Mr. Dehner works in finance and Ms. Dehner works part-time in e-commerce. They briefly considered moving to Southern California, but decided after last year's heavy forest fire season that the risk wasn't worth it. Living in Texas, she said, will offer a lower cost of living and, therefore, greater peace of mind.
"Finances will not be a driving factor in every decision we make," she said. “It gives us a pillow to enjoy life.
In April 2021, the median sales price for a single family home in San Francisco County was $ 1,800,000. In Sacramento, 100 miles northeast, where house prices are up 22.5 percent since last year, it was $ 490,000.
"In the past 10 months the market has caught on fire and migration has absolutely increased," said Ryan Lundquist, a Sacramento real estate appraiser who also blogs about the Central Valley real estate market. "We have stepped up migration from the Bay Area and there are so many local shoppers out there too that Covid was the catalyst behind this decision to live in remote areas."
While San Francisco and Los Angeles saw population declines in 2020, the California Policy Lab found "no evidence of a major exodus from the state," adding that "the pandemic has not driven people out of California so much, but she has shifted in it. "
It's also shifted to where these people do business.
Ryan Swehla, co-founder of Modesto, California-based commercial real estate company Graceada Partners, saw a rapid surge in low-rise leases throughout the pandemic. California's Central Valley – which includes state capital Sacramento as well as cities like Fresno and Stockton – has been growing steadily for decades and is now benefiting from a brain drain who have fed up with the congestion and inflated prices of Silicon Valley.
The gears were already in motion before the pandemic – Zennify, a computer software company, tripled its workforce in Sacramento in 2019; Intel's campus in nearby Folsom was established in 1984. But now that many tech companies in the Bay Area have embraced remote or hybrid work, tech workers are increasingly looking to cities like Sacramento, which is a 90-minute drive from San Francisco, and local tech companies Move to attract them .
