• Rachel Pohl and her husband left San Francisco and traveled around the USA for about a year.

• When Pohl became pregnant, they finally began looking for a place to settle down.

• They thought Durham, North Carolina, would be the answer, but Chattanooga, Tennessee, ultimately became their home.

San Francisco is home to the Golden Gate Bridge, has been the setting for the television series “Raven's Adventure” and “Full House,” and is home to a strong professional and business services workforce.

It's also an expensive city, with more people moving away from it than moving to other parts of the United States.

Rachel Pohl, 34, who lived in San Francisco for several years, and her husband Jesse Rosenthal are just two of the people who left. After traveling around the U.S. for about a year, they are happy to have settled in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Pohl said that although she was also happy in San Francisco and enjoyed life there, at her current stage of life she is “grateful to be able to call Chattanooga home.” She and her husband moved to the city of more than 180,000 residents in late 2021.

They had been considering moving away from California for some time before leaving San Francisco in the fall of 2020.

“Obviously, it's very expensive and difficult to buy a home and raise a family,” she said. Pohl said they also wanted to live closer to family and be somewhere where life was “slower” than the more hectic big city of San Francisco, which is home to over 800,000 people.

“I think the overall situation and quality of life there is more difficult than in smaller or medium-sized cities because of the cost of living,” said Pohl.

The California wildfires in August 2020 were another reason for the couple's decision to leave the country. “It was around that time that we thought, let's leave California. It's time,” Pohl said.

“A great nomad tour through the USA”

During the pandemic, the pair were able to leave San Francisco thanks to flexible remote work and decided to explore the country, see the sights and decide where they would settle. “We went on a big nomadic tour of the USA,” Pohl said.

They packed up their things and moved some items to storage. Pohl said goodbye to the city she had called home for years and where she had met her husband. The two set off for Airbnb accommodations across the US.

Montana was one of the states they visited. Chattanooga was another place they saw on their trip and she found it “very beautiful and lovely.”

“It was spring and the flowers were blooming and I thought, 'This is a beautiful place,'” she added. She and her husband moved on, but after about a year of traveling, they finally moved there because they were looking for a permanent place after learning Pohl was pregnant. Pohl said she and her husband liked the size and energy of Chattanooga.

“It seemed to me that for the size of the city there was enough and plenty going on, but not overwhelming,” she said.

In the summer of 2021, they landed in Durham, North Carolina, before leaving Chattanooga, in part because of the potential job opportunities there. But Pohl said the place just didn't appeal to them.

“We thought if we could choose any place in the U.S., we just wanted to love it and feel comfortable with our decision,” Pohl said. “So we decided then to return to Chattanooga. We hadn't been there since the spring.”

The family-friendly location and other advantages of Chattanooga

Pohl likes the access to nature in Chattanooga.

“We like to hike, go river walking and paddle,” she said. “We like to take our son to playgrounds and parks. It's all very accessible.”

Pohl said people in Chattanooga are also friendly and she considers it a family-friendly place. She has also found that people are more diverse when it comes to jobs, in contrast to the dominance of the tech industry in the San Francisco area.

“I met entrepreneurs in the food and beverage industry and people doing all kinds of things,” Pohl said of Chattanooga. “It felt approachable and accessible here to do that.”

Chattanooga is also much more affordable for homebuyers than San Francisco. According to Realtor.com, both San Francisco and Chattanooga are currently buyers' markets where “the supply of homes exceeds the demand for homes.” While that may be the case, Realtor.com also shows that the median sales price for homes in Chattanooga is well below the national price in San Francisco – $347,500, or about $1.1 million.

“It's just a lot easier to buy a nice, bigger house in Tennessee and Chattanooga,” she said. “You can go a lot further with your money here. We thought about buying a house in California, but in the end we thought it didn't make sense because of the cost, because of the distance from family and just the whole situation. We thought let's move there.”

Although Pohl is happy in Tennessee, she misses the cuisine in San Francisco and access to some of the national parks nearby. Pohl told BI that she has visited San Francisco since moving away, mostly for work. And while she loves the energy in Chattanooga, there's something special about the energy in California, too.

“It's such a beautiful state,” Pohl said of California. “Sometimes I miss the energy a little bit, but I feel like that was an active part of my decision to move away from the big city, but there's so much innovation there around technology and AI. From a professional perspective, I miss that sometimes.”

Have you moved from San Francisco or anywhere else in the U.S.? Contact this reporter at mhoff@businessinsider.com to share your moving experience.

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• John and Matine Yuksel moved from San Francisco to the Midwest in 2020.

• The brothers and business partners lived in Iowa and Cincinnati while founding their startup.

• Sometimes they miss living in California, but love the friendly people and affordable prices of Cincinnati.

