisco.
San Francisco’s population shrank by 1.4% between July 1, 2019, and July 1, 2020, the secondlargest decline in the country, according to census data. However, around twothirds of residents who left stayed in the Bay Area, according to a UC Berkeley analysis, which concluded there was no California exodus.
The city is drawing more new residents as the economy recovers. San Francisco and San Mateo counties added 17,200 jobs in June, the highest level in a year, though the region remains 100,000 below the levels of February 2020.
While the city has fewer net moves overall than it did during the pandemic and even 2019, its monthly “churn rate” — that is, the total number of moves into or out of the city — has mostly gone up this year. For instance, this April, about 18,500 households filed changeof address requests into or out of the city, compared with just 13,300 in April 2020 and 14,500 in April 2019.
Anusha Datar recently moved to San Francisco after graduating college in Massachusetts.
Datar works at Meter, an internet hardware startup, and likes working in the office.
San Francisco “made sense to me as an engineer. The energy here, the people you can meet and the people you can work with, it’s pretty awesome,” she said. “It’s been exciting and energetic.”
The downside of a more vibrant city has been a pricier market for renters. San Francisco rents have increased by 17% since January, but remain 14% lower than in March 2020, according to Apartment List.
Datar has looked at more than 15 apartments as she tries to secure a lease around the Mission, Potrero Hill or Hayes Valley.
“Competition is definitely back up,” she said.