• With offices empty and housing scarce, commercial buildings are being turned into homes more often. 
• Architects say the hardest part of these conversions is picking the right building.
• After that, they have to do everything from adding stairs to cutting out the centers of structures. 

Vacant downtown office buildings may be the next SoHo lofts. That is, after they go through the costly process of being converted into apartments and condos. 

Elected officials in cities across the US are trying to solve a housing shortage, empty offices in a remote-work world, and the climate crisis by converting underused commercial space into homes.

Steven Paynter, an expert in office-to-residential conversions at the architecture firm Gensler, thinks converted office buildings will be a trendy, new type of housing. Like the loft apartments converted from former manufacturing spaces that have become some of the most desirable homes in Manhattan, New York, former offices offer unique features and history you can’t find in a new building. 

“A lot of the residential conversion is now providing a better product than ground-up residential because no one builds residential with that high ceilings, or that kind of interesting structural system, or that kind of heritage facade, or building with brick skin,” Paynter said.

The renovated exterior of Franklin Tower, a 24-story former office building in downtown Philadelphia that now contains luxury residences. Courtesy of Gensler and Robert Deitchler

And even in a worst-case scenario, where units are strangely laid out or dimly lit, there can still be unique benefits to living in an old office.

“A lot of people might not care that they get a ton of daylight into their bedroom if it means their rent is cheaper or they live a five-minute walk from work,” Mark Hogan, a San Francisco architect who has advised the city government on policy reforms concerning office conversions, said.

But renovating old office buildings is no simple task. Insider spoke with four architects who’d tackled these projects. They said that turning a cubicle farm or conference room into a livable space involved addressing a host of issues, including inoperable, poorly insulated windows and the dark depths of a skyscraper’s center.

Here’s what it takes to turn an empty office skyscraper into much-needed housing.

The first step is finding the right building

The most difficult part of the conversion process comes before any of the construction begins: selecting the buildings to convert, Paynter said. He and his team have developed an algorithm to determine which buildings are ripe for conversion. It takes into account building size, layout, location, and how updated its facade is. Of the 950 buildings he and his team have surveyed, just 30% are suitable for conversion. People in the industry call them “Goldilocks buildings.”

“If you get the right building, you can make a really great project out of it,” he said. “If you start with the wrong building, you’ve got no chance.

Older, prewar buildings are generally easier to turn into homes than newer skyscrapers. That’s because buildings constructed before air conditioning generally have smaller floor plates, with building interiors no more than 25 or 30 feet from windows that can open. Newer buildings often have deeper floor plates and windows that don’t open, which can make conversion tricky since residential buildings need light, air, and bathrooms all over. 

“A lot of older buildings that are U-shaped or E-shaped, or kind of smaller in floor plate are perfect candidates for conversion,” Charles Bloszies, a San Francisco architect and structural engineer, told Insider. 

In some cases, particularly when it comes to postwar high-rises, it’s more economical to tear old office buildings down and replace them with new housing, Hogan said. He thinks older, smaller buildings are much more eligible for conversion. 

“That is lower-hanging fruit, and I think those are the type of projects you’ll be more likely to see sooner,” Hogan said. 

An exercise and lounge space in Franklin Tower. Courtesy of Gensler and Robert Deitchler

Many buildings need more stairs to meet modern fire codes

The first step in turning a commercial building into homes is figuring out where the staircases will go to meet modern fire regulations, especially in older and smaller buildings, Hogan said. In the US, most apartment buildings more than 4 stories high must have two staircases and exits. Those staircases need to be connected by a corridor, and that shapes how apartments are laid out around them.

“There’s a lot of existing buildings that have a fire escape as a second means of egress in San Francisco,” Hogan said. “In a building where you’re changing the use, you typically have to bring it up to code, and so adding extra stairs is a really major intervention and is just going to change the available square footage pretty dramatically.” 

Cutting out the middle of skyscrapers to add more windows

Key to the interior design in converted buildings is maximizing the amount of exterior wall per unit to get each home the most light and air possible. In some newer office buildings, architects will cut out a portion of the center of the building to create a courtyard or shaft for air and light. Sometimes that lost floor space will be made up by adding several floors to the building. 

John Cetra, a Manhattan architect who has worked on office conversions since the 1980s, is leading the second-largest office-to-residential conversion project in Manhattan. The building — at 25 Water St. in the financial district — houses JPMorgan’s offices and is set to have 1,300 apartments eventually. But first, sections of the center of the building, including excess elevators, are planned to be cut out, with new floors added. 

