Taxpayers who filed 2019 tax returns from San Francisco and 2021 returns from a new location reported an average annual adjusted gross income (AGI) to the IRS of nearly $196,000. And I suspect that those who departed San Francisco, whose exits left the city with 60,000 fewer taxpayers, feel the same way.īetween 20, San Francisco lost nearly $7 billion of household income, even after accounting for those who moved into the city. As someone who loved San Francisco, it pains me to say it no longer is. They are moving to destinations that do not have San Francisco’s drug and crime issues, its poorly performing public schools, its homelessness, its extremely high cost of doing business, and other issues that people have tolerated for so long, only because San Francisco was once one of the world’s great cities. Instead, they are choosing to move to locations, many of which are also expensive, that have much more sensible city governance. San Francisco housing costs have contributed to this loss, but many of those leaving the city are those with very high incomes who can afford to live in San Francisco. Some blame San Francisco’s high cost of living for the exodus. How bad? As some city blocks have been taken over by drug gangs selling fentanyl in open-air superstores (think of an opioid version of Costco, without the membership card), city supervisors have spent their time talking about defunding police, abolishing rent, abolishing prisons, and demanding that if Whole Foods is to be allowed to develop a grocery store in a vacant building in the city, it must include affordable housing. San Francisco’s decline is driven by absurdly bad local economic policies. Move over Detroit, here comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 20, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history and unprecedented among any major US city.ĭetroit’s fall was primarily driven by the relocation of the US auto industry to southern, right-to-work states, where auto producers, including foreign firms who build autos here, have avoided the union conflict that was endemic in Detroit. No major American city has failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today.
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