• An estimate of Americans living in New Zealand has more than doubled since 2022, from 1,479 to 4,264.
• Four former Californians relocated to New Zealand for safety and a calm atmosphere.
• “In LA there was a lot of tension. Here it just felt like it was a more relaxed attitude,” one said.

Garvey Daniels first moved to Auckland, New Zealand, in 1996 for a job at a newly opened casino.

“I fell madly in love with the country and started the immigration process within two days,” Daniels, 55, told Insider.

He moved back to his home base of Irvine, California, in 2003 but always hoped to return to New Zealand. In June 2022, he got his chance. 

Daniels — now joined by his wife and two children, 14 and 13 — put almost everything his family owned in California into a storage unit. They brought two suitcases each to Auckland, New Zealand, for a one-year trial run. A year later, they’ve decided to stay for longer.

“It’s a magical country,” Daniels said. “There’s something about it. When I landed, I just felt this calm, like, ‘I’m home.'”

A photo taken from Daniels’ front porch. Garvey Daniels

Daniels and his family are a few of the growing number of Americans trading life in the US for life down under. Provisional migrant arrivals from the US to New Zealand jumped from 1,479 in 2022 to 4,264 in 2023, according to a dataset provided by Stats NZ, New Zealand’s official data agency.

Overall, New Zealand’s population has increased steadily for decades and has an estimated population of 5.2 million as of March 2023, according to Stats NZ. The island country to the east of Australia has a surface area similar to Colorado, but fewer people than Colorado’s 5.8 million.

Others following the same path as Daniels have found safety, friendliness, and natural beauty in New Zealand. Four Americans who moved to New Zealand told Insider their reasons for departing the US.

New Zealand’s beauty made him want to come back, but the safety made him stay

New Zealand had been in the back of Daniels’ mind since leaving in 2003, but it took some convincing to get his family on board.

“I knew I wanted to come back, but my wife and my kids had never stepped foot in New Zealand — they knew nothing about it except my stories,” Daniels said. “It was a little bit more of a challenge for them to say yes, but they love the idea of the adventure and trying something new.”

Daniels enjoying a nearby beach with his family. Garvey Daniels

Daniels and his family decided to stay at least until his kids finish high school. The initial reason for returning to New Zealand was simply Daniels’ admiration for the country, but since he’s now there with his family, he’s discovered other reasons to love New Zealand, like its safety.

“My kids just get to go and have an education,” he said. “They can walk to the dairy with their friends and if they decide they want to  go eat ice cream on the beach and they’re not home right away, I don’t go into a mad panic.”

“It doesn’t seem to be as fraught with the kind of anxiety that you have back in, for us, California,” Daniels said.

A Los Angeles resident visited for 20 years before making his move more permanent 

Jon Kroll lived in Los Angeles for 35 years and visited New Zealand on and off for 20 years as a break from the congestion of Los Angeles. He didn’t make the move full-time until December 2022, when he came with his partner. 

“We just liked the vibe, we liked the people, we liked the environment, and we felt like we could breathe here,” Kroll told Insider. “In LA there was a lot of tension. There’s traffic and everyone’s always working. Here it just felt like it was a more relaxed attitude.”

Kroll visited New Zealand for vacations for 20 years. WellingtonNZ

Kroll, who’s in his 60s, moved to Wellington — the capital of New Zealand at the southern end of the North Island, nearly 400 miles from Auckland — into a 2,200-square-foot, three-bedroom home. He downsized from his four-bedroom home in Los Angeles.

Kroll owns his home. The average cost of a home in Wellington was 1.02 million New Zealand dollars in July, or $607,338, according to CoreLogic NZ. 

New Zealand is often regarded for its scenic landscapes, and Kroll takes full advantage of that.

“You can go 10 minutes in any direction and there’s an amazing hike to go on with my dogs,” he said. “There’s so much natural beauty everywhere.”

Kroll also pointed out that the charm expands beyond the landscape, to the Kiwis — or locals.

“Just last week I bought a bookcase and was trying to load it into my car and this stranger said, ‘Do you need a hand?,'” Kroll said. “He helped me load this bookcase in, and I’ve never had anything like that happen before. It was just such a cool thing.”

He added, “And that’s just normal. I think it’s an overwhelming feeling that people help each other here, and I think that’s really nice.”

The slower pace in rural New Zealand helped this tech worker enjoy more time with family

Heather Gadonniex left the San Francisco Bay Area and went on what was supposed to be a quick vacation to New Zealand in March 2020. Accompanied by her husband, who is originally from New Zealand, and 1-year-old son, they ended up hunkering down with family for the duration of the pandemic-related lockdowns. 

“We had a suitcase full of clothes and a suitcase full of wine. We trade wine back and forth, being from Northern California,” Gadonniex told Insider. “Six months turned into eight months, and we were still there.”

Gadonniex, 42, settled in Matakana, New Zealand, a small town about 42 miles outside of Auckland, and lives in an intergenerational home with her husband, now two children, and her father-in-law.

