As housing prices rise, 17,000 Bay Area workers commute from the Sacramento region

The weekday commute to the Bay Area from the Sacramento region isn’t easy. It can range from a 90-minute train ride to Richmond to a multi-hour slog to Silicon Valley.

More than 17,000 Sacramento-area residents make the commute anyway, according to a Bee review of the latest census data.

For context, that’s enough people to fill the Golden 1 Center to capacity.

It is infamously expensive to live in the Bay Area. Median home prices range from $700,000 in Oakland to $1.6 million in Mountain View, according to tracking firm Zillow.com. The median home price in Sacramento is about $300,000.

As a result, thousands of people have fled the Bay Area for Sacramento in recent years.

Some of them didn’t quit their jobs by the bay. And thousands more already here decided to earn a Bay Area salary and live in Sacramento.

It’s not just IT workers making the commute.

In fact, most of the workers who commute from Sacramento to the Bay Area are in the construction industry, census figures show. Construction workers in the San Francisco metropolitan area earn an average of $73,000 a year, about 30 percent higher than the average in the Sacramento region.

Local areas closest to San Francisco have the highest proportion of Bay Area commuters, census figures show. About 3 percent of workers, or about 1,480 people, in the Sacramento County Delta area commute to the bay. Roughly 2.6 percent of workers in Yolo County, or 2,400 people, commute to the bay.

In Sacramento County, more than 2 percent of workers in both Natomas and Elk Grove work in the Bay Area.

Notes: For this story, the Bay Area includes the following counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Alameda and Marin. Census data represent an average from 2013 through 2016.

This story was originally published December 16, 2017 at 3:55 AM with the headline "As housing prices rise, 17,000 Bay Area workers commute from the Sacramento region."