The COVID-19 pandemic struck, and downtown San Francisco has never been the same again. Tech firms allowed workers in the country’s least affordable housing market to work remotely indefinitely, and they haven’t looked back.
But they haven’t looked far away, either, as new data reveals this shift hasn’t come at the cost of Silicon Valley’s growth.
The San Francisco Bay Area topped the list of fastest-growing cities in the U.S. in a report by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, which seeks to paint a broad picture of the metro areas experiencing the most growth as business establishes a new normal after the pandemic. So how could San Francisco decline during the remote work area as its metro area topped the fastest-growth list?
By the end of 2020, an estimated 45% jobs, or 1.79 million in total, were eligible for remote work in the Bay Area, according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. Since then, data on which downtown facilities were actually being used by workers, provided by Kastle Systems, has consistently shown that San Francisco lags behind other major cities in return-to-work progress.
