In recent years, red states have relished the chance to take a deep dig at dark blue California: The Golden State is hemorrhaging residents, and many are moving to the low-tax Republican havens of Texas, Arizona and Florida.
So it seems like a no-brainer that liberal-minded Austin or Phoenix, where you can buy a nice house with a pool for $500,000, would be the top stops on the California exodus pipeline.
But it turns out the biggest draw for Bay Area transplants is in an entirely different direction.
Try our rainy neighbor to the north: Seattle.
King County, Washington, topped the IRS migration list of out-of-state relocation destinations for people leaving four of the five core Bay Area counties in 2021: Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara.
More than 7,600 Bay Area residents moved to Seattle in the thick of the COVID pandemic, which set off a remote-work revolution that freed employees from being bound to abodes near the office.
But wait … Seattle?
It’s a revelation that surprised even Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a regional think tank.
“I think of Seattle as Silicon Valley with the same stuff. I mean, similarly fraught — rising prices and a lot of crowding,” Hancock said. “So people are saying, ‘I’ve had it. I’ve had it with the Bay Area. I’ve had it with San Francisco. I can’t deal with any more homelessness. I’m tired of seeing needles and feces on the street.’ Well, that’s all up in Seattle as well. So that’s why I’m surprised.”
But in many ways, Seattle is a natural destination for Bay Area refugees, experts say. It has similar politics, a well-developed tech sector, no state income tax and relatively cheaper housing.
No, housing in Seattle is not cheap. But it is less expensive than in most of the Bay Area. The median home price in Santa Clara County was $1.47 million this June. In King County, it was $815,000.
The only major Bay Area County with a lower average housing cost — Contra Costa — also happens to be the only one for which Seattle is not the top out-of-state destination for residents on the move. Instead, Contra Costans moved in higher numbers to Phoenix’s Maricopa County or Las Vegas’ Clark County, Nevada, where housing costs are even lower.
While politicians in red states like to believe that liberal politics and policies are driving away Californians — indeed, one in three votes cast in California in the 2020 presidential election were for Donald Trump — experts say the cost of housing is still the No. 1 reason they packed their bags.
“You cannot overstate the importance of housing in people’s decisions to leave the state,” said Hans Johnson, a demographer and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “I’m not saying politics don’t matter. I’m not saying income taxes don’t matter at all, but they’re certainly not the main reason.”
Cue the Stephens family — Christine and Blake and their two children, a 4-year-old son and a 14-month-old daughter.
Over the previous 10 years, they moved seven times, from Hayward to Santa Clara and North San Jose, always searching for a better place to raise their kids and save money for a down payment on a place of their own. They finally settled into a $3,200 “bare bones” rental in Fremont, where they bundled up in the winter when the heating gave out and sweltered in the summer without air conditioning.
Still, when Blake was offered a software engineering job at Amazon in Seattle in November 2020, he was reluctant to take it. He’d miss their friends. Besides, Seattle prices were sky-high, too, weren’t they?
“He was honestly, like completely against it,” Christine said, “until I pulled up Zillow.”
In the Bay Area, $1 million could buy them no more than a 1,400-square-foot, 3-bedroom home with a tiny lot in a bad neighborhood, she said. A mobile home would cost half that, but they’d still have to pay rent on the space.
In Bellevue, just outside of Seattle?
For $1.1 million, they found their ideal home in a quiet neighborhood with a top-rated school district: a five-bedroom, three-bath, 3,000-square-foot house with huge windows overlooking a green preserve with 50-foot pine trees and big-leaf maples. Their backyard faces a nature trail that runs along a quiet stream.
“On a quiet day like today, I can sit on my back deck and listen to a waterfall. I don’t want to understate it. My husband and I are constantly (saying) it’s hard to go on vacation now because the places that we stay are not as nice as” our home, Christine Stephens said. “We could never have afforded something this size in the Bay.”
It wasn’t long ago that Seattlites were the ones clamoring to trade in 152 days of rain each year for the sun-soaked Bay Area.
From 2011-2014, the net flow of migration between the two regions was tilted largely in the Bay Area’s favor, with more Seattle-area residents moving to many Bay Area counties than the reverse. But ever since 2015-2016, Seattle claimed the upper hand. And the pandemic kicked that up a notch.
In 2019, King County gained a net 619 people in family moves to and from Santa Clara County. In 2021, that number more than doubled, to 1,639.
Maricopa County (Phoenix) and Travis County (Austin, Texas) are among the other big, metro-area counties that routinely turn up as the top destinations for on-the-move Bay Area residents. And for Californians as a whole, Texas (105,000) drew more than twice as many transplants as Washington state (47,000) from the Golden State in 2021, the most recent year of relocation data from the IRS.
Still, most people who left the Bay Area didn’t even leave the state. Nearly 69% of people who relocated out of Alameda County, for example, moved to another part of California in 2021. Experts say that many people who flee the Bay Area are looking to relocate to cheaper, more bucolic counties nearby where housing prices are lower.
Although the Stephenses might see a world of difference between Silicon Valley and Seattle, the two region’s dueling chambers of commerce might as well be sisters.
Their problems are so similar that the Seattle chamber sent down a delegation in June to see how San Jose is tackling its most intractable issues — housing, homelessness and public safety.
As much as the two regions share problems, however, they also share some of the same attributes — beauty and recreation opportunities abound.
“What we found is that by far the number one reason people want to be in the Puget Sound region is access to outdoors and lifestyle choices,” said Seattle chamber spokesman Lars Erickson, “being able to get on a sailboat and into the mountains and have access to the natural amenities.”
Housing costs have skyrocketed in both regions – King County by 151% and Santa Clara County by 184% since 2012. But as the Stephenses found out, $1 million will go a whole lot farther in Seattle and its tech-heavy suburbs like Redmond, home to Microsoft, than in San Jose and its Silicon Valley neighbors.
They don’t miss Blake’s hour-long commutes, or the car break-ins they experienced over and over, or worrying about their children’s education.
From time to time, though, Christine finds herself feeling homesick for the Bay Area. They miss their friends and the energy of the place, the cute shops and abundant eateries in downtown Campbell, Palo Alto and Mountain View.
In their Bellevue neighborhood, the best they can find are two pizza places, she said. “And they’re not awesome.”
“If I could go back tomorrow and have what I have here,” she said, “I would do it.”
