The San Francisco metro is the only large metro still below its February 2020 payroll employment (96.0 on a base of 100, 1 of 16); net income leaving the county ran 4.5 times its pre-pandemic pace, 60% of it to other California counties; the city's share of the Bay Area's taxable sales fell 2.3 points; and downtown BART exits stand at 39% of 2019.
Why San Francisco recovered more slowly than other metros, read from five public records: payroll employment, tax-return migration, taxable sales by city, BART exits by station, and the city's revenue against the state's other large cities.
A page for one question people keep asking about San Francisco: where did the people and the money go after 2020, and who still comes downtown. Five public records answer it, each by a rule written before the numbers were seen. Payroll employment for the large metros, indexed to February 2020. The IRS's county-to-county migration files, which follow tax returns from one address to the next and carry the income that moved with them. The state tax agency's quarterly taxable sales for every city, so retail spending can be placed by where it happened. BART's monthly station-to-station matrices, from which each of the eight San Francisco stations' exits are counted, with the registered businesses and payroll jobs within eight hundred metres of each. And the State Controller's revenue reports for every California city, which show what share of a city's own revenue is property tax under Proposition 13 and how much arrives from the state. The page describes and refuses to claim a cause; where a read fell between its thresholds it says so.