“We created the hole in the doughnut to bring the light and air into the middle of the space,” Cetra said. “And we took some of the floor area that we eliminated, and we’re building 10 stories on top of the building.” 

A rendering of a coworking space at 55 Broad St in Manhattan. Courtesy CetraRuddy

In another such project completed in 2007, Bloszies and his team turned the oldest skyscraper on the West Coast — San Francisco’s Chronicle Building — into 100 homes. They stripped off a metal shroud that had been added to the building, restored the original facade, and added 8 stories to the top of the building — one of the largest vertical additions to a historic building in the world at the time.

Rebuilding a skyscraper can get expensive

Not all buildings can accommodate a renovation like this. Some building foundations can’t handle the extra weight of additional floors. Cetra said he and his team “draw the line” at reinforcing foundations, a process that he said was too expensive and disruptive to be worthwhile.

Changing an older building’s use often triggers requirements to have it abide by modern building codes. This includes updates like seismic retrofitting, which strengthens buildings to protect them against earthquakes. It also includes abiding by modern energy-efficiency standards. New plumbing, mechanical systems, and heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems are also usually part of the construction process. 

Renovating the facades and windows of buildings is also a costly but often necessary endeavor. Many buildings, particularly those constructed after 1960, don’t have operable windows, and even if they do, they don’t meet modern energy-efficiency standards. 

When Gensler renovated Franklin Tower, a vacant 1970s office building in downtown Philadelphia, it fully reconstructed the facade and windows. It also solved some of the problems associated with a large floor plan by creating smaller amenity spaces on several floors occupying many of the windowless spaces in the center of the building, Paynter said. 

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The post Architects Clarify How Places of work Are Being Made Into Luxurious Residences appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Every Saturday, local farmers and San Francisco residents flock to the Alemany Farmers Market to experience a tradition steeped in 80 years of California history. But recently, above stalls selling £1 tomatoes and free peach samples, a sign of our spooky moment loomed: a huge ad for Prophecy – not a gift from divine power, but a Palo Alto-based data technology startup.

A ubiquitous part of life in San Francisco, these tech billboards proclaim the names of the area’s emerging and established companies. But so often the company names that dot our landscape seem like a parody — they’re more likely to create uncomfortable confusion among Bay Area residents than to give a startup its next paying customer. After all, the most valuable company of all time is named after Steve Jobs’ favorite fruit, part of a legacy of tech dominance by companies whose names have little to do with their actual function — think Twilio, Spotify, and Uber.

Add in the inherent brain drain of the tech industry, which all but guarantees that only a fraction of the startups formed each year survive, and you have a litany of bizarre company names scattered across San Francisco. Do you need insurance? Try Hippo, Glow or Huckleberry. Businesses looking for city-designed human resource tools can choose to buy from Cocoon, Rippling, Gusto or Hammr. There is a pylon for mortgages as well as a pylon for managing digital calls; There is a thread for fixing code bugs and now there are two different threads apps for messages.

In this age of tech startups that cost just a dime, fast-paced founders struggle with how to name their new ventures. Some outsource the work, or choose (or make up) a random word and hope for the best. But oftentimes, founders market their products to venture capitalists—chasing industry trends and lingo in hopes of snagging high ratings—rather than using a name that will expose their company to a larger audience.

San Francisco-based Stripe, currently the most valuable private startup, reportedly got its name when early collaborator Greg Brockman chose the word “Stripe” from a list of hundreds of “random nouns” he wrote after the availability of ” .com” searched. And now it’s serving as inspiration for newcomers: Kevin Lu, co-founder of new AI startup Sweep, told SFGATE that while the Stripe name “has absolutely nothing to do with what their product is, its simplicity is a helpful guideline goes”.

“Most businesses want a one-word name that can become part of everyday language,” said Ashleigh Hansberger, co-founder of branding agency Motto, which helped name payment platform Hopscotch and podcast collective Soundrise. “‘Let’s grab an Uber,’ ‘Google it,’ ‘Slack me’.”

Tim Qin had Apple’s “very fun, very approachable” naming vibe in mind while working on branding for his travel loan startup, which launched in early 2023. He and his co-founder went through dozens of iterations of a company “name,” he told SFGATE, trying to find something that didn’t sound too serious. After entries like Positano and Toujour — which didn’t quite live up to the Wanderlust brand — they landed on Roame.

