San Antonio's tech industry growth more than doubled during the first year of the pandemic, making it one of an unexpected group of fast-growing metro areas that saw an influxe of tech workers, a new report by the Brookings Institution found.
The report, released Tuesday, found that 36 of the nation's metro areas not typically considered "superstar" or "rising star" cities for tech saw tech employment accelerate in 2020 when compared to the five years before the pandemic — including many warm-weather cities like San Antonio, New Orleans, and Birmingham.
Tech superstar cities like San Francisco, Seattle, New York and Austin — while still yielding the highest numbers of tech employment overall — experienced slowed growth during the pandemic. At the same time, significant tech growth occurred in smaller and midsized markets like San Antonio. On average, major tech cities with a 4.9% pre-pandemic growth rate saw their rate decrease to 2.9% between 2019 and 2020.
In contrast, San Antonio's tech employment growth rate, which previously hovered at about half a percent increase per year between 2015 and 2019, saw it grow to 1.2% — more than double its previous rate. This increase put the Alamo City among nearly half of the nation's secondary large metro areas that added tech jobs at a faster rate than in the five previous years.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow and policy director at Brookings and one of the lead authors of the report, told the San Antonio Business Journal this could be in part due to the rise of remote work.
While it's hard to identify a pattern from one disruptive year, Muro cautioned, it's an open question as to whether the growth of smaller tech markets is a one-time disruption or an inflection point marking the beginning of a more widespread trend.
Even digital services in the tech sector like software publishing and data processing that lost some jobs between spring and summer 2020 still saw employment rates between 8% to 11% above pre-pandemic levels one year later, the Brookings report noted, with 289 out of 384 metro areas in the U.S. experiencing some tech growth.
Muro said it would be a boon to see tech talent dispersed more widely throughout the nation's metro areas. "The extreme concentration has created a kind of frustration in the rest of the country," he said. "(We're) leaving too much talent in too many places off the table."
The findings are in line with other recent reports, such as a 2021 Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis report that found San Antonio had experienced a 9.4% growth rate in the last three years in its tech force. A 2020 Zillow analysis ranked San Antonio No. 6 out of the top 10 American cities most ripe for future tech industry growth, and a 2020 Q3 Tech Job report found that San Antonio had a 21% growth rate in that quarter — the highest in the country.
