US Census: 300,000 Bay Area residents returned to the office in 2022

More than a quarter of a million Bay Area residents returned to offices and other workplaces last year as companies across the region overhauled their pandemic-era remote work policies, a Bay Area News Group analysis of newly released census data found.

Last year, 836,000 residents, or 26% of the five-county Bay Area workforce, said they usually worked remotely, down from 35% in 2021. Despite the drop-off, there were still more than four times as many people working from home in 2022 as in the years leading up to the pandemic, when just 6% of workers were mostly remote.

In 2022, twice as many people — 1.7 million residents — drove to work alone as compared to those who worked from home. Three years earlier, just before the pandemic hit, just 200,000 worked mainly from home, and over 2 million drove to work alone. Data for 2020 was not available.

How work-from-home trends continue to evolve in the Bay Area, which has embraced remote work more than any other part of the country, could have far-reaching implications for the region’s economy, transit agencies and urban job hubs still struggling with high office vacancies and empty storefronts.

“It’s a new ballgame,” said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a business and labor consortium.

After white-collar workers largely proved they could do their jobs effectively and efficiently from home during the pandemic, many anticipated they’d never be asked back to the office. But once COVID-19 restrictions were fully lifted, it wasn’t long before many local companies — including tech giants that initially led the shift to remote work — sought more interaction with employees and began requiring them to show up in person at least a few days a week.

“Now, we’re saying the solution is hybrid,” Hancock said. “We don’t have to choose one or the other. You can have your cake, and you can eat it too.”

Among the core five Bay Area counties, tech-heavy San Francisco and Santa Clara saw the biggest drop in the share of remote workers last year, according to the census data. The remote workforce fell from 46% to 33% in San Francisco and 36% to 25% in Santa Clara County.

The remote workforce in San Mateo County, meanwhile, fell from 33% to 25%. Alameda County declined from 35% to 28% and now has a higher percentage of remote workers than Santa Clara County. And Contra Costa, which had the lowest remote work rate to begin with, fell from 28% to 21%, still in last place.

As more people began commuting to work, the share of Bay Area workers taking public transportation doubled from 3% to 6%, according to the data. But that was still less than half the 15% that took buses and trains before the pandemic. The lack of riders is the main reason state lawmakers in June agreed to a $3 billion bail-out for local transit agencies, though fare hikes and service cuts could still be on the horizon if ridership doesn’t continue to improve.

“As these agencies are looking long-term, they’re going to need to look at their operating models and how they’re going to be financially stable with fewer riders going forward,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, a regional think tank.

Just as before and during the pandemic, most Bay Area workers still showed up to work in person and got there by car. In 2019, 71% of workers drove or carpooled to work. That figure fell to 55% in 2021 and rebounded to 62% in 2022.

“My main mode of transportation pre-COVID was BART” said Shashwat Verma, 24, who was a student during the pandemic and took BART several times a week. Now he works at a property management company and drives five days a week from Daly City to downtown San Jose in part because it takes less time than public transportation would take.

For his coworker, Juliana Veloso, 40, the only thing that’s changed is how often she goes in to the office. “I have to go five days a week. I used to go like two days a week.” She lives a 10-minute drive from her office, so she wasn’t complaining, but both lamented the lack of more public transportation options.

Despite the recent gains in commuters, fewer people going into the office has hit the Bay Area’s largest downtowns the hardest, keeping office vacancies at historic highs and raising fears of an economic “doom loop.”

Such a negative spiral could look like this: Many employees keep staying home, and office buildings remain empty. Stores and restaurants that used to serve downtown workers continue to shutter. Property and sales taxes then plummet. Forced to slash essential services, cities fail to get a handle on homelessness and crime, causing even more people to avoid urban centers. The vicious cycle feeds on itself.

To stave off that fate, city leaders in San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco are looking for ways to transform downtowns from areas where many people have come primarily to work to places where they want to live and spend their free time. That includes efforts to convert office buildings into apartments and potentially transform vacant commercial space into museums, entertainment hubs or even sports arenas.

“From a policy perspective, it’s not only how do you bring people back … but how do you really create the vibrancy on the street that we had pre-pandemic,” Bellisario said.