But many other startup founders think of investors, not ordinary people. Right now, venture firms are particularly bullish on software-as-a-service companies — think Salesforce or GitLab — that mainly sell to other companies. These companies don’t have to appeal to the average person; They tend to opt for innuendos within the group. After realizing that corporate buyers couldn’t easily pronounce Tractific, Buğra Gündüz simply swapped the name of his data analytics startup to HockeyStack “because it sounds like ‘hockey stick growth,’ which is what we promise our customers.”

An advertisement for Zoho, a software-as-a-service company, at the Van Ness subway station in San Francisco on June 30, 2023.

Stephen Council/SFGATE

According to Denis Pakhaliuk, president of San Francisco-based branding agency Ramotion, venture capitalism is also leading founders to naming conventions with proven fundraising potential.

“It’s really easy to come up with a trending name that’s really easy for the investor to recognize,” Pakhaliuk said in an interview, adding that trends are especially useful when a company is still developing its first products. “You can just call it ‘Whatever Dot AI’.”

Indeed, in the months following OpenAI’s viral success with ChatGPT, there was a torrent of imitators. “AI” ends the name of at least 15 of the 130+ startups announced in the latest class at prominent San Francisco tech incubator Y Combinator. Now the “-AI” trend may have taken its course: Elon Musk’s newly announced artificial intelligence startup with his team of all-star researchers will trade as xAI. Pakhaliuk reckons that the most successful artificial intelligence companies will begin to abandon these identifying letters to escape the saturated naming convention.

There is precedent for Pakhaliuk’s conjecture. A decade ago, the startup name of choice almost always ended in “-ify” and “-ly,” popularized by Spotify, Shopify, and Bit.ly. When Chinese tech giant Bytedance debuted Musical.ly, it was an oddity, a legacy of Vine at best. But when the company merged with TikTok, it decided to keep the unconventional name for its American product. Meanwhile, TikTok is as common a noun as Band-Aid.

Hansberger said that when her firm helps name a new company, she will work out hundreds of options over a six-week process. It begins with a “name letter,” which includes descriptions of how the name is intended to evoke emotion, words to avoid, the names of competitors, and criteria for safeguarding against linguistic or cultural “disasters.”

But in this industry, the quirkiest names have respectable track records, and sometimes linguistic disasters are warranted.

Sure, data security startup Snowflake’s US Highway 101 ad might make motorists think politically thin-skinned, but the company just made nearly $2 billion in 12 months. And “Git” is an iconic Harry Potter roast, but that hasn’t stopped San Francisco-based GitLab and GitHub from becoming — by name alone — two of the most successful startups of the last decade.

Prophecy billboard shows a view of US 101 and the Alemany Farmers Market on the edge of the Bernal Heights neighborhood in San Francisco, July 15, 2023.

Stephen Council/SFGATE

Palo Alto-based data analytics startup Prophecy, whose advertising dominates the German market, isn’t faring too bad either, according to Crunchbase, with over $30 million in venture funding since 2021. The ad, blue and nondescript, is as vague as the name of their manufacturer.

Can you spot a standout tech startup name in the Bay Area? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council at stephen.council@sfgate.com or via Signal at 628-204-5452.

The post Tech founders lastly clarify San Francisco’s bizarre startup names appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

For a long time, researchers at the University of Florida included a question in their ongoing, decades-long survey of Floridians: If you weren’t born in this state, why are you here?

The answers remained a constant for so many years that in 2019 they stopped asking.

“‘The weather’ or ‘I moved here for my job’ were the two primary reasons. Considerably lower down, in third place, was ‘family,’” said Scott Richards, associate director at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. “It was remarkably stable, even through severe economic disruptions.”

Experts say no one knows if those reasons have changed, like so many other facets of American life have, during the coronavirus pandemic. But Florida’s elected leaders contend that something different is luring residents. Gov. Ron DeSantis touts the state as a destination for those fleeing COVID-19 restrictions. Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis has suggested northeasterners are escaping “tax hell” for the income-tax-free Sunshine State.

What we do know is the state had 221,000 more residents arrive from other U.S. states than leave from July 2020 to July of last year, according to the latest population estimates from the Census Bureau. That’s Florida’s largest gain in residents from within the U.S. since 2005.

The state’s net gain of approximately 260,000 residents, which includes 39,000 international migrants, is up a little over the previous two years, “but it’s not exceedingly high,” said Stefan Rayer, director of the population program at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

Two recently released reports, one using data compiled by Zillow and Allied Van Lines, and the other analyzing new Florida driver’s licenses, show New York is the No. 1 supplier of new residents to Florida and Tampa Bay, as per usual. Other metro areas sending a lot of people to Tampa Bay specifically, according to that data, are Atlanta and Chicago.

