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These Bay Area cities saw largest remote work increase in 2021.

Remote work in Bay Area: These 7 cities saw most dramatic shift. The share of people working from home shot up in San Francisco from 2019 to 2021.

In 2019, only 4% of workers in Mountain View primarily worked from home. But by 2021, that number had jumped to 50% — the largest increase of any city in California.

Mountain View wasn’t the only Bay Area city that saw dramatic growth in its number of residents working from home. Bay Area cities accounted for seven of the top 10 California cities with the highest shares of employed people who primarily worked from home in 2021, according to a Chronicle analysis of recently released U.S. census data that included cities with at least 65,000 people. San Francisco had the fifth-highest work from home rate of any California city at 46%, up 38 percentage points from 2019.

Prior to the pandemic, the Bay Area wasn’t unusual in its work - from - home rates. About 5.8% of workers in the Bay Area’s nine counties worked from home in 2019, similar to the national rate of 5.7%. While the U.S. as a whole rose to a work - from - home rate of 18%, the Bay Area’s number soared to over 33%.

Why did the Bay Area see such a dramatic increase?

A city’s overall e ducation levels and predominant industry types are important drivers of its remote work patterns, according to Stanford Professor Nicholas Bloom. Higher education, particularly post-graduate education, drives remote work because of its tendency to lead to computer-based jobs. In this category, the Bay Area stands out: The region has a higher share of college educated people compared with the U.S. and California. Of Bay Area residents 25 and older, 50% have college degrees, 14 percentage points higher than California’s share and 15 percentage points higher than the U.S.

Education isn’t the only factor contributing to computer-based jobs. The Bay Area, in particular Silicon Valley, has a high concentration of tech jobs. Bloom said jobs in the tech industry often are centered around long periods of focused computer time and are ideal for remote work.

A Chronicle analysis of U.S. census data shows that the California cities with the highest rates of workers in “management, business, art and science” roles saw the largest increase in work-from-home rates. For example, 65% of Sunnyvale workers held jobs in “management, business, art and science” roles in 2019. After the onset of the pandemic, Sunnyvale’s work-from-home share jumped 43 percentage points. On average, for every 10 percentage point increase in workers in management, business, art and science roles, the share of remote workers increased by six percentage points from 2019 to 2021.

However, not all Bay Area cities saw work from home skyrocket. Cities like Vallejo that have higher shares of people in service jobs and a lower median household income still fall below the national share of remote workers.

While work from home offers flexibility for some, it comes with its own issues for the Bay Area. Sujata Srivastava, the San Francisco Director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association(SPUR), said the pattern of remote work among companies based in downtown San Francisco will cause a huge loss of revenue for the city in terms of business taxes and property taxes. San Francisco transportation agencies are also losing revenue, projecting to return only to 70% of the pre-COVID level.

Srivastava said the lack of office commuters, which the city’s public transportation was built around, isn’t all bad news. It leaves room for redesigning the transportation systems to benefit those who can’t work from home and who may have been historically underserved.

Remote work may be on the decline if employers have their way. In March, Mayor London Breed pushed companies to commit to back-to-work plans. Tesla CEO Elon Musk demanded 40 hours of in-person work in June.

Still, the level of remote work does not appear to have significantly decreased in 2022. Mobility data from Google shows people in the San Francisco metro area are spending 38% less time in the workplace in September 2022 than they did prior to the pandemic, a number that is only slightly higher than it was in September 2021.

Leila Darwiche(she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: leila.darwiche@sfchronicle.com

Leila Darwiche is a data intern at The San Francisco Chronicle. She is entering her senior year at Northwestern University, studying journalism and statistics. Prior to The Chronicle, she worked as a data science intern at a tech company and has previously written for Northwestern's Institute for Sustainability and Energy.