Who in the Bay Area has not thought about leaving?
It’s a challenging place to live — the most expensive metro area in the country for consumer prices and buying a home. In a recent poll of Bay Area residents, nearly half said they were considering leaving in the next few years.
These four former Bay Area residents explain what led them to eventually take the plunge and move.
A place to spend their “golden” years
Ken Freeze, 69, and Michele Freeze, 68
Sold: A split-level home in Martinez for $750,000 (Originally bought for $167,000 in 1984)
Bought: A 3,800 square foot home in Meridian, Idaho, with a five-car garage for $496,000
Ken and Michele Freeze mine for gold along one of Idaho’s many gold-bearing creeks with their prospecting club. (Courtesy of Ken Freeze)
After starting their careers with the U.S. Coast Guard, Ken and Michele Freeze settled in Martinez in 1984. They loved California, and in 2005 bought several acres in Placerville, where they one day hoped to retire. But by the time retirement rolled around, the state had changed too much for them.
“The homeless situation in downtown Martinez was just getting out of hand,” Freeze said. “Beautiful Marina Park was just littered with needles. People didn’t want to take their families down there.”
Placerville, though far from the Bay Area, “was still California,” Ken said. So they decided to swap out the foothills of the Sierra Nevada for the foothills in Idaho, and move to Meridian, a fast-growing suburb of Boise. They’d first traveled there in August 2017 for the total solar eclipse, and were struck by the good condition of the roads and how affordable the homes were.
At the end of 2019, they sold their place in Martinez and bought in Meridian. These days, the two rarely have a free weekend — Michele installed a woodturning studio in their five-car garage. Ken joined a coin-collecting club and his city’s historic preservation committee. This summer, they spent several weekends in the mountains with fellow members of their gold prospecting club.
But as it turns out, the problems of California can’t be outrun — the area is rapidly growing, and with that come some familiar problems: concerns about traffic, overcrowded schools and urban sprawl.
“In the short time we’ve been here, areas that when we first moved here were just open fields are now apartment complexes and buildings,” Ken said. “I’d just like to see them pull back the reins a little bit and let the infrastructure take a breath.”
A pandemic lifestyle change
Jared Troutman, 45, and Grace Xu, 37
Left: A $2,600 a month one-bedroom rental in San Bruno
Bought: A 2,223-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Phoenix for $695,000
Jared Troutman with his rescue dog, Bonaparte, swimming in their backyard pool in Phoenix. (Courtesy of Jared Troutman)
After the pandemic struck in 2020, Jason Troutman and Grace Xu put everything from their one-bedroom San Bruno apartment into a storage pod and moved to Hawaii for nine months. When they came back to the mainland, one thing was clear: they didn’t want to stay in the Bay Area.
It was a complete reversal in their thinking — just a few years earlier, they had considered making an offer on a small cottage in Half Moon Bay. “At the end of the day, we couldn’t go forward with paying a million dollars for a tiny, one-bedroom house.”
Home prices elsewhere were too good to pass up. They looked at houses in Minneapolis and Phoenix — both places where Xu’s company, Shutterfly, had offices. Troutman, a media analyst, could work remotely from anywhere.
In Phoenix, they fell in love with a quirky house in the Ahwatukee neighborhood on the city’s south side. It came with a pool, palm trees and a view of the mountains. “You can’t get all that in California anymore, unless you’re Elon Musk,” Troutman joked.
They closed in the fall of 2021, and now pay less for their mortgage than they did for their one-bedroom in San Bruno. They recently adopted a dog and a cat, something they’ve wanted to do for a long time but could only do now that they’re “settled,” Troutman said.
There are always parts of the Bay Area that Xu and Troutman will miss — the nature, the food scene, and Troutman’s sister, who still lives in Berkeley.
“It wasn’t necessarily that we wanted to leave the Bay Area,” Troutman said. “But it made a lot of sense.”
Finding peace in a lakeside town
Susan Hyland, 47, and Dan Hyland, 47
Went from: Renting a 1,200 square foot home in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood
Bought: A $1.13 million, 4,200 square-foot home in Granite Bay, Calif.
Susan and Dan Hyland moved to Granite Bay from San Jose in 2018, looking for more space and a slower pace of life. (Courtesy of Susan Hyland)
Susan and Dan Hyland grew up in San Jose and met at Archbishop Mitty High School. When their children were in elementary school, they lived in a 1,200 square-foot rental in the Willow Glen neighborhood.
It was a search for better schools for their children, one’s a fifth grader and the other is a high school sophomore, that led them to Granite Bay, a town of 22,000 on Folsom Lake in Sacramento County with highly rated schools. The Hylands sold a duplex rental property they owned in North San Jose, which allowed them to put a hefty down payment on a five-bedroom house on a one-acre lot in Granite Bay.
“I was rooted in Willow Glen,” said Susan, who with Dan headed a woodworking business in San Jose. “For us to leave felt very scary, but once we found a community and environment like where we’re at, we have never looked back.”
Since they moved in 2018, Susan’s mom also sold her home of 50 years in San Jose’s Cambrian neighborhood and moved to join them. Susan started a new career, working as an executive assistant in a venture capital firm.
“So many people are scared to make that move because of their community, but it really is feasible to find happiness outside of a place that seems so special and irreplaceable,” Susan said.
Back to Southern roots
Mary Ezell-Wallace and her husband Samuel moved from Oakland to El Dorado, Arkansas where they bought a large home for around $400,000. (Courtesy of Mary Ezell-Wallace)
Mary Ezell-Wallace, 73, and Samuel Wallace Jr., 83
Sold: A four-bed, three-bathroom house in the hills above East Oakland for $575,000 in 2006 (Bought at $106,000)
Bought: A 5,500 square-foot home in El Dorado, Arkansas, for $400,000
For nearly four decades, Oakland was Mary Ezell-Wallace’s home. In the ’90s, she ran a beauty parlor on 19th Street next to a theater. There was good shopping — a Sears and Catwell’s downtown, a Hat-o-Rama, which her husband preferred.
“We could get anything we wanted real fast,” Ezell-Wallace said. “I thought Oakland was one of the greatest places there was.”
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But in the early 2000s, the city started “to feel like a third-world country,” she said. “I didn’t want to wait until everything got worse than it already was.”
In 2006, they bought a big brick two-story home in El Dorado, Arkansas, where Ezell-Wallace had grown up. They went back and forth between Arkansas and Oakland until last year, when the frequent travel started to wear them down.
“Living in Oakland was stressful every day and night,” she said. “It’s so much better down here.”