“It’s New York pretty much every year, but if you look at No. 2 for people coming to Florida overall, it’s always Georgia,” Rayer said, referring to historic Census data. “And No. 1 for people who leave Florida is Georgia. So distance matters.”

The demographics of residents flowing in and out can affect the state’s economy and politics. For instance, the number of active voters registered as Republicans in Florida surpassed Democrats for the first time in modern history last year. Susan MacManus, a professor emerita at the University of South Florida and expert on Florida politics, believes that’s mostly due to Democrats suspending in-person voter registration efforts during COVID. But she said migration could also be a factor.

“It’s hard data to get,” MacManus said. “My big question is, ‘Were (new Florida arrivals) typical northeasterners who just want better weather and bring Democratic voting patterns with them, or more affluent people who were upset with lockdowns and who may vote Republican?’”

“If anyone tells you they know definitively,” MacManus said, “they’re lying.”

While experts say big-picture data is lacking, new arrivals and recent departures from Tampa Bay were happy to discuss personal reasons for moving. The Tampa Bay Times received more than 250 responses to recent social media posts seeking their stories.

Those responding to the survey, which wasn’t scientific, often cited lower taxes and more affordable homes, along with the sunny weather, as reasons for moving to Florida. A few mentioned COVID-19 restrictions. Many said they chose Tampa Bay because of fond vacation memories. After the weather, the most common reason for moving was job-related. Some had been offered a better salary to relocate, yet more cited the ability to work remotely. For those leaving Florida — hundreds of thousands move out of the state every year — many mentioned politics, but more mentioned a feeling that they could find better schools and more robust services somewhere else for the same cost.

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Here’s what some respondents had to say.

Moved to Florida

Harshneel More, 30, Tampa (via San Francisco)

Harshneel More, 30, looks onto Sparkman Wharf from a deck of Industirous, a shared office building where he works from as a senior applications security engineer for tech company Fast, while waiting for programs on his computer to load to start his workday on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022. More and his wife moved to the area last summer from San Francisco. [ IVY CEBALLO | Times ]

When his San Francisco-based employer announced in 2020 that employees could permanently work remote from anywhere, the newly married More started thinking it might be time to branch out.”

He booked a trip to check out Tampa and Miami last summer. He ended up skipping South Florida after he and his wife, the founder of an architecture jobs marketplace startup, fell in love with Sparkman Wharf and Armature Works. They moved in July, trading a small one-bedroom for a two-bedroom apartment with a workout area in a new luxury tower in Tampa’s Water Street district.

“We were able to get a bigger space, with a dedicated home office,” while keeping his San Francisco salary, More said. “I really liked the amenities, like swimming pools, gyms, things you couldn’t get back home.”

He said the area was on his radar because of Tampa’s growing reputation as a hub for tech work. A senior application security engineer for Fast, an online payment services startup, More said he was especially impressed when he realized the publicly traded cybersecurity firm KnowBe4 is based in Clearwater. “I knew them,” he said. “Silicon Valley is always seen as the place to be, but I’ve been encouraging people I know to consider Tampa.” He said he feels even more rooted in Tampa since, a month after he moved, Fast announced it was opening a second headquarters where their CEO would be based, in Tampa.

He’s enjoying less expensive groceries and meeting a lot of other young professionals who’ve recently moved from places like Denver, New York City and southern California. His one peeve: “I did notice San Francisco had less traffic. It was small streets, so everyone drove small sedans. Here you see bigger cars, big pickup trucks, and they’re all moving at high speed — I had to get used to that.”

Rayellen Griffin, 48, St. Petersburg (via Independence, Ky.)

Rayellen Griffin, 48, walks her dog Rembrandt on the St. Pete Pier on Monday, Feb. 21, 2022 in St. Petersburg. Griffin moved to St. Pete from Northern Kentucky last March. [ DIRK SHADD | Times ]

Griffin had been vacationing in Tampa Bay for years from her home state of Kentucky. She had a series of life-changing events. She lost her parents and older sister within a couple of years. She watched the last of her three grown children leave home in rural Independence, about 15 miles south of Cincinnati. She separated from her husband after realizing their plans for the future were “very different.” So she wanted a fresh start.

Tampa Bay “felt less touristy than other places in Florida, and even the touristy areas didn’t seem so bad,” she said. She considered Bradenton first, but a coworker who’d moved to St. Petersburg suggested she visit. Describing herself as “actually very liberal, even though I’m from Kentucky,” Griffin liked the city’s political makeup and LGBTQ inclusiveness. “And there’s no freezing rain.”

