Portland Attracts More San Franciscans Than Anywhere Else
Anecdotal evidence has long supported the idea that talented San Francisco workers are leaving the city to look for similar jobs in cities where the cost of living is lower. Recently CBRE decided to quantify that migration using LinkedIn, and found Portland is drawing more San Francisco residents than any other city.
The company defined migration when a person changes his or her location on their LinkedIn profile. To develop a list of cities that the San Francisco market lost the most workers to, CBRE identified the cities the most LinkedIn members moved to from San Francisco in the past 12 months (as of March 2017).
For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in San Francisco, 4.47 moved to Portland, topping the list ahead of Seattle at 4.3. Austin was a distant third at 1.69. Other cities that draw San Franciscans were Denver, Salt Lake City, Nashville and Las Vegas.
"Portland is home to several household-name tech companies with offices based in the Bay Area," CBRE vice president Josh McDonald said. "The continued emergence of businesses and employment talent to the region are a result of the combination of a lower cost of living and attractive lifestyle."
Where the workers go — essentially to be able to rent something on their own for a tolerable price — businesses are following.
"Capital continues to follow the population growth of labor and millennials to Portland. Institutional investments here are chasing that job growth," McDonald said.