This essay is based on a conversation with John Yuksel, 33, and Matine Yuksel, 29, two brothers who moved from San Francisco to Dubuque, Iowa, in 2020 to start Beltways, an accelerated pavement company. The brothers then moved to Cincinnati in 2022. Their company is based nearby in Northern Kentucky.

John: We are children of immigrant parents who grew up in southern Arizona.

I always knew I wanted to be close to my brother. He's my only sibling. After college, we lived in San Diego for a few years and then moved to San Francisco in 2018.

Death: San Francisco is incredible. I've never seen such a diverse environment there and it's a world-class environment for companies, especially in technology.

John: Matine worked for Walmart e-commerce and later got a job at Apple. I worked as a lawyer.

We paid an incredibly high rent, but had the best view of the Pacific and saw the sunset outside our windows every night.

But San Francisco was in the apocalypse. During COVID, the streets were empty. It felt unsafe. My car was broken into several times.

Death: COVID helped us rethink and reprioritize things. Instead of working on bringing the next generation iPhone to market, I wanted to build a new product that few people have ever heard of.

John: Beltways is actually our father's dream. Forty years ago, he lived in Istanbul and realized that today's forms of mobility were not moving people efficiently. He came up with a modular design to make pedestrian routes ten times faster.

John and Matine Yuksel with their parents.Courtesy of John and Matine Yuksel

My brother and I always wanted to do something together and years after our father came up with the idea, we started looking into it.

Death: We founded Beltways in July 2020. We quickly realized we had to move out of San Francisco. It would have been far too expensive to do what we needed to do there.

John: It wasn't the right place for our startup. We're a large hardware manufacturing startup. It made much more sense to be near industrial technology clusters. We wanted to be in the Midwest, where manufacturing is still profitable.

Death: John met someone with experience in the sidewalk business and he offered us a deal in Iowa.

We moved to Dubuque, Iowa in 2020

John: It was a very small town in the middle of the cornfields, an hour and a half from any airport. Dubuque is a beautiful, quiet town on the Mississippi. We could drive anywhere in the city in two minutes.

We practically lived in a mansion. We had a three-story, four-bedroom house for half the price of our condo in San Francisco.

Death: The snow was definitely a change. We got our share of physical activity by shoveling snow.

It was a different way of life. We had to be focused and Iowa was good because we didn't have too many distractions. The two years we spent in Iowa flew by.

The brothers said they had to adjust to small-town life after moving to Dubuque, Iowa.Courtesy of John and Matine Yuksel

John: We built the prototype for the fastest walkway in the world when we lived there. It was a thirty-meter-long system and earned us our first VC check.

This was a huge milestone for us. We put all our money into this company. We quit our regular jobs. We refinanced our house. There was nothing more fulfilling than turning our father's invention into a commercial venture.

Death: It was a surreal day when he came out and rode the system for the first time. It was the icing on the cake to see his enthusiasm for something he dreamt up so many years ago.

John: We had to look for a new location for our company. The next step was to pilot our walkway. We were invited by several airports to do a pilot demo of our system.

We knew that CVG Airport in Cincinnati had a real track record of innovation and startup support. The area was also beneficial for manufacturing. It's super cheap. The facility we're currently in is just a little more expensive than my rent in San Francisco and is 20,000 square feet.

We moved to Cincinnati in 2022

John: We even moved our parents here. We wanted our father to work with us and be a part of the company personally. Our parents live three floors below us in our building in the Mount Adams neighborhood.

When we moved to Cincinnati, we felt like we were back in a big city after two years in Iowa. We have big sports teams and a big major airport. The climate is much more temperate.

The winters have been pretty mild so far. The spring is lush and green. You can kayak down the rivers and there are great hiking trails nearby. The air quality is great. And the summers aren't 120 degrees like Arizona.

I met my partner and now I have a child who was born here in Cincinnati. The city has become home for us. The company is here, the whole family is here.

John and Matine Yuksel enjoy a football game in Cincinnati.Courtesy of John and Matine Yuksel

Sometimes we miss living on the coast. California is a beautiful place. We love the climate and the diversity of the people. San Francisco is where technology starts and flows out. It really is the birthplace of many amazing things.

Death: But the tech scene in Cincinnati has also been very good to us. It's growing. It's a tight-knit startup community. From the moment we got here, the community was so welcoming.

John: And it's much cheaper here.

Bringing our father's dream to life was incredible

Death: We started Beltways in a modest garage in Tucson, where my brother built prototypes himself. Now we're in a 20,000-square-foot facility here in Northern Kentucky, right next to our first airport customer. And we manufacture in the USA.

John: Our goal is to become an official partner of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles and to provide temporary high-speed transportation.

Cincinnati is a great place to raise a family and run a business, and we can see ourselves staying there for the foreseeable future.

But our ultimate goal is to make our sidewalks commonplace and to spread this technology around the world. Wherever we need to go to make that possible, we will. This is bigger than us.

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