Tech Workers Swore Off the Bay Area. Now They're Coming Back.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Last year, Greg Osuri decided he had had enough of the Bay Area. Between smoke-choked air from nearby wildfires and the coronavirus lockdown, it felt as if the walls of his apartment in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks neighborhood were closing in on him.

“It was just a hellhole living here,” said Osuri, 38, founder and chief executive of a cloud-computing company called Akash Network. He decamped for his sister’s roomy town house in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, joining an exodus of technology workers from the crowded Bay Area.

But by March, Osuri was itching to return. He missed the serendipity of city life: meeting new people, running into acquaintances on the street and getting drinks with colleagues. “The city is full of that — opportunities that you may never have expected would come your way,” Osuri said. He moved back to San Francisco in April.

The pandemic was supposed to lead to a great tech diaspora. Freed of their offices and after-work klatches, the Bay Area’s tech workers were said to be roaming America, searching for a better life in cities like Miami and Austin, Texas — where the weather is warmer, the homes are cheaper and state income taxes do not exist.

But dire warnings over the past year that tech was done with the Bay Area because of a high cost of living, homelessness, crowding and crime are looking overheated. Osuri is one of a growing number of industry workers already trickling back as a healthy local rate of coronavirus vaccinations makes fall return-to-office dates for many companies look likely.

“I think people were pretty noisy about quitting the Bay Area,” said Eric Bahn, a co-founder of an early-stage Palo Alto investment firm, Hustle Fund. “But they’ve been very quiet in admitting they want to move back.”

Bumper-to-bumper traffic has returned to the region’s bridges and freeways. Tech commuter buses are reappearing on the roads. Rents are spiking, especially in San Francisco neighborhoods where tech employees often live.

And Monday, Twitter reopened its office, becoming one of the first big tech companies to welcome more than skeleton crews of employees back to the workplace. Twitter employees wearing backpacks and puffy jackets on a cold San Francisco summer morning greeted old friends and explored a space redesigned to accommodate social distancing measures.

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While Texas celebrates HP ($33B market cap) moving its HQ to Houston as some kind of watershed event, looks the Bay Area continues to consolidate even more of its power as home to the largest tech behemoths:

Google ($1.7T), Facebook ($977B), Apple ($2.5T), Oracle ($250B), Robinhood ($30B), Netflix ($237B), Twitter ($54B), Salesforce ($241B), Uber ($87B), Lyft ($18B), LinkedIn (owned by MSFT), Airbnb ($83B), Cisco ($226B), Square ($109B) and countless other publicly traded companies, small startups and unicorns that sprout there every year.