Higher House Prices on Coasts Send Home Buyers Packing

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Higher House Prices on Coasts
Send Home Buyers Packing

By Rafael Gerena-Morales and Michael Corkery
From The Wall Street Journal Online

An exodus of U.S. workers from the technology-rich San Francisco Bay and Boston areas accelerated early this decade, according to Census Bureau data to be released today.

Meanwhile, high housing costs on both coasts drove more Americans to cheaper cities nearby. One big winner is the inland Riverside, Calif., area. It continued to attract residents from the Southern California coast from 2000 to 2004, experts say. States in the Southwest and Pacific-Northwest continued to attract many disaffected Californians, economists say. But their rate of U.S. migration gains slowed compared with the 1990s, the Census data indicates. Florida continued to attract new residents at a fast clip.

The bursting technology bubble sent people packing from the San Francisco Bay area. The rate of domestic migration out of the area nearly tripled to an average annual net loss of 14.7 people per 1,000 population, compared with a loss of 5.5 people in the 1990s. At the same time, the Boston area, another high-tech hub, lost workers at an average annual rate of 9.5 domestic residents per 1,000 population, nearly double the '90s rate.

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