NBC News reports: Many urban centers have seen residents move out in
large numbers since the start of stay-at-home orders in March, but the
shift has been especially dramatic for San Francisco, a city that was
already experiencing rapid change because of the tech industry. Software
engineers, CEOs and venture capitalists have chosen to jump from the Bay
Area to places such as Denver, Miami and Austin, Texas, citing housing
costs, California’s relatively high income tax and the Bay Area’s general
resistance to rapid growth and change. The scale of the departures is
visible in vacant high-end apartments, moth-balled offices and quieter
streets in neighborhoods popular with tech workers. And while no one is
exactly celebrating, especially as Covid-19 has devastated the incomes of
many people, some residents were ready to take a break from the rich….
Rents may have fallen 20 percent or more from a year ago, but they’re
still high by national standards, and many artists left the city a long
time ago. Although some companies such as Pinterest have canceled leases,
Google is expanding its offices in San Francisco, a sign of the tech
industry’s attachment to the city despite the local hostility and the
predictions of a permanent work-from-home culture… Tracy Rosenberg,
executive director of Media Alliance, a San Francisco nonprofit that is
often critical of the power of tech companies, said she wonders whether
tech workers will want to return to a place where they’ve received a
mixed welcome. “The level of tech blowback in San Francisco and the Bay
Area was going up in intensity,” she said. “I think there’ll be sort of a
reluctance to come back and face that, because that was reaching a level
that was hard to live with — when you are the cause of all social
problems, in the eyes of a significant part of the population, at least.” …
