San Francisco Becomes Fastest-Shrinking U.S. City

Yahoo News/Reuters ^ | Thu Jul 10, 5:00 PM ET | Andrea Orr

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San Francisco Becomes Fastest-Shrinking U.S. City Thu Jul 10, 5:00 PM ET Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo!

By Andrea Orr

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - I left my forwarding address in San Francisco.

The foggy city by the bay, which has lost jobs and income in the technology industry bust, saw the largest population decline of any major city in the United States last year, according to U.S. Census data.

San Francisco's population declined by 1.5 percent or nearly 12,000 between July 2001 and July 2002, making it the biggest loser among 242 U.S. cities with more than 100,000 people, a report released on Thursday showed.

San Francisco, with a population of about 776,000 in mid-2002, joins some other famously depressed U.S. cities, including Flint, Michigan, which ranked 240 on the list with a population decline of 1.4 percent or 1,687 people, and Gary, Indiana, which came in at 227, losing 0.8 percent of its population, or 793 people. San Francisco lost 11,929 residents over the same one-year period.

But the exodus from the San Francisco Bay Area appears more pronounced considering all the other surrounding cities that also suffered big population declines.

Second to last on the list was Sunnyvale, California, a Silicon Valley city about 50 miles south of San Francisco, and the home to number of high-tech companies and high-tech workers, who were hit hard by the dot-com bust. Sunnyvale's population declined by 1.4 percent, or 1,830 people, the report showed.

DOT-COM ADIEU

San Jose, California, also a key Silicon Valley city, ranked near the bottom of the list, at 220, as did Daly City, just outside of San Francisco, which ranked 236. San Jose lost 5,740 people or 0.6 percent of its people and Daly City 1,089 people or 1.1 percent.

Hundreds of high-tech start-up companies based in northern California have closed their doors during the past three years, sending many people out of town in search of work.

California's Employment Development Department said San Francisco had a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 6.6 percent in May, compared with a national rate of 6.1 percent. The jobless rate in Santa Clara County, encompassing Sunnyvale and much of Silicon Valley, was 8 percent.

This recent exodus marks a stark reversal of trends seen in the late 1990s when engineers and recent college and business school graduates thronged to the Silicon Valley region seeking work at high-tech companies that offered generous compensation and stock option packages.

Although San Francisco has not ranked among the fastest growing cities at any time in recent history, it did show healthy expansion throughout the 1990s, with its population growing 7.3 percent over the course of that decade, census data show.

Most of the fastest growth in the United States meanwhile, is occurring in southern California and throughout the Southwest. The Census report ranked Gilbert, Arizona, with a 10.3 percent population increase last year alone, as the fastest growing city in the U.S.

North Las Vegas, Nevada came in second with Rancho Cucamonga near Los Angeles; Henderson, Nevada; and Joliet, Illinois rounding out the top five.

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...cats and dogs living together!

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15% voted GOP and you claim that's normal? I might have naively thought the same thing prior to doing quite a bit of travel around the US and seeing how the real US were. You need to get away from the City and see it from the outside looking in. Then you'll understand. Not everyone leveling criticism on this thread is, as Herb Caen would have written, an "auslander!"