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An exodus is taking place in the Bay Area, and it’s not just Twitter employees fleeing the company.
Analysis of tax return data suggests that wealthy San Francisco residents moved out of town in the early years of the pandemic, taking billions in revenue with them, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
In 2020, 32,000 more people left San Francisco than moved into the city, and the income of those who got out was nearly $8 billion more than those who came. That only compounded a problem the city already had. The year before, 39,000 more people left San Francisco than arrived, resulting in a net loss of $6.9 billion in wages. That means the city lost $15 billion in revenue over a two-year period.
The IRS tracks migration patterns by checking to see if taxpayers provided different addresses on their forms than the previous year. Then the agency can track how many people are leaving a region and of course the income of the people coming and going. During the two years the Chronicle analyzed, the median annual income of citizens leaving San Francisco was $153,000, while people arriving earned $103,000 per year.
San Francisco chief economist Ted Egan told the Chronicle that the data doesn’t necessarily mean wealthy people are fleeing en masse. He explained that it is possible for a small number of extremely wealthy people to drive the average. While the newspaper acknowledged that the IRS does not disclose data on individual incomes, it also noted that US Census Bureau data shows that “mean household income in the San Francisco metro area decreased between 2019 and 2021.”
Of course, not only people leave the City by the Bay. Nordstrom announced this week that it would be closing its downtown store, joining retailers like Office Depot, Whole Foods and Anthropolgie in giving up all San Francisco locations.
