San Francisco is Losing Residents Because It’s Too Expensive for Nearly Everyone

By: Marco della Cava
Appearing in: USA Today

For the better part of two decades, the Bay Area has been a magnet for newcomers lured by a modern-day technology Gold Rush. But increasingly only those who have struck it rich can afford to stay.

Once a bohemian mecca that welcomed the Beat poets and ’60s hippies, San Francisco now lays claim to the most expensive housing in the West, with a median home price of $1.4 million. There’s also $5 a gallon gas, private schools priced like universities and chic restaurants that cost nearly double the national average.

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Bay Area was second only to New York — and ahead of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago — when it came to people leaving major U.S. cities. More than 28,190 departed in the second quarter of 2019, almost double 2017’s rate, according to a regular Migration Report from real estate brokerage Redfin.

“The great tragedy is this place was a middle-class paradise, and now you’ve got the flight of the middle class with all their aspirations, leaving the poor, the rich and a transient population,” says Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California.

Read the full article at USA Today.