San Francisco Bay Area Added 9,600 Jobs In October
On November 20, the State of California Employment Development Department released a report noting that the Golden State added 41,200 new jobs in the month of October. As has been the case since the start 2015, the San Francisco Bay Area played a role in driving job creation in the state. From September to October, 9,600 members of the Bay Area workforce gained new employment. Among the nine Bay Area counties, San Francisco led the pack in terms of wages, with the average Bay Area salary being $91,000 a year. The City by the Bay also boasted the third lowest unemployment rate in the entire state with 3.4 percent.
In recent months, San Francisco's resurgent economy has bolstered employment rates to the point that they eclipsed the job numbers that the city had in the late 90s/early 2000s at the peak of the dot-com bubble. There are now 536,200 people with jobs living in S.F., which is 70,700 more than in the year 2000. It's also worth noting that San Fran has fully rebounded from the Great Recession, as there are now 99,500 more employed people in the City than there were in January 2010, which was the nadir of employment in the region in the 21st century.
While San Francisco's economic turnaround is good news for both local residents and the state as a whole, its thriving tech industry has pushed rent costs and house prices to record highs. The median cost to rent a one-bedroom apartment in the city is now $3,452, and the median home value is $1,117,300. However, those housing costs shouldn't be seen as an impossibly high barrier to entry. As this Patch article notes, the area offers commuters four different mass transit options. That means lower-income workers can find well-paying jobs in S.F. with companies like Air BNB, Uber and Twitter, without having to live in the city proper.
Mario McKellop is a freelance writer who has covered the pop culture beat since 2010.