S.F. population falls to lowest level in over a decade after second year of the pandemic

And yet I still cant find an affordable one bedroom or even a studio.

On a percentage basis, San Francisco had the smallest population drop among Bay Area counties, while Marin saw the largest at 1.5%.

Gotta get those clicks on this article somehow by using inflammatory headlines, right?

the lowest level since July 2012

Maybe this will help ease the pain of scarce new housing.

Another doomsday article about San Francisco? Will this make San Francisco affordable to live in?

No.

Then it’s not really a catastrophe (for the landlords).

Dig a little deeper: "On a percentage basis, San Francisco had the smallest population drop among Bay Area counties." Also directly in line with California's population drop as a whole, at around 0.5%.

Also - talking about empty offices and BART trains is not a proxy for SF population. A proxy for commuters, sure, and we all know that's way down. But even in the last couple of weeks (after the rains), it sure seems to me like midweek foot traffic is way up versus the fall... would love to know if that's verifiable by data.

What's kind of interesting is the map about "net migration" showing SF down ~1%, while total population is down ~0.5% around the same time... did we all have a bunch of kids during the pandemic to offset ppl leaving (edit: and dying)? It talks about statewide birth rates but nothing about local.

The article is kind of all over the place.

It's like the 1970's all over again!

SF lost 10% of it's population from 1950 to 1980 while the country as a whole grew by 50%.

Can't blame them and while I'm all for urban efficiency from an environmental standpoint SF isn't geographically ideal for that purpose. We need regional density, tons more housing assistance for lower income longtime locals and a real transit system. Tech decentralizing isn't a bad thing (when people choose to decamp fir better pastures I mean, not the layoffs). Housing prices will go down and I'm going to gripe about all my lost hypothetical millions but hopefully we become less of a beacon so that someone someday can consider buying a house.

It's kind of funny how, after googling facts around this article, I noticed San Jose has a bigger population than SF. For tech, San Jose is also arguably closer to "where the action is" than San Francisco.

So if SJ wins on those two counts, that's a reasonable basis to conclude it's a more important city than SF.

Yet SJ occupies like 1% of the mindshare on Twitter that SF does.

Thank goodness. This city is divine with a few less people in it.