Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the company will build support for a more remote workforce as San Francisco 'is not serving us any longer'

Office space is limited and competitive, especially as fast-growing big tech companies have filed in within the last decade.

Before Twitter moved its San Francisco headquarters to the city's Mid-Market district in 2012, tech companies were concentrated farther south in the heart of Silicon Valley.

But in 2013, Square, where Dorsey is also CEO, moved into an office a block away from Twitter's headquarters. Square shares the same building with ride-sharing behemoth Uber, which moved in in 2014 and is also the city's most valuable startup. Many more followed suit in Mid-Market and other parts of the city center as well, like Salesforce, which is now San Francisco's largest private employer.

On top of that, a measure dubbed Proposition E is currently in the works that aims to offset housing demand by making new office development contingent upon the amount of affordable housing produced each year. If the city fails to approve its yearly quota for affordable housing, then the amount of new office space will be capped at a similar level.

Source: The San Francisco Chronicle

Thanks to faster internet connections, updated telecommunication capabilities, and cloud products, companies can hire outside of the Bay Area.

"There's incredible talent around the world and we have to be able to work in a way that supports them as employees regardless of where they live, especially when they want to build careers in their own communities," a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider in an email.

At the same time, the tech talent pool is established in the region and there are benefits to having a physical office location, like in-person interactions with coworkers and higher-ups.

Some San Francisco company veterans are looking outside the Bay Area for a new headquarters location altogether. The payments company Stripe, valued at $9 billion, recently announced that it would pull its headquarters out of its San Francisco SOMA location in the second half of 2021 and move further south. It moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco in 2012 and will be one of the city's largest corporate departures.

Stripe cited a lack of office space as the main reason for the move. Jay Cheng, public policy director at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, told the San Francisco Chronicle that Stripe's removal from the city was only the beginning. He pointed to the potential new limitations on office development as a contributing factor to companies not wanting to stay.