Twitter, Yelp, Airbnb and Dropbox have tried to sublease some of their San Francisco office space. For more than a month last year, 90 percent of the searches involving San Francisco on moveBuddha were for people moving out.
Though prices had dropped only slightly, Zillow reported more homes for sale in San Francisco than a year ago. 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. New founders are still coming to town.īut the migration from the Bay Area appears real. Google is still absorbing ever more office space in San Jose and San Francisco. Apple’s flying-saucer-shaped campus is not going to zoom away. The biggest tech companies aren’t going anywhere, and tech stocks are still soaring. Remote personal training happens to coincide well with remote life, but he said his start-up’s growth this past year was also due to his leaving the tech bubble and immersing himself in more normal communities, a few days at a time. Gardner wrote: “Greetings from sunny Miami Beach! This is about the 40th place I’ve set up a temporary headquarters for Kickoff.” They fled to states without income taxes like Texas and Florida.Ī couple of months later, Mr. They fled to more affordable places like Georgia. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. Remote work offered a chance at residing for a few months in towns where life felt easier.
The city gave its workers a choice of interesting jobs and a chance at the brass ring. Living in the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world was what mattered. Or if your office was in the city, maybe it was in a neighborhood with too much street crime, open drug use and $5 coffees.īut it was worth it. If you lived in San Francisco, you might have commuted an hour south to your job at Apple or Google or Facebook. SAN FRANCISCO - The Bay Area struck a hard bargain with its tech workers.