Yelp workers fled NYC, San Francisco in favor of Florida, Texas during pandemic: report

New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, DC, aren’t getting any five-star ratings from employees of Yelp.

The high-tax, high-crime havens were ditched in droves in favor of locales in Florida and Texas by workers at the business review app after the move to remote work during the pandemic, according to an internal study.

Between 2019 and 2022, some 70% of workers who had been living near the company’s headquarters in San Francisco fled the Bay Area, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, more than two out of three Yelpers living in New York City before the pandemic left the Big Apple, while the same percentage of employees decamped from Chicago and Washington, DC, according to Bloomberg.

Yelp’s internal review found that its share of employees living in both Florida and Texas soared four-fold.

“Many of the employees we’ve spoken with moved away from former office locations to areas with a lower cost of living, with some individuals purchasing their first home or enjoying a slower place of life,” Carmen Whitney Orr, Yelp’s chief people officer, told Bloomberg News.

Yelp, which has a nationwide staff of 4,400, was one of several tech companies that allowed employees to work entirely from home at the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020.

Last June, Yelp closed its offices in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, due to poor attendance. During an average week, the offices in those cities were less than 2% utilized, according to Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

The migration trends among Yelp employees corroborate nationwide data showing a mass exodus from New York, California, Illinois and Connecticut.

Sun Belt states that offer warm weather year-round and a relatively affordable cost of living such as in Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Texas and the Carolinas have been the beneficiaries.

The population explosion in the Sun Belt states fueled a post-pandemic boom that allowed for quicker economic recovery from the depths of the COVID lockdowns.

Last year alone, more than 64,500 former residents of New York state moved to Florida — more than any year in history, according to Florida state government statistics.

Last year’s record-shattering pace of migration eclipsed the prior mark of 61,728 New Yorkers who made the switch to the Sunshine State in 2021, according to the data.

Earlier this month, billionaire real estate developer Stephen Ross, whose business interests in the Big Apple include the Hudson Yards project, told Bloomberg News that he predicted the New York-to-Florida migration trend will continue.

“People are looking from the Northeast and relocating for jobs — not retirement — and companies are looking” for offices, Ross said.

“It’s tax issues, and there’s the security issues.”

Ross added: “There’s just the ease of living.”

Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who runs Citadel, announced last year that his company would be relocating its headquarters from Chicago to Miami.