She moved into an apartment in the Gateway neighborhood with her dog and cat “just before prices really started going up.” The only downside, she said, has been the cost of living. She’s watched her neighbors’ rent go up 30 percent and anticipates a big increase when her lease expires. “I’m having a hard time finding a job that pays me enough to stay in St. Petersburg,” she said. She does not have a degree but has experience doing administrative work and working in call centers. For now, she’s working temp jobs and living off savings. “I hope I can stay. … Kentucky was depressing. There’s plenty to do here, like the beach or the Pier, even if I’m broke.”

Julianne Recine, 49, Westchase (via New York City)

A lifelong resident of New York City, Recine relocated to Florida in July 2021 with her young son and husband, who works remotely for a defense contractor. “I didn’t come down here for the weather. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but I miss the winter and snow,” she said. “Quite frankly, it was freedom.”

Recine’s family began mulling a move as New York schools remained closed last spring due to COVID-19. “I didn’t want my son going to school on Zoom … and there was a high level of fear that made it hard to get together with people,” said Recine, who kept her remote job as a financial consultant.

Tampa had long been on her husband’s radar, but more as a retirement destination, until “the pandemic accelerated everything.” Recine said they were able to compete in the challenging housing market because they bought a home from owners who didn’t plan to move out for five months. The Recines did not sell their house in the Bronx.

An appreciation for DeSantis also factored in. “Do I agree with everything he says? No. But mostly.” Recine had once prided herself as being a “gritty, liberal New Yorker,” she said, “but the term ‘liberal New Yorker’ has been so distorted by where the left has taken it that I can no longer be associated with it.” Recine said she was specifically referring to New York being soft on criminals.

As for Tampa life, “I’ve been pleasantly surprised. … You hear there’s no good Chinese outside of New York, but (Tampa’s) Yummy House is excellent.”

Katherine La Rochelle, 48, Tampa (via Denver)

Katherine La Rochelle attends her first Gasparilla parade. She moved to Tampa in 2021 from Denver. [ Courtesy of Katherine La Rochelle ]

Last year, La Rochelle, a vice president at a San Francisco-based startup, and her husband, a software engineer, realized their 110-year-old Craftsman home in Denver was worth about 50 percent more than they’d paid a few years earlier and wondered: “What if this all blows up?” They’d limped through the 2008 housing crash as homeowners in Phoenix. They did not want to get stuck in Denver where, La Rochelle said, they were disillusioned by rising costs, homeless people in their neighborhood and what they characterize as an unchecked increase in violent crime.

“We wondered where can we do better on taxes,” La Rochelle said, “after being bled dry and seeing no improvements.” Florida made sense. They’d loved living near the water when they had lived in France years ago, and “we lean Libertarian, so we liked the personal freedom aspects.” Tampa became the top candidate when La Rochelle found a gifted private school for her daughter — one of only a handful in the state — and discovered a burgeoning girls’ youth hockey scene. “She and my husband play hockey, so that was very important to them.”

Their home on the western edge of Hillsborough County cost about what they paid in Denver five years ago, and La Rochelle kept her job. “I haven’t really looked at what jobs pay here,” she said. One thing she misses: public transportation in the form of light rail and frequently running buses.

Getting out of Florida

Adam Kuhn, 41, Asheville, N.C. (via St. Petersburg)

Adam Kuhn moved from St. Petersburg to Asheville, North Carolina. [ Courtesy of Adam Kuhn ]

After 16 years in St. Petersburg, Kuhn and his wife headed to the mountains in late 2020 in what he called a recent “mass exodus” of his family to Asheville. That included a sister who had spent 20 years in St. Pete and his parents in Pinellas Park. They visited the area often after some Florida friends moved first. They decided to make the move while their two children were doing school remotely, thinking it would be less of a “social impact” on them.

Kuhn, a web engineer for a Silicon Valley startup, said the other big factors included the desire to experience a new climate and environment and a desire to get away from Florida’s “shifting political landscape.” He said he appreciates living in a politically diverse state, as it gives him an opportunity to teach his children to accept other viewpoints and coexist with people they disagree with. He felt that was no longer the case in Florida. “I think there’s a lot of hay made about Florida being a purple state,” he said, “but my feeling was that it was deeply red when we left.”

The family chose to keep their home in St. Petersburg and rent it out, while also buying in Asheville. The somewhat higher cost of living was a bit of a shock, Kuhn said, but so far they’re happy with the move. Kuhn does worry about some of the same changes that he saw in St. Petersburg happening there. “I was a big fan of the 600 block, the Local 662, Fubar,” he said referring to St. Petersburg’s shuttered live music venues. “The same gentrification that happened there could happen here.”

