On a typical workday before the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of commuters flowed into San Francisco and Silicon Valley from around the region, swelling their daytime populations. Then COVID emptied streets and transit stations and quieted once bustling shops and restaurants that catered to the weekday crowds.
A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau highlights just how big of a hit remote work had on the country’s commuter centers.
San Francisco lost nearly 210,000 people during a typical workday in 2021 compared to 2019, a Bay Area News Group analysis found, and Santa Clara County saw a drop of nearly 110,000. That drop of more than 300,000 in what the Census calls the ‘commuter-adjusted population’ of the Bay Area’s two largest counties far outpaced — by nearly 100,000 — the decline in far-larger Los Angeles.
On the flip side, Alameda and Contra Costa counties added tens of thousands to their workday populations between 2019 and 2021 as pre-pandemic commuters stayed home to work.
The numbers provide a startling new data point on the evolving landscape of our large cities.
San Francisco’s transformation has been among the most dramatic in the country. Pre-pandemic, its population would swell to more than 1.1 million people during work hours, about 30% larger than the number of residents. But the city saw an 18% drop in its estimated daytime population from July 2019 to July 2021. Santa Clara County’s fell 5%.
By comparison, New York County (Manhattan) lost 800,000 people in its commuter-adjusted population, a 24% drop from before the pandemic, while neighboring Kings County (Brooklyn) saw 300,000 additional people each work day, a 14% spike.
L.A.’s drop in commuter-adjusted population — at 230,000, similar in number to San Francisco — was only a 2% decrease.
Like most workers who commute to San Francisco, software engineering manager Supriya Khandekar, 25, has seen the city’s downtown dramatically change since she started working there in 2019. Traffic vanished on freeways and BART. Shops and restaurants slowed and shuttered.
“It definitely became very empty during the pandemic itself” and it stayed that way for a while, she said. “It’s coming back — but it’s taken time.”
But it’s not just daytime population that dropped since the pandemic. San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties all saw drops in their resident populations through 2021 as well.
The region’s less expensive communities have seen the reverse. Contra Costa County has experienced the largest increase in its daytime population, adding more than 50,000 people, a 5% increase.
Alameda County also saw an increase in the daytime population, of about 48,000, or 3%, despite a drop in the resident population. The increase is largely due to more Alameda County residents working from home and fewer commuting to nearby San Francisco and Santa Clara counties.
“I think there’s two things happening,” said Abby Raisz, research manager at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, an economic policy think tank. “More people are working from home — we have the highest remote work eligibility of basically anywhere in the country,” she said, and “we lost a lot of our labor force too.”
Before the pandemic, Marin County had the highest percentage of workers — 14% — of any California county who reported they worked from home, according to Census data that Raisz and her colleagues analyzed in a report they published last year on remote work. In 2021, that number grew to 36%. But San Francisco surpassed Marin and took the top spot with 46% of resident workers working from home.
There is evidence that things are changing. Newer data is not yet available, but with COVID loosening its grip in the last two years and many companies requiring workers return to the office, San Francisco’s downtown seems to be recovering. Recent buzz around innovations in artificial intelligence is spurring a flurry of investments in startups moving into the city.
“There are definitely more people coming into downtown than compared to COVID, but there’s still a big decrease from before the pandemic,” said Jayden Wong, 22, a cashier at a Japanese restaurant in downtown San Francisco.
“Our target customers are mostly office workers, and with more people working from home, there’s been less people coming downtown,” Wong said. “People are gradually coming to the office more and more, but only a few days a week. Monday and Friday there is still basically no one, and that affects business.”
Others are more optimistic. Preston Justice, 39, was in downtown on Thursday emceeing the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival lunchtime jazz concert.
“We’re bouncing back pretty well and seeing numbers similar to before the pandemic,” he said.
Though it would mean more crowds and possibly longer commutes, Khandekar also hopes the return of fellow workers to downtown continues. “It’s nice to see everyone coming back to the office, and hopefully it’ll stay this way.”