An earlier version of this article misstated Silicon Valley’s population decline last year. The error has been corrected.
Roughly 90,000 people left Silicon Valley during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an annual report that found a slowing “exodus” has reverted the tech center’s population to 2013 levels.
A net total of 43,800 residents moved out of the region from July 2021 through June 2022, the fourth consecutive year that the region’s overall population has shrunk and the second year that net domestic migration topped 40,000, according to the Silicon Valley Index. The annual look at the health of the region found housing prices and job numbers continuing to rise well into last year, even as the number of people in the region returned to levels not seen since Google Glass still had a chance to be the next big thing.
“Yes, there’s an exodus,” Russell Hancock, chief executive of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, said in a news briefing Tuesday about his group’s latest report. “It’s happening.”
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Amid reports of an exodus earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Silicon Valley Index did not show much of a population decline. With more data, though, there is now a clearer picture of the region’s population declines, especially as they relate to the effects of the pandemic, which increased death rates and slashed rates of immigration from overseas, though both of those problems declined in the second year.
The effects of COVID-19 raised death rates in the region, with more than 3,300 Silicon Valley residents’ deaths caused by COVID-19 last year. But it also changed the nature of work, including where that work can be done, which allowed residents to move away from a high-priced region — with the majority staying in California but moving to other places in the Bay Area or more affordable outlying areas.
Despite the population decline, housing in the region continues to be expensive. Median home prices still rose 7% to a record $1.53 million in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in 2022, making houses there more expensive than in San Francisco for potentially the first time ever, according to the report.
Also contributing to the population decline was fewer people moving to Silicon Valley, especially from foreign countries. In 2021, there was a negative net flow of foreign immigration into the region, according to revised numbers from the state.
That reversed in 2022, with Rachel Massaro, director of research for Joint Venture’s Institute for Regional Studies, saying 8,000 foreign immigrants moved to Silicon Valley last year. That’s slightly lower than the 8,400 foreign immigrants who moved to the area in 2020.
Steve Levy, director and senior economist of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, told MarketWatch that the return of foreign immigration is key.
“The return of international travel and the opening up of China [is] essential,” Levy said, because the region depends on immigration as a source for its skilled workforce.
Silicon Valley’s population declined by 38,900 residents between mid-2020 and mid-2021, a record high, according to the index, then by 24,634 over the next 12 months as foreign immigrants began to return. The net domestic outmigration of 91,400 from July 2020 through July 2022 approached the number for the prior four years combined — 97,800 — according to recently released data from the California Department of Finance.
What does all this mean for tech, the industry that dominates the region, and its labor force? Some Silicon Valley residents have moved to other growing tech regions in the past couple of years, as Joint Venture’s previous indexes have shown.
“It’s clear that other regions are rising,” Hancock said Tuesday. “But tech is all networked together. Think of Silicon Valley as a major node in a network of nodes.”
Despite recent news about tech layoffs, the index shows that in the past year through June 2022, Silicon Valley added 88,000 jobs, a 5% rate that outpaced the nation’s. More than 16,000 of those jobs added were in the tech industry. Silicon Valley’s unemployment rate is at roughly 2%, better than the national rate of 3.4%.
In terms of the population decline’s effect on the labor force, Massaro said the types of residents leaving the area may be shifting.
“In 2021, most of the outmigrants who left [the Bay Area] were going to other tech centers in nation,” she said. “But in the last year, they were going to Reno and Miami-Fort Lauderdale.” Those areas are well-known as places people go to retire.
