This Bay Area suburb is shrinking faster than any other California city. Here's why

Like many Union City residents, Heather Perez chose the unassuming East Bay suburb for its relative affordability and the convenience of its location. But in the 12 years she lived here, she hardly experienced either.

Unsatisfied with Union City's public schools, Perez enrolled her two youngest children at a private school on the Peninsula, near where one took intensive ballet lessons and her husband, Steve, worked as a software engineer. After Steve went fully remote during the pandemic, Heather began asking herself: Why are we stretching our budget just to spend our days traversing the Dumbarton Bridge?

"We felt like hamsters on a wheel," she said. "We just kept spinning and spinning, and it was really hard to save."

Now, as Perez prepares to move her family into a sprawling home overlooking an artificial pond in the Sacramento suburb of Granite Bay, she is excited for more time with family - and less in traffic. Still, she wonders what the future holds for Union City, which has become a bellwether for the Bay Area's pandemic-spurred population loss.

From 2020 to 2025, this Alameda County commuter hub saw its number of residents fall by 6.9%, from around 70,000 to just over 65,000. According to a Chronicle analysis of census data, that's the steepest decline of any California city with more than 50,000 people.

Perez and her family are at the crux of the problem. Though Union City has a low vacancy rate of just 3%, and houses here tend to sell at least twice as fast as the typical U.S. home, the city appears to be losing more young families.

That, combined with Union City's rising number of empty-nested baby boomers, has left it with its lowest average household size since the early 1990s. If Union City officials can't make this quiet bedroom community more enticing to house-hunting parents, they could eventually face far-reaching repercussions: School closures. Budget deficits. Cuts to city services.

"It's surprising because Union City is right in the middle of the Bay Area," said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, a nonprofit think tank. "But once you take a closer look at it, it starts to make sense."

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Known as "Little Manila" for its large Filipino population, Union City has historically been a working-class haven for Asian and Latino immigrants. Families long flocked here because it was close to - and more affordable than - many job centers.

But with remote and hybrid work schedules making commute times less important, many young families have decamped for the Tri-Valley, the Sacramento area or the Central Valley. Parents like Perez are having a harder time justifying seven-figure prices for older one- or two-story houses in a community with little name recognition, no buzzy restaurants or nightlife scene, and few top-tier schools.

Local real estate agents such as Navi Dhillon, who has helped residents buy and sell homes in her hometown for 16 years, still have no problem piling up commissions. With Union City's median home price now around $1.3 million, modest ranch-style and tract houses often sell for over asking within a week or two of being listed.

The only big difference from 15 years ago, other than the prices, is who's buying them. Instead of the working-class and immigrant families who were once Dhillon's target demographic, she now has the most success with wealthy tech workers without kids. They're the ones who still prioritize a short drive to Meta, Google or Apple.

According to census data, about 17% of Union City residents are under age 18, down 2 percentage points from the start of the pandemic in 2020 and a 7 percentage point decline since 2010.

"More than ever before, people want it all: the trendy downtown, the best schools, the Michelin-starred restaurants," Dhillon said. "For a lot of these younger families, simply being close to work isn't good enough anymore."

Union City schools are a particular concern. Though test scores have improved in its school district, New Haven Unified, which includes parts of south Hayward, its state results on the California School Dashboard remain average for math and below average for English.

Those scores lag far behind adjacent Fremont, whose district has the highest possible rating in those subjects. This is just one of many unfavorable comparisons to Fremont that have created what some Union City residents call a "little brother complex" with their much bigger neighbor to the south. Victoria Torrez, who has lived in Union City for more than 30 years, lamented that it "does feel like we're always in Fremont's shadow."

Over the past four years, WalletHub, a popular personal finance website, has named Fremont as America's "best place to raise a family" or "happiest city" a combined six times. In addition to touting blue ribbon schools, it has one of the lowest crime rates in the East Bay, a median household income of $176,000 and one of the highest rates of family households in all of California.

