California exodus as 500,000 people flee Golden State in two years since the start of the pandemic

California has seen a population decline of more than 1 percent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an estimated 500,000 people leaving between April 2020 and July 2022.

In the state where annual wildfires and treacherous mudslides threaten homes, the population has dropped by just over 508,000 since 2020.

San Francisco and Lassen counties experienced the largest population declines, at 7.1 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively.

California Department of Finance Deputy Director of External Affairs HD Palmer told the sacramento bee that the Golden State’s population decline is a reflection of its current housing affordability crisis.

‘If you talk to demographers, they will tell you that one of the factors is the cost of housing. And that continues to be a challenging problem for the state,” he said.

California has seen a population decline of more than 1 percent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an estimated 500,000 people leaving the state between April 2020 and July 2022. San Francisco has become a virtual ghost town, seen here in October 2022

Homeless tents are seen along Embarcadero Street during heavy rain in San Francisco earlier this year.

According to Bee, in Sacramento – where the median household income in 2021 it was $71,047; a family salary of around $145,000 is required to pay for the median-priced home in the region.

There has been a mass exodus from the city known for its tech industry since the pandemic hit in 2020, with many office spaces left abandoned.

That means the city’s streets have become increasingly dangerous, with many locals avoiding downtown sidewalks for fear of a violent encounter with one of the many homeless people and drug addicts who have taken over.

“San Francisco went from being one of the hottest office markets in the country to one of the weakest,” Carlisle told the Saint Francis Gateadding, “High-tech workers were the most likely to say, ‘Well, if I can work from anywhere, I’ll move somewhere where housing costs 90 percent less.”

Since 2020, the city has become a haven for crime, where cut-and-grab thieves break into stores and steal items in broad daylight and homeless people are seen doing drugs on the streets, sometimes where students walk home from school.

Tents and homeless people are seen down Polk Street near San Francisco City Hall.

The streets of San Francisco, some of the most expensive in the country for taxpayers, continue to be littered with human feces and drug needles.

That rampant increase in homelessness and crime has affected the “quality of life environment” that downtown once offered, Carlisle said.

To make matters worse, he said, recent mass layoffs at tech companies have forced middle-class workers to relocate.

Despite the exodus from City by the Bay, however, 19 of California’s 58 counties experienced population growth during the same period, primarily inland counties with lower housing costs.

The fastest growing county was San Benito, which is located just south of the Bay Area.

Experts say San Francisco’s growing homelessness problem and open-air drug markets are driving potential buyers away from the area.

Additionally, six of the nine fastest-growing counties were in Northern California, in the areas surrounding Sacramento, with Amador, Calaveras, San Joaquin, Placer, Yolo and Yuba County growing more than 1.5 percent.

The information was drawn from recent US Census migration data showing that while 20 percent of new residents in these northern inland counties came from nearby Sacramento County, about a third came from the Bay Area.

Outside of Sacramento County, Alameda, Santa Clara, and Contra Costa counties were the top three counties of origin for these residents with 11%, 6%, and 5%, respectively.

Cheaper home prices are the main reason people are moving inland, and the flexibility of remote work has made it easier for them to keep their jobs in the Bay Area while living elsewhere.

“What’s been changing a lot in California in recent years is the really remarkable cost of housing in California in general, but also in the Bay Area in particular,” said Eric McGhee, a demographic researcher at the Public Policy Institute. from california to San Francisco Chronicle.

“That’s likely to make people want to try and find a deal somewhere cheaper, preferably not too far from where they were before if they can help it.”

Last month, San Francisco’s Democratic mayor London Breed saying she is requesting nearly $30 million in additional funding for the city’s police force.

The San Francisco Police Department has faced rising overtime costs for current officers as the force is experiencing a worker shortage.

Between 2021 and 2022, the department saw a 121 percent increase in total overtime, according to KPIX.

SFPD officials have also been making specific attempts to address crime in certain incident-prone parts of the city.

“We have been working hard to address the serious public safety challenges in San Francisco, but we need our officers on the street,” London Breed said in February.

The San Francisco Police Department is currently experiencing a shortage of 541 officers.

“As we work on strategies to address our staffing shortages, we can’t wait to make sure our officers can provide the basic services our residents deserve and that our prosecutors can hold drug dealers and repeat offenders accountable,” Breed said.