If you moved from the Bay Area to Miami or Austin during the pandemic, chances are you've left by now. First of all, it's too damn hot in both places. Second of all, the jobs aren't there.

"You'll be back!" is what went through many of our heads when transient tech folk — and others — decamped for cheaper and less-locked-down cities during the pandemic. And while San Francisco took its lumps and downtown is still just slowly dusting itself off, Austin and Miami are feeling the whiplash of being flash-in-the-pan hotspots, now in the mid-2020s.

The Chronicle has a piece today about how "Miami was hyped as the next Silicon Valley during the pandemic," but the city saw one of the highest rates of domestic out-migration last year of any major city, indicating that it is a hotspot no more. The piece points to rising housing costs and the lack of high-paying jobs in Miami as being the key to the problem — about 1.8% of the city's population fled for a different US city between 2024 and 2025 — and the story goes back much further than the pandemic.

San Francisco and New York have both seen small out-migrations over the last decade, with San Francisco seeing the biggest dip in 2021, and since then a rebound to 2019 levels as of 2025. Unlike New York and Miami, SF had a period of population swell between 2011 and 2015 which began dipping after that.

Miami, on the other hand, has had a fairly steady outflow of domestic out-migration since 2011, with the exception of the pandemic years, during which it did not recover to pre-2011 levels, but had three years of slightly slower out-migration.

This was made up for by foreign in-migration, with Miami continuing to show overall population gains, due primarily to foreigners, as MiamiRealtors explains.

Meanwhile, all the billionaires are buying homes in the Miami area, though not in the city proper. Peter Thiel announced in December that he was relocationg Thiel Capital to Miami from Denver, after leaving Palo Alto in 2020. And we learned earlier this month that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have bought a house in the same billionaire enclave outside Miami as Ivanka Trump.

This all seems likely motivated by the threat of a "billionaire tax" in California, and the desire to shield their wealth from it, if it comes to pass.

As for Austin, its time in the sun, at least for the tech world, already seemed to be ending by the middle of last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. While tech employment has been growing again on the coasts, in SF and New York, tech employment was on the decline the past two years in places like Austin, Houston, Denver, and Toronto.

This is despite moves to relocate company headquarters to Texas by the likes of Tesla and Hewlett Packard.