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

As San Francisco has seen everything from high crime to persistently high rents to businesses fleeing the city in recent years, many residents have left the city. From 2020 to 2022, 65,000 people fled San Francisco alone. Some moved to nearby or adjacent cities, many moved to places like Stockton to take advantage of cheaper housing and lower crime rates while still being close enough to commute. Others stayed in the state, and a large proportion of former residents traveled to Los Angeles and San Diego. Still others left the state entirely. The Globe spoke to those in the first group on Wednesday, those who were ready to leave the city but didn’t want to leave the area.

Despite the deteriorating conditions in the city, many former residents found it difficult to imagine the potential move and postponed any notion until conditions reached a breaking point.

“My family has lived in San Francisco for generations,” Marcus O’Brien, who moved to Roseville from San Francisco a year ago, told the Globe. “There were family members who survived the earthquake, and I still remember my grandfather, a World War II veteran, who spoke with that old San Francisco accent that sounded like he was from Brooklyn. It is a special city and there is history everywhere.”

“However, something changed 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe it was a technological boost or a change in leadership, but there was a change in the air, so to speak. Then you saw how more and more tents were set up. Many people dismissed this as part of the recession but stuck with it. Then more reports about drugs hit the news. Then there was talk of not charging some criminals with crimes.”

“It didn’t happen overnight. One ax blow wasn’t enough to fell the tree. It was many, many things. For my family, COVID was the beginning of the end. Middle class people like us didn’t seem to get any help, while the homeless got hotels and calls about drug use went unanswered outside our Victorian Quarter.”

“The turning point came in 2021. We were lucky enough to have a small plot big enough for a flower garden and my mother had planted a bouquet. I won’t say where in town this was, but if you passed it you would definitely notice it. One day in 2021 my parents woke up to see a freshly plastered tent hanging 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 damage had been done. It wasn’t just that, but my mom was the only remaining voice in town at that point, and that was enough.”

“Roseville is about two hours from San Francisco on an average day, so commuting was difficult until I got a remote job earlier this year. Honestly, it’s better out here because Sacramento is beautiful. But my heart is still in San Francisco, so to speak. 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’ve always been a typical Chinese-American family in San Francisco,” says Chu, who moved to Stockton last year. “Mom and Dad ran the restaurant, the kids worked in it. We were known to have a live goose with us because we accidentally got an egg on an order and me and my sister decided to see if it could hatch and it did. So if you were in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco in the 90’s and two girls on a red leash were playing with a goose, that was us. We could keep the goose as long as we had an A and that motivated us! “

“I would say it was progressive the way everything happened. Because as much as everyone associates San Francisco with the tech industry or hippies or whatever, much of the city just didn’t feel it for a while. When the first dot-com boom hit, the only thing we noticed in our neighborhood was that a few white guys who worked for eBay or something moved in nearby and frequented our restaurant. That was it.”

“I went to college in the Midwest, so I only ever came home for winter break and summer, and that was in the early 2010s and that’s when it really started to change. Every time I came back it seemed like something else was wrong in the neighborhood. Then I moved back after graduation and things really took off. Our restaurant, which was never robbed, was robbed. Then again. And again. One day in 2018 my poor mom had to call 911 because there was a dead junkie behind our restaurant. We’ve never had to deal directly with homeless people or things like car crime, but others around us have.”

“And this decade was worse. COVID almost destroyed the restaurant but then the crowd of tramps who stayed here destroyed it. You asked where the breaking point is, that’s it for us. No one wants to walk into your restaurant unless they can get through the crowds of people loitering outside. You know that video earlier this year of a business owner spraying a homeless woman with a hose? My dad did this just before the restaurant had to close for good last year and luckily it wasn’t filmed.”

“Even if we had survived to this year, a large part of our business would have been from downtown companies, so with so many vacancies we would have to close soon anyway. I still have a job in town. It’s a long commute from Stockton but I do it because of the cheaper rent and because my mum finally got the space for a garden she’s always wanted but never had room for in town.”

“Yes, I miss San Francisco. The Chinese community there is great and the food just isn’t quite the same in Stockton. But you don’t have to worry about walking around at night here either. Also, we all still believe in a reversal in California, but that’s not the case in San Francisco right now. I drive in and out of town five days a week and every day I think I can go back, but after I drive a few blocks in and see what happened, it’s usually gone.”