Harrison Aquino, 29, Buffalo via Pensacola

Harrison Aquino moved from Florida to Buffalo, New York in 2021. [ Courtesy of Harrison Aquino ]

Aquino, an accountant, and his wife, a law student, decided it was time to look outside of Florida after having their first son.

“The poor school systems in Florida were, for us, a huge thing,” he said. “If you track the schools in New York, even in Buffalo, they’re ranked near the top every year.” Another big factor, which may come as a surprise, is the weather. “Yes, it’s freezing, but we don’t have hurricanes or really any natural disasters here. … We had a hurricane, with a newborn baby, and lost power for like a week.”

After getting priced out of their preferred neighborhoods in West Palm Beach, Tampa Bay and Pensacola, Aquino started considering Buffalo, where he had lived for a while in high school.

“Even in the best neighborhoods (in Buffalo), you can afford a house almost anywhere if you’re a married couple with a decent middle-class income,” he said. “I was making like $65,000 when we moved here and was able to buy a two-unit house for $250,000.” The second unit now has tenants and generates rental income. Aquino also found a new, higher-paying job, in software consulting.

“I like Florida,” Aquino said, “but it just didn’t make sense to stay. Maybe someday we’ll be back as snowbirds.”

The post Transferring to Florida? New arrivals clarify why they moved to Tampa Bay appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

For a long time, researchers at the University of Florida included a question in their ongoing, decades-long survey of Floridians: If you weren’t born in this state, why are you here?

The answers remained a constant for so many years that in 2019 they stopped asking.

“ ‘The weather’ or ‘I moved here for my job’ were the two primary reasons. Considerably lower down, in third place, was ‘family,’ ” said Scott Richards, associate director at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. “It was remarkably stable, even through severe economic disruptions.”

Experts say no one knows if those reasons have changed, like so many other facets of American life have, during the coronavirus pandemic. But Florida’s elected leaders contend that something different is luring residents. Gov. Ron DeSantis touts the state as a destination for those fleeing COVID-19 restrictions. Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis has suggested northeasterners are escaping “tax hell” for the income-tax-free Sunshine State.

What we do know is the state had 221,000 more residents arrive from other U.S. states than leave from July 2020 to July of last year, according to the latest population estimates from the Census Bureau. That’s Florida’s largest gain in residents from within the U.S. since 2005.

The state’s net gain of approximately 260,000 residents, which includes 39,000 international migrants, is up a little over the previous two years, “but it’s not exceedingly high,” said Stefan Rayer, director of the population program at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

Two recently-released reports, one using data compiled by Zillow and Allied Van Lines, and the other analyzing new Florida driver’s licenses, show New York is the No. 1 supplier of new residents to Florida and Tampa Bay, as per usual. Other metro areas sending a lot of people to Tampa Bay specifically, according to that data, are Atlanta and Chicago.

“It’s New York pretty much every year, but if you look at No. 2 for people coming to Florida overall, it’s always Georgia,” Rayer said, referring to historic Census data. “And No. 1 for people who leave Florida is Georgia. So distance matters.”

The demographics of residents flowing in and out can affect the state’s economy and politics. For instance, the number of active voters registered as Republicans in Florida surpassed Democrats for the first time in modern history last year. Susan MacManus, a professor emerita at the University of South Florida and expert on Florida politics, believes that’s mostly due to Democrats suspending in-person voter registration efforts during COVID. But he said migration could also be a factor.

“It’s hard data to get,” MacManus said. “My big question is, ‘Were (new Florida arrivals) typical northeasterners who just want better weather and bring Democratic voting patterns with them, or more affluent people who were upset with lockdowns and who may vote Republican?’”

“If anyone tells you they know definitively,” MacManus said, “they’re lying.”

While experts say big-picture data is lacking, new arrivals and recent departures from Tampa Bay were happy to discuss personal reasons for moving. The Tampa Bay Times received more than 250 responses to recent social media posts seeking their stories.

Those responding to the survey, which wasn’t scientific, often cited lower taxes and more affordable homes, along with the sunny weather, as reasons for moving to Florida. A few mentioned COVID restrictions. Many said they chose Tampa Bay because of fond vacation memories. After the weather, the most common reason for moving was job-related. Some had been offered a better salary to relocate, yet more cited the ability to work remotely. For those leaving Florida — hundreds of thousands move out of the state every year — many mentioned politics, but more mentioned a feeling that they could find better schools and more robust services somewhere else for the same cost.

