The pandemic exodus was easy. The return is a housing nightmare. 8%
By Emily Landes54%
8/9/2026, 6:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Negativity Bias, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 17.2% saturation with 307 hits. Analysis detected 1,993 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,788 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 15.9% and a BS Rank of 8% (29,566 of 31,898 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 92.70% of the article peer group.
It took only a few months of pandemic life for Emily Caruso and her now-husband to clear out of their Hayes Valley apartment and relocate to Lake Tahoe.
Why stick around the city when work is remote, shops and restaurants are shuttered, and most of their friends had already fled, they thought.
By September 2020, they were full-time Tahoe residents.
Three years later, they became first-time homeowners, fixing up an Incline Village property with panoramic lake views and breathing the fresh mountain air.
The years went by, and they have a 2-year-old daughter and a close cohort made up mostly of fellow young families who also left cities to enjoy Tahoe’s outdoor lifestyle and lower cost of living.
Caruso works as a consultant, which allows her to work remotely, as do many of her mountainside friends, even as their companies disallow such arrangements for their new recruits.
Then there are the less fortunate friends who’ve turned into super commuters, staying at hotels or studio apartments three days a week to fulfill obligations at their San Francisco offices before booking it back to their homes in Tahoe.
By last fall, however, the alpine lifestyle had begun to lose its luster.
Caruso, her husband, and many of their friends found that childcare options, the dining scene, and cultural offerings were lacking.
Remote work, frankly, hinders career growth, they sensed.
Caruso’s husband, especially, wanted his next job to be in person, and with his expertise in advanced robotics, there’s really only one place to be.
“That is an industry that is unparalleled outside of San Francisco,” Caruso said.
And thus they have picked up and restarted their lives once again, this time back in the city.
Now they just need to find somewhere to live, and therein lies the problem — for Caruso and for the many others who left during the pandemic and are returning as rents and home prices skyrocket.
As they endure the long-haul hunt for a San Francisco address, some are flying back and forth weekly just to clock in at the office.
Others are willing to downsize and return to the rental market if it means getting a foothold back in the Bay Area.
Some of the would-be returnees are living on the suburban edges of the Bay and can no longer endure epic rush-hour commutes.
Michael Bellings of Compass helped many clients sell their San Francisco homes in 2020 and 2021 and is fielding their increasingly desperate calls as they attempt to return.
“I have had people calling me, regretting their decision, probably on a daily basis,” he said.
Greener pastures
There were 873,444 San Francisco residents on Jan. 1, 2020, according to the California Department of Finance.
One year later, there were 850,000; by 2022, the count was 836,000.
The spring of that year also saw a precipitous rise in both interest rates and the downtown “doom loop” narrative, effectively bringing the city’s housing market to a standstill and dropping rents 25% from pre-pandemic levels.
Bellings recalled the period from 2022 to 2024 as the worst time he’s ever experienced as a born and raised San Franciscan.
“Everything was closed.
Crime was rampant.
The city was as dirty as I’ve ever seen it,” he said.
“People were very happy with their decision to leave.
They were on ranches.
They were in the middle of nowhere.
They were loving it.”
The first wave of calls from former residents looking to come back came in the latter half of 2025.
They were tinged with reticence, Bellings said, mostly workers being forced into in-person jobs as the balance of power swung back to employers after several waves of tech layoffs.
Fast-forward a few months, and the rush to return is most definitely on.
There’s hype and pressure from the expected IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic.
The public impression of the city has greatly improved since Mayor Daniel Lurie took office and began Instagramming every coffee shop opening and office lease signing.
Anxiety and impulsive decisions are just as rampant as they were in 2020, but this time people are frantic to get in instead of out.
“In 2025, you could have anything you wanted, but people were still being discerning about it,” Bellings said.
“Once 2026 hit, you couldn’t be discerning anymore.”
Time to compromise
At the start of 2026, San Francisco still had fewer residents than before the pandemic but was clearly on a population rebound, according to Censai, a property analytics platform that tracks moves using sources like utility bills and voter records, as well as its own consumer surveys.
The biggest group of inbound out-of-state residents by far is from Seattle, with 434 people moving into the city in 2025, and 84 more in the first quarter of 2026.
That was followed by New York City (Manhattan, then Brooklyn), Washington, D.C., Chicago, Austin, Denver, the greater Boston area, and Phoenix.
These same cities are largely the ones that San Franciscans were most often moving to between 2020 to 2024.
Those who moved to Austin, Denver, and especially New York City left in greater numbers than those who returned.
