How Bay Area has changed since ’10
Commute times longer, residents older, cost of housing higher
The decade that just ended was one of change in the Bay Area. It’s when we strapped on our Apple Watches (launched 2015), put on some sensible Everlane chinos (launched 2010) and ordered a Lyft (launched 2012) to take us to the hottest new bar in town.
It was also a decade in which the booming technology industry propelled the region’s white-hot economy, the housing crisis intensified and long-running demographic trends came to the forefront. Here are some of the biggest trends of the past decade, based on new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Bay Area’s population growth hit a high-water mark in 2012 — the same year the San Francisco Giants won their second World Series of the decade. Coincidence? Maybe. That year, the population in the five-county Bay Area increased 1.45%, the fastest growth since 2000, according to the California Department of Finance.
But that growth started to slow almost immediately and just last year reached a 14-year low when the region’s population increased just 0.42%.
In 2012, roughly 50,300 more people moved in than out of the Bay Area. In 2019, after several years of declining net migration, about 3,100 more people moved out than in.
Experts say that change is be
ing driven by a rising cost of living, lack of affordable housing and other conditions that make it harder to stay in the Bay Area.
The Bay Area is home to four of the five California counties with the fastest growth in median income from 2010 to 2018.
Santa Clara County now has the highest median income in the state at just under $116,200. That’s a 34% increase from 2010. Alameda and San Mateo counties both had increases of about 33%. And in San Francisco, which had the highest increase
in the state at 47%, median household income is now about $104,600.
At the same time, home prices have skyrocketed in most of the region. In Santa Clara County, median home prices increased 34%, to $1.16 million, according to Zillow. Contra Costa County, meanwhile, still has the most affordable houses, with a median price of $679,000.
But renters bore the brunt of the housing cost increase, with median rents increasing from 34% in Contra Costa County to a high of 52% in Santa Clara County, according to the census. The median rent in Santa Clara County is now $2,126.
Asian Americans became the largest racial group in two Bay Area counties — Alameda and Santa Clara — during the past decade. That continues a trend of growing Asian populations going back to at least the 1980s.
Since 2010, the share of white residents has decreased in all Bay Area counties while the number of residents who are Asian or of two or more races has increased. Meanwhile, the region has been losing African American residents, with their share of the population dropping from 6.6% in 2010 to 5.9% in 2018.
Despite the Bay Area’s youthful reputation, residents here are closer to the
Commodore 64 (released in 1982) than PlayStation (released in 1994). The median age of residents here ranges from 37 in Santa Clara County to nearly 40 in San Mateo County, both older than California’s median age of 36.
It’s not just the median age. There are a lot more people over 65 than there used to be and they make up a bigger slice of the population, mirroring a nationwide trend driven by the long surge in aging baby boomers.
Bay Area residents are spending, on average, about 4 minutes and 35 seconds longer getting to work. That’s roughly enough time to listen to the 2019
hit song “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X — twice. On average, residents in the five-county Bay Area spend about 30 minutes commuting, one way.
But more people in the Bay Area started commuting via public transit. In Alameda County, the share of workers taking transit has increased by a third since 2010 — the largest increase in the area. Now, 15% of all workers age 16 and older take public transit. The share of workers driving alone declined the most in San Francisco, to about a third of all workers. San Francisco is the only county in California where transit is the most popular way to get to work.