Spend your days with Hayes

Subscribe to our free Stephinitely newsletter

Columnist Stephanie Hayes will share thoughts, feelings and funny business with you every Monday.

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Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Explore all your options

Here’s what some respondents had to say.

Moved to Florida

Harshneel More, 30, Tampa (via San Francisco)

Harshneel More, 30, looks onto Sparkman Wharf from a deck of Industirous, a shared office building where he works from as a senior applications security engineer for tech company Fast, while waiting for programs on his computer to load to start his workday on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022. More and his wife moved to the area last summer from San Francisco. [ IVY CEBALLO | Times ]

When his San Francisco-based employer announced in 2020 that employees could permanently work remote from anywhere, the newly-married More started thinking it might be time to branch out.”

He booked a trip to check out Tampa and Miami last summer. He ended up skipping South Florida after he and his wife, the founder of an architecture jobs marketplace startup, fell in love with Sparkman Wharf and Armature Works. They moved in July, trading a small one-bedroom for a two-bedroom apartment with a workout area in a new luxury tower in Tampa’s Water Street district.

“We were able to get a bigger space, with a dedicated home office,” while keeping his San Francisco salary, More said. “I really liked the amenities, like swimming pools, gyms, things you couldn’t get back home.”

He said the area was on his radar because of Tampa’s growing reputation as a hub for tech work. A senior application security engineer for Fast, an online payment services startup, More said he was especially impressed when he realized the publicly-traded cybersecurity firm KnowBe4 is based in Clearwater. “I knew them,” he said. “Silicon Valley is always seen as the place to be, but I’ve been encouraging people I know to consider Tampa.” He said he feels even more rooted in Tampa since, a month after he moved, Fast announced it was opening a second headquarters where their CEO would be based, in Tampa.

He’s enjoying less expensive groceries and meeting a lot of other young professionals who’ve recently moved from places like Denver, New York City and southern California. His one peeve: “I did notice San Francisco had less traffic. It was small streets, so everyone drove small sedans. Here you see bigger cars, big pickup trucks, and they’re all moving at high speed — I had to get used to that.”

Rayellen Griffin, 48, St. Petersburg (via Independence, Ky.)

Rayellen Griffin, 48, walks her dog Rembrandt on the St. Pete Pier on Monday, Feb. 21, 2022 in St. Petersburg. Griffin moved to St. Pete from Northern Kentucky last March. [ DIRK SHADD | Times ]

Griffin had been vacationing in Tampa Bay for years from her home state of Kentucky. She had a series of life-changing events. She lost her parents and older sister within a couple of years. She watched the last of her three grown children leave home in rural Independence, about 15 miles south of Cincinnati. She separated from her husband after realizing their plans for the future were “very different.” So she wanted a fresh start.

Tampa Bay “felt less touristy than other places in Florida, and even the touristy areas didn’t seem so bad,” she said. She considered Bradenton first, but a coworker who’d moved to St. Petersburg suggested she visit. Describing herself as “actually very liberal, even though I’m from Kentucky,” Griffin liked the city’s political makeup and LGBTQ inclusiveness. “And there’s no freezing rain.”

She moved into an apartment in the Gateway neighborhood with her dog and cat “just before prices really started going up.” The only downside, she said, has been the cost of living. She’s watched her neighbors’ rent go up 30 percent and anticipates a big increase when her lease expires. “I’m having a hard time finding a job that pays me enough to stay in St. Petersburg,” she said. She does not have a degree but has experience doing administrative work and working in call centers. For now, she’s working temp jobs and living off savings. “I hope I can stay. … Kentucky was depressing. There’s plenty to do here, like the beach or the Pier, even if I’m broke.”

Julianne Recine, 49, Westchase (via New York City)

A lifelong resident of New York City, Recine relocated to Florida in July 2021 with her young son and husband, who works remotely for a defense contractor. “I didn’t come down here for the weather. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but I miss the winter and snow,” she said. “Quite frankly, it was freedom.”

Recine’s family began mulling a move as New York schools remained closed last spring due to COVID-19. “I didn’t want my son going to school on Zoom … and there was a high level of fear that made it hard to get together with people,” said Recine, who kept her remote job as a financial consultant.

Tampa had long been on her husband’s radar, but more as a retirement destination, until “the pandemic accelerated everything.” Recine said they were able to compete in the challenging housing market because they bought a home from owners who didn’t plan to move out for five months. The Recine’s did not sell their house in the Bronx.