Gadonniex moved to Matakana, New Zealand during the start of the pandemic in 2020. Heather Gadonniex

Matakana is more rural than Oakland, where she lived before moving, and while Gadonniex does miss the innovation and hustle and bustle in the Bay Area, she’s enjoyed the change of pace.

“We live a very different existence,” she said. “It’s really an idyllic place. We’re five minutes from the beaches, it’s really safe, my kids go to a school down the road that’s surrounded by cows.”

Gadonniex is an executive at a venture-capital firm in Auckland and still enjoys the fast pace of the tech industry, but now enjoys the balance between work and time with family that New Zealand has allowed her to practice.

“The ability to have more balance is something that I don’t think I realized how much I needed, but now that I have it, I think I’d be pretty hard pressed to give that up,” she said. “I just don’t know how I would’ve done that in San Francisco.”

Wellington, New Zealand, provides the small-town feel his family was looking for

Native Wyomingite Ryan Rogers departed for New Zealand more than a decade ago for work. 

Rogers, 43, mulled over cities like London, San Francisco, and Vancouver, but ended up picking the furthest option.

“At the time I didn’t honestly know a great deal about New Zealand, but it just seemed to me like it was this interesting place that was different from all the others,” Rogers told Insider. 

Rogers worked in the film industry — specifically special effects — and explained that New Zealand was an attractive market in that space at the time.

Rogers moved to New Zealand more than a decade ago. WellingtonNZ

Rogers has grown to love the small-town feel that Wellington, which had a population of 202,737 in 2018, the most recent Census estimate, is able to offer.

“I do miss some of the nightlife in Los Angeles — nightlife in Los Angeles is just off the charts, so it’s hard to compare to that — but my favorite thing here by far is that it’s a great place to raise a family.”

Rogers has two children, one that was born in the US and the other that was born in New Zealand. Raising his family in Wellington has been a great experience for him because the community is tightly knit, and he knows everybody.

“I know all of my neighbors, and it feels like how things were in the ’80s when I was growing up in a small town in Wyoming,” he said. “It just has that small-town vibe yet it is a big city.”

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Lclockdown was, among other things, a sudden collective experiment in volume control. Sound waves from the regular rush-hour thrum of cities usually penetrate more than a kilometer below the Earth’s surface. When Covid-19 forced humans inside, seismologists noticed the muzak of their subterranean instruments was quieted. The ancient rock of our planet came nearer to the silence that it had known for nearly all of the first 4bn years of its existence. And the relative stillness was felt on the surface, too. People noticed voices from beyond the human world a little more readily, and those voices felt less need to shout to be heard. Scientists in San Francisco discovered that the city’s sparrows reverted to softer and lower pitched songs of a kind not heard since the invention of the freeway.

Biology professor David George Haskell’s often wonderful book is all about listening to those kinds of lost frequencies. It is a sort of rigorous scientific update on that 1960s imperative to “tune in and turn on”: a reminder that the narrow aural spectrum on which most of us operate, and the ways in which human life is led, blocks out the planet’s great , orchestral richness. Haskell’s previous acclaimed book, The Forest Unseen, was a thrillingly curious investigation of the life of one square meter of ancient Tennessee woodland. This new volume gives you the experience of closing your eyes in such a space and having your senses flooded with the background cacophony.

David George Haskell.

It took our sun a good while, Haskell argues, to work out the means of filling the planet with sound. Eventually it discovered the cymbal crash of life. A microphone in a muted laboratory can pick up the sounds of colonies of bacteria. When these are amplified and played back to the bacterial cultures they grow at an accelerated rate, detecting the noise through cell walls. No one knows how or why. Bacteria had this ultimate chill-out playlist to itself for nearly 2bn years. The first sea creatures were voiceless. The evolutionary quirk that set life on the road to hearing was a “tiny wiggly hair”, a cilium on a cell membrane that allowed organisms to “hear” eddies and changes in water flow that might help them to locate food. Haskell traces, beautifully and brilliantly, the stages from that development to the wonders of human and animal hearing – all the infinite serial interactions between communication and reception. “When we marvel at springtime birdsong, or the vigor of chorusing insects and frogs on a summer evening,” he writes, “we are immersed in the wondrous legacy of the ciliary hair.”

Crickets and their ancient relatives were among the prime movers in this evolutionary soundscape. Immersing himself in the mechanics and music of insect song, Haskell transports his reader to imagine the first instruments and notation: he examines the fossil tracery of prototype grasshopper wings, preserved in Permian rock, which clearly reveal the shift from a flat surface to one with an unusual ridge, the gene genie mutation that allowed the insect to create and amplify its sawing sound. Such discoveries lead Haskell to all sorts of places: the development of echolocation, the “hearing feet” of certain species, the insatiable human need to recreate and delight in Caliban’s isle “full of noises”, and the ways in which technology – from antler -horn pipes to reed instruments to digital soundtracks – has often advanced in creating through rhythm and music.

