One Year Out Of San Francisco: How Leaving Has Affected Former Residents

With San Francisco experiencing everything from high crime to continued high rents to businesses fleeing the city the last several years, many residents have left the city. From 2020 to 2022, 65,000 fled San Francisco alone. Some went to nearby or bordering cities, with many moving to places like Stockton, to take advantage of cheaper housing and lower crime rates while still being close enough to commute. Others stayed in-state, with a large contingent of former residents heading to Los Angeles and San Diego. Still others moved out of state entirely. The Globe talked to those in the first group on Wednesday, those willing to leave the city, but didn’t want to leave the area.

Despite the worsening conditions in the city, many former residents found the possible move difficult to fathom and put off any notion of it until conditions reached a breaking point.

“My family had been in San Francisco for generations,” Marcus O’Brien, who moved away from San Francisco to Roseville a year ago, shared with the Globe. “There were family members who survived the Earthquake and I still remember my grandfather, a WWII veteran, talking in that old San Francisco accent that sounded like he was from Brooklyn. It’s a special city, and there is history everywhere.”

“Something shifted 10 or 15 years ago though. It may have been tech taking off or a change of people in charge, but there was a change in the air so to speak. Then you started seeing more and more of the tents going up. A lot of people brushed that off as part of the recession, but they stayed. Then more reports of drugs came on the news. Then there was talk of not charging some criminals with crimes.”

“It didn’t happen overnight. One swing of the axe didn’t chop down the tree. It was many many things. For my family, the beginning of the end was COVID. Middle class people like us were not getting any help it seemed, while the homeless were getting hotels and calls of drug use outside our Victorian went unanswered.”

“The breaking point was in 2021. We are fortunate enough to have a small plot big enough for a flower garden and my Mom had put in a bunch of flowers. I’m not going to say where in the city this was, but if you passed by it, you would definitely notice it. One day in 2021, my parents awoke to see a tent freshly plastered over the garden. We managed to get them out, but everything was ruined, and the SFPD did nothing even though it was private property and there was damages. It wasn’t just that, but my mom had been the sole remaining vote to stay in the city by that point, and that just did it.”

“Roseville is about two hours from San Francisco on an average day, so commuting was hard until I got a remote job earlier this year. It’s honestly been better out here, as Sacramento is nice. But my heart, so to speak, is still in San Francisco. Aesthetically, I miss it a lot. But what is now, you know, you just can’t live there.”

Former residents still love San Francisco, but can’t live there

Another former resident, Helen Chu, also reached a similar breaking point.

“We were always a typical Chinese-American family in San Francisco,” says Chu, who moved to Stockton last year. “Mom and Dad ran the restaurant, kids would work in it. We were known for having a live goose with us because we got an egg in an order accidently and me and my sister decided to see if it could be hatched and it did. So if you were at a Chinese restaurant in the 90s in San Francisco with two girls playing with a goose outside on a red ribbon leash, that was us. We could keep the goose as long as we had straight A’s, and that motivated us!”

“I would say it was progressive, the way everything happened. For as much as everyone associates San Francisco with the tech industry or hippies or whatever, in a lot of the city, it just didn’t ring out for awhile. When the first dot com boom happened, all we really noticed in our part of the city was a few white people working for eBay or something moved in nearby and visited our restaurant often. That was it.”

“I went to college in the Midwest, so I would just come home for winter break and the summer, and this was in the early 2010s, and it really started to change then. Each time I came back, it seemed like something else was off in the neighborhood. Then I moved back after graduating and it really took off. Our restaurant, which had never been robbed, was held up. Then again. And again. My poor mom had to call 911 one day in 2018 because there was a dead junkie behind our restaurant. We never had to deal directly with the homeless or things like car crimes, but others around us did.”

“And this decade was worse. COVID nearly killed the restaurant, but then just how many vagrants stayed around here killed it. You asked what the breaking point was, that was it for us. No one wants to go to your restaurant if they can’t get through all the people just hanging around outside. You know that video from earlier this year where a business owner sprayed a homeless woman with a hose? My dad did that right before the restaurant had to close for good last year, and thankfully it wasn’t caught on film.”

“Even if we had survived to this year, so much of our business came from businesses downtown, so with all those vacancies now, we would have had to close soon anyway. I still have a job in the city. It is a long commute from Stockton, but I do it for the cheaper rent, and because my Mom finally got the space for a garden she always wanted but never had room for in the city.”

“Yeah, I miss San Francisco. The Chinese community is amazing there, and the food just isn’t quite the same in Stockton. But you also don’t have to worry about walking around at night here. Also, we all still believe in California to turn around, but that just doesn’t extend to San Francisco right now. I go in and out of the city 5 days a week, and every day I think I can go back, but after driving a few blocks in and I see what happened, it’s usually gone.”