An appreciation for DeSantis also factored in. “Do I agree with everything he says? No. But mostly.” Recine had once prided herself as being a “gritty, liberal New Yorker,” she said, “but the term ‘liberal New Yorker’ has been so distorted by where the left has taken it that I can no longer be associated with it.” Recine said she was specifically referring to New York being soft on criminals.

As for Tampa life, “I’ve been pleasantly surprised. … You hear there’s no good Chinese outside of New York, but (Tampa’s) Yummy House is excellent.”

Katherine La Rochelle, 48, Tampa (via Denver)

Katherine La Rochelle attends her first Gasparilla parade. She moved to Tampa in 2021 from Denver. [ Courtesy of Katherine La Rochelle ]

Last year, La Rochelle, a vice president at a San Francisco-based startup, and her husband, a software engineer, realized their 110-year-old Craftsman home in Denver was worth about 50 percent more than they’d paid a few years earlier and wondered, “What if this all blows up?” They’d limped through the 2008 housing crash as homeowners in Phoenix. They did not want to get stuck in Denver where La Rochelle said they were disillusioned by rising costs, homeless people in their neighborhood and what they characterize as an unchecked increase in violent crime.

“We wondered where can we do better on taxes,” La Rochelle said, “after being bled dry and seeing no improvements.” Florida made sense. They’d loved living near the water when they’d lived in France years ago, and “we lean Libertarian, so we liked the personal freedom aspects.” Tampa became the top candidate when La Rochelle found a gifted private school for her daughter — one of only a handful in the state — and discovered a burgeoning girls’ youth hockey scene. “She and my husband play hockey, so that was very important to them.”

Their home on the western edge of Hillsborough County cost about what they paid in Denver five years ago, and La Rochelle kept her job. “I haven’t really looked at what jobs pay here,” she said. One thing she misses: public transportation in the form of light rail and frequently running buses.

Getting out of Florida

Adam Kuhn, 41, Asheville, N.C. (via St. Petersburg)

Adam Kuhn moved from St. Petersburg to Asheville, North Carolina. [ Courtesy of Adam Kuhn ]

After 16 years in St. Petersburg, Kuhn and his wife headed to the mountains in late 2020 in what he called a recent “mass exodus” of his family to Asheville. That included a sister who’d spent 20 years in St. Pete and his parents in Pinellas Park. They visited the area often after some Florida friends moved first. They decided to make the move while their two children were doing school remotely, thinking it would be less of a “social impact” on them.

Kuhn, a web engineer for a Silicon Valley startup, said the other big factors were the desire to experience a new climate and environment and a desire to get away from Florida’s “shifting political landscape.” He said he appreciates living in a politically diverse state, as it gives him an opportunity to teach his children to accept other viewpoints and coexist with people they disagree with. He felt that was no longer the case in Florida. “I think there’s a lot of hay made about Florida being a purple state,” he said, “but my feeling was that it was deeply red when we left.”

The family chose to keep their home in St. Petersburg and rent it out, while also buying in Asheville. The somewhat higher cost of living was a bit of a shock, Kuhn said, but so far they’re happy with the move. Kuhn does worry about some of the same changes that he saw in St. Petersburg happening there. “I was a big fan of the 600 block, the Local 662, Fubar,” he said referring to St. Petersburg’s shuttered live music venues. “The same gentrification that happened there could happen here.”

Harrison Aquino, 29, Buffalo via Pensacola

Harrison Aquino moved from Florida to Buffalo, New York in 2021. [ Courtesy of Harrison Aquino ]

Aquino, an accountant, and his wife, a law student, decided it was time to look outside of Florida after having their first son.

“The poor school systems in Florida were, for us, a huge thing,” he said. “If you track the schools in New York, even in Buffalo, they’re ranked near the top every year.” Another big factor, which may come as a surprise, is the weather. “Yes, it’s freezing, but we don’t have hurricanes or really any natural disasters here. … We had a hurricane, with a newborn baby, and lost power for like a week.”

After getting priced out of their preferred neighborhoods in West Palm Beach, Tampa Bay and Pensacola, Aquino started considering Buffalo, where he’d lived for a while in high school.

“Even in the best neighborhoods (in Buffalo), you can afford a house almost anywhere if you’re a married couple with a decent middle-class income,” he said. “I was making like $65,000 when we moved here and was able to buy a two-unit house for $250,000.” The second unit now has tenants and generates rental income. Aquino also found a new, higher-paying job, in software consulting.

“I like Florida,” Aquino said, “but it just didn’t make sense to stay. Maybe someday we’ll be back as snowbirds.”

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