People are fleeing San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO – Social media influencer Sarah Tripp and her husband, Robbie Tripp, moved to San Francisco in 2016 brimming with optimism.

“We thought, here’s a city full of opportunities and connections where you go to work hard and succeed,” says Tripp, 27, founder of the lifestyle blog Sassy Red Lipstick.

But after a year-long hunt for suitable housing in San Francisco only turned up “places for $1 million that looked like rundown shacks and needed a remodel,” the couple packed up and moved to Phoenix.

They went from paying San Francisco rents of $2,500 for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment that was far from shopping and other amenities, to purchasing a newly constructed 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bathroom home where they’ll raise their newly arrived baby boy.

“It was cool to be living near all those high-tech startups,” Tripp says of her time in the Bay Area. “But you quickly saw that if you weren’t part of that, you’d be pushed out. It’s just sad.”

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 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.

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