"I actually know a lot of families who stayed in Union City until their kids finished elementary school here, then moved to Fremont in time for middle school," said Rutvik Hora, whose daughter is about to start middle school in Union City.

The crossover works both ways. Some of Dhillon's clients are empty-nesters who, after watching their children graduate from Fremont high schools, are now ready to move into a more spacious home within their price range - in Union City.

Its lone public high school, James Logan, has seen its student body fall by nearly 30% since the late 1990s, from about 4,300 to roughly 3,000. "The numbers would be worse if we didn't have a decent amount of kids who transfer in from other districts for certain programs we offer," said John Thompson, New Haven Unified's superintendent. "That's kind of saving us in some ways."

Like many other Bay Area suburbs, Union City more than tripled in population during the 1970s and '80s. In the process, developers almost completely built out the 19-square-mile enclave. The few remaining parcels are zoned largely for townhomes, apartments and condos - housing types that tend to be more popular with single professionals than young families.

With limited places left to go, Union City is pursuing redevelopment, transforming 470 acres of industrial land around its BART station into a mixed-use district with roughly 4,000 new homes and a projected 18,200 new jobs. The hope is that the $500 million project, dubbed the Station District, will help offset the city's shrinking household size.

The project has been in the works for about 20 years. But the area remains a long way from becoming the bustling commercial corridor Union City officials envision, and it's still probably a decade or two from completion. There's also the matter of BART's ongoing annual deficit of up to $400 million. Banking on its future could be risky.

City Manager Joan Malloy isn't fretting. The way she sees it, Union City is enduring a transition period. Plenty of other communities have dealt with similar population declines after decades of nonstop growth exhausted the local housing supply. "We are a city that has limited land," Malloy said. "You're seeing places like the Tri-Valley continue to grow because they have more land within their city limits."

But Union City isn't an outlier. The Bay Area as a whole is aging, which played a key role in it losing about 1.4% of its population from 2020 to 2025.

"Union City is suffering a perfect storm that's regional in nature," said Ben Metcalf, managing director at UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation, a nonprofit think tank. "They'll need to do more to attract young families, who are essential to any community."

While locals wait for the Station District's amenities to arrive, some complain of few restaurants and nonexistent nightlife. "The biggest attraction, in terms of things to do, honestly might be the In-N-Out Burger," said Jason Pham, a real estate agent at the firm Intero who has lived here for 25 years.

Unlike Bay Area suburbs such as Pleasanton, Livermore and Redwood City that grew around a historic downtown core, Union City was incorporated in 1959 when the farming settlement of Alvarado merged with an old railroad community called Decoto. Union City is now a mishmash of tract and ranch-style neighborhoods built in the 1960s and '70s, strip malls, big-box stores and distribution centers.

If Union City residents tire of catching a movie and a chain-restaurant dinner at the Union Landing Shopping Center, they often drive to Fremont, Palo Alto, San Jose or even the Tri-Valley for a fun night out. This is how Suki Bath came to appreciate Livermore, where residents trade longer work commutes for a lively downtown and high-performing schools.

For more than two years, she has daydreamed about using the equity from her Union City home to buy a bigger one in that burgeoning wine region. But until Bath secures just the right property there, she's content to stay in her hometown, where family is nearby, her teenage son has friends, and her nursing job in San Leandro is just 12 miles up Interstate 880.

"Union City is fine, so we really have no complaints," Bath said. "I just can't help but wonder whether somewhere like Livermore could be even better for us."

Since packing up her Union City home last month, Perez doesn't have to stress over such hypotheticals. For the past three weeks, she has been living in a Residence Inn in Roseville with her husband, 9-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter as they wait to move into their new house in nearby Granite Bay.

That 3,600-square-foot home, with towering palm trees, a waterfront view, a neighborhood filled with young families and a top-rated school district, isn't just twice the size of their previous home in Union City. At $1.45 million, it cost $125,000 less.

"It'll just be nice to not have to not live out of our car anymore and be able to save some money," Perez said. "We're finally off the hamster wheel."

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