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During the pandemic, the Bay Area lost thousands of residents to smaller cities around the country<\/a>, prompting speculation that the region had lost its tech-mecca status. But a new report<\/a> from the Harvard Business Review argues that many of those people \u2014 and the cities they moved to \u2014 remain firmly tied to San Francisco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Urban studies professor Richard Florida and three city-focused consultants wrote that San Francisco is a hub of a \u201cMeta City,\u201d which they define as a web of cities that share talent pools and industries. By framing it that way, Florida told SFGATE on Friday, they argue out-migration and remote work aren\u2019t necessarily bad for the Bay Area, but could serve to expand its \u201cdigital hinterlands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the technology world, San Francisco remains the center. It remains the sun on which the planets orbit,\u201d Florida said. Those \u201cplanets,\u201d the authors wrote, include Austin, Seattle and Portland, as well as larger talent hubs like New York and Los Angeles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, the Bay Area has maintained an outsized influence on the tech industry even as more of the corporate world embraces internet-based tools. More venture capital funding went to Bay Area companies from July to September than to those based in New York, LA, Boston and Austin combined, according to the investment tracker Pitchbook<\/a>. San Francisco, with companies like OpenAI<\/a> and Anthropic, has staked a key claim in the artificial intelligence hype, and in 2021, Air India chose San Francisco as the first U.S. city with nonstop flights from the tech hotspot Bengaluru.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Harvard report, titled \u201cThe Rise of the Meta City,\u201d and published on Nov. 29, relies mainly on a set of LinkedIn user data provided to Boston Consulting Group. The authors looked at worker location trends from August 2022 to July 2023. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Citing the mass of venture funding and two-way migration streams with other major cities, the authors called San Francisco \u201cthe world\u2019s leading high-tech hub and the anchor of its global innovation ecosystem.\u201d They also found \u201cpipelines,\u201d cities that they said had been \u201ctied together\u201d by similar companies, professional opportunities and talent pools. <\/p>\n\n\n\n New York provided six times more new residents to Miami-Fort Lauderdale, for example, than any other city, per the LinkedIn data. And San Franciscans poured into Austin at twice the rate of New Yorkers and more than 1.5 times the rate of Angelenos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSimilar to New York\u2019s relationship to Miami, Austin is best understood as a satellite of the San Francisco tech complex,\u201d Florida and co-authors Vladislav Boutenko, Antoine Vetrano and Sara Saloo wrote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tesla may be the perfect example to illustrate the authors\u2019 idea that those worker and company migrations are not a zero-sum game, but deepen places\u2019 connections. Though Elon Musk infamously moved his company\u2019s corporate headquarters<\/a> from Palo Alto to Austin in 2021, he continued to expand and invest in the Bay Area. This February, he opened up a new Tesla engineering headquarters at Hewlett-Packard\u2019s old Palo Alto office park, praising the region\u2019s tech talent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Florida, who also wrote the 2002 book \u201cThe Rise of the Creative Class,\u201d said that he thinks about remote work as, in part, a corporate tool of influence. As tech giants like Salesforce<\/a> and Apple<\/a> expand across the country, more workers are doing the bidding of Bay Area-based executives, meeting remotely with Bay Area colleagues, and contributing to Bay Area companies\u2019 bottom lines. And with the area\u2019s central role for startup funding<\/a> and conferences<\/a>, even those who leave for other companies, Florida said, will find \u201cthe axis of their profession remained in San Francisco.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe have binaries,\u201d Florida said, of urban studies discourse. \u201cIt\u2019s either the city is a physical artifact with people who live and work there, or the city is not important, everything\u2019s moving into the cloud. I think what this article tries to do is say, \u2018It can be both. Those two things don\u2019t have to exist in opposition.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Florida also pointed to the rising costs of living in Austin, Miami and Nashville, and said that as prices in the tech \u201csatellites\u201d rise, San Francisco may seem more appealing again. In October, SFGATE<\/a> spoke with several people who\u2019d entered the tech workforce elsewhere but decided in 2023 to move to the Bay Area. Florida expects that to continue, especially if the city can build its downtown to be better suited for community and connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou\u2019d have to be a lunatic, sorry, to bet against San Francisco,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hear of anything happening at a Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Jan 2, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n By Stephen Council<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Stephen Council is the tech reporter at SFGATE. He has covered technology and business for The Information, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC and CalMatters, where his reporting won a San Francisco Press Club award. Signal: 628-204-5452 Email: stephen.council@sfgate.com<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Austin, meanwhile, is a mere ‘satellite’ By Stephen Council Jan 2, 2024 (SFGate.com) During the pandemic, the Bay Area lost thousands of residents to smaller cities around the country, prompting speculation that the region had lost its tech-mecca status. But a new report from the Harvard Business Review argues that many of those people… Continue reading