Via the New York Times, a pretty interesting article about tech entrepreneurs leaving the Bay Area for elsewhere, with numbers to show for it:
...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 percent from a year ago, and the office vacancy rate has spiked to 16.7 percent, a number not seen in a decade.
Though prices had dropped only slightly, Zillow reported more homes for sale in San Francisco than a year ago. For more than a month last year, 90 percent of the searches involving San Francisco on moveBuddha were for people moving out.
Twitter, Yelp, Airbnb and Dropbox have tried to sublease some of their San Francisco office space. Pinterest, which has one of the most iconic offices in town, paid $90 million to break a lease for a site where it planned to expand. And companies like Twitter and Facebook have announced “work from home forever” plans...
I have long asserted that the Bay Area's dominance in the American life sciences space will continue unchecked, and it would take an epic natural disaster to change that. While I don't think the pandemic measures up, it certainly is doing its part to push people elsewhere. I still think that San Francisco will maintain its pre-eminence (1A to Boston's #1, IMO), but we shall see.
It would be interesting to know who exactly is leaving, i.e. the people who were successful in tech entrepreneurship, or those who were not?
A few comments from a bay area resident:
ReplyDelete1) Tech = software. Hard tech hasn't left the bay area.
2) All these companies are on temp WFH thru Sep. It will be interesting to see what happens after that. Google, Apple, etc continue to build more office space as if they plan to bring everyone back.