But San Francisco now has more than enough residents from Seattle, Boston, Chicago, and D.C. to make up for those who left for those four cities.
Whether returning or arriving for the first time, incoming house hunters are making tough compromises, sacrificing space or time with loved ones to make it work in the Bay.
Dan Dodd of Vanguard is working with a family that moved to Arizona during the pandemic but has to get back to the Bay Area for an in-office job.
The husband is in a hotel three days a week, while the wife and their two young kids are in Tucson.
They were looking for homes around $2 million but kept striking out.
With school starting up again, their search is on hold till next year.
Dodd questions whether waiting is the right choice, given the market’s continued rise.
“After you’ve written several offers, you’ve gotten emotionally attached to something, and then you lose out, and it goes for a number that you know is crazy to look at and say, ‘Well, there’s nothing to support this,’ you get fatigued,” he said.
“It probably would have been better if they just stayed in the market, but time will tell.”
Others want to return because they didn’t realize the importance of lifestyle factors like the area’s mild weather or progressive politics.
Dodd has another client who moved to Connecticut during the pandemic and loved the extra space indoors and out.
Yet the wife told Dodd they missed the Bay Area’s diversity, culture, and temperate weather.
She hated the muggy summers and frigid winters yet got her biggest chill from the homogeneous town’s “Stepford kind of environment,” he said.
They’re renting a San Francisco spot that’s half the size of the home they owned in Connecticut while they decide on a neighborhood for the long term.
Dodd told many clients to think long-term when they considered leaving in the first place.
He suggested they hold onto their San Francisco properties and rent elsewhere during the pandemic to make sure they really liked those new communities.
Those who bet against the city do so at their own peril, he advised.
“I’ve seen multiple cycles in San Francisco, and she always rises again,” he said.
Far-flung suburbs
Some who moved to rural areas of Marin and Alameda counties are questioning their choices as they reckon with long weekday commutes.
Censai data shows that far more San Franciscans moved to the adjacent suburbs during the pandemic than Texas or Florida, despite all the media attention around those out-of-state defections at the time.
Compass agent Rick Kaluza has noticed that many homes on the market deep in the Bay Area ’burbs last sold in 2021 or 2022, indicating that a pandemic-era desire for space and solitude is now being cast off as inconvenient to those outside the retiree set.
“The commute just from their home to the main artery to get to the freeway is like half their time,” he said of those trying to get to jobs in the city.
Traffic concerns have made western Marin more of a buyer’s market, Kaluza said.
There are more listings in Fairfax than he’s ever seen.
“Fresh air and a slower-paced lifestyle sound fantastic,” he said, but people were kidding themselves if they thought they’d never need to go back to in-office work.
“That’s foreseeable.”
Not everyone is getting called back to the office.
Christine Wells of Christie’s Sereno splits her time between Tahoe and the South Bay and works with buyers and sellers in both markets.
In the pandemic’s early days, she was busy with Bay Area buyers moving out, and among her clientele — largely in their 50s and in senior positions at work — none have approached her about returning.
In fact, she’s seeing a renewed draw to Tahoe, especially the Nevada side, given the threat of the billionaire tax in California and similar wealth taxes proposed in Oregon and Washington.
That fear has more than compensated for the drop-off in remote workers moving there, she said.
Some people fled to escape the pandemic; others are looking to avoid progressive taxes — but the underlying reasoning is the same.
“People are trying to position themselves into a safe area,” she said.
Wells is the agent selling Caruso’s Incline Village four-bedroom, 4.5-bathroom home, overlooking the lake.
It was on the market this summer for $5.2 million, and recently went into contract after a little over a month.
Even though the median price of a San Francisco home is $2.1 million, Caruso does not plan on jumping back into homeownership.
Instead they have joined the “rat race” for a rental in the city now that her husband has been hired for his new in-person job, she said.
They want at least three bedrooms in a neighborhood with parks and rec centers for their daughter, and so far the search has been “pretty nuts.”
Some places are underpriced, with 30-plus people bidding up rents until an ultimate winner is chosen.
Others are gone within hours of being listed.
Yet even with the stress of the hunt, they’ve been reveling in the conveniences of city life while living in their short-term furnished rental; particularly, the joys of getting dinner delivered when their toddler is in meltdown mode, reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones through the city’s myriad parent WhatsApp groups.
“ We definitely want to stay in SF,” Caruso said.
“We love how family-friendly it is, which is not something we were paying attention to six years ago.”
Speakers
5speakers33%attributed speech1,206writer words
Selected voice
92%flagged-word coverageMichael Bellings
135 attributed words23% of attributed speech72% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.