The calls of whales and dolphins can get lost in the ‘sonic fog’ of ships’ engines. Mating and distress calls go unheard

The earliest ears of all species were on high alert for novelty – just like teenagers hungry for the newest beats. Some corners of the animal world are richer with this kind of innovation than others. Humpback whales, Haskell writes, concentrate their hit factory in “an innovation zone” off the coast of Australia, where new calls are developed and tested. Once established, the latest humpback songs will have spread throughout the oceans within a few months. Tragically, evidence suggests, this natural wonder has met with brutal interference in recent years: the calls of whales and dolphins can get lost in the “sonic fog” produced by container ships’ engines. Mating and distress calls go unheard. And oil prospectors’ sonic surveys, producing underwater decibel explosions every minute, are thought to have forced whales – enormously sensitive hearing creatures – out of the ocean to escape the torture.

Human noise pollution is everywhere on land and Haskell’s investigation into natural sound often takes on the tone of a valedictory lament. He goes in search of wild places – forests at dawn, riverbanks at evening – where the diversity of bird and insect noise is at its overwhelming richest, and contrasts them with the eerie silent springs of pesticide-scoured agrarian landscapes. The ambition to tell the history of our planet through description of sound is given a profound urgency by these chapters. Meanwhile, the sense of what is being lost is revealed in how even the thesaurus of Haskell’s descriptive language struggles to keep up with the nuance and variety of the musical world. You often sense him, as he attempts to convey in words what he is hearing, in the position of Keats: no match for the nightingale.

Sounds Wild and Broken by David George Haskell is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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SAN FRANCISCO, 17th August 2021 / PRNewswire / – When the San Francisco Campus for Jewish Living (SFCJL), known to many as the Jewish Home, began planning its assisted living and memory maintenance community a few years ago, the focus was on redefining assisted living and memory maintenance. The result was a new and modern community that was developed to offer high-quality senior citizens tailored care: Frank Residences.

During the Frank Residences construction period, seniors and their families seeking exceptional care with great design had few options in the Bay Area. Often times, they were forced to sacrifice their lifestyle for more robust maintenance, which meant fewer on-site aesthetics and convenience. Frank Residences has been designed to provide both a luxurious environment and specialized care that goes beyond current standards in senior living. Bright, modern and full of life are just a few of the words that the residents of the new Frank Residences hear about their experiences. The design aspects of the new community not only ensure a visually stimulating and inviting experience on the ground floor, which includes a full-service restaurant, a bar and a casual café, but also on each of the five floors that the residents of Luxuriously appointed condominiums accommodate -style accommodations.

In addition, Frank Residences has a fully equipped full-service gym, a heated indoor therapy pool, a spa and salon, and a Pilates studio. Residents enjoy creating new works in the art studio, immersive experiences in the in-house cinema, and attending public performances in the art center. A continuous connection with nature is possible through several rooms, including outdoor terraces that are accessible on the living floors, as well as beautifully designed social rooms with fireplaces and areas to meet for conversations, a glass of wine with friends or visits with family. On the ground floor, Frank Residences offers what many call resort-style outdoor spaces, including the Brunnenhof, which is right next to Bakar Noshery, a casual bistro-cafe. It’s the perfect place for a game of bowls, an alfresco meal with friends, or a cappuccino with the morning paper.

A new approach to memory maintenance
Frank Residences is redefining the memory care model with a personalized approach that offers the highest level of attention and care. Getting to know each resident is the first step in creating a specific care and activity program that is designed to stimulate and improve every day at Frank Residences. Every detail of the Memory Care community has been carefully thought out to create a warm, welcoming and inclusive environment with no clinical clutter.

Peace of mind is priceless
As Frank Residences continues to welcome new residents, peace of mind is priceless. From assistance with relocation planning to assistance with unpacking and decorating, the Frank Residences team can provide as much or as little assistance as desired.

“The move to assisted living or memory maintenance is a big step – both for the resident and for his family,” said Staci Chang, Chief Marketing Officer of SFCJL. “At Frank Residences, we want to make this transition as smooth and seamless as possible so you can focus on the things that matter most.”

On a recent visit to her father Susan Aronovsky said it best: “When my father moved in, he told me how happy he was to be here. It is no small matter. Knowing that your loved one will feel at home as quickly as possible gives you a security that is simply priceless. ”

For more information or to schedule a viewing, please visit https://frankresidences.org.

San Francisco Campus for Jewish Life (SFCJL), based in San Francisco Excelsior District offers a modern residential model for older adults to receive a higher level of care. ON $ 140 million With 270,000 square feet of new build and renovation work on SFCJL’s 362 qualified nursing, short-term rehabilitation and behavioral health units, the community includes the new Frank Residences – 113 assisted living apartments and 77 memory care suites due to be occupied in Spring 2020. Byer Square, the epicenter of the downtown campus, will include a primary, specialized, and inclusive health care clinic, fitness and water sports center, library, cafe, movie theater, and culture and performing arts center. Healthy aging and wellbeing programs and caregiver support will be available on-site, at home and virtually to older adults and their families. To schedule an appointment for an introduction to Frank Residences and a virtual tour, contact the Preview Center at 415-562-2020 or visit https://frankresidences.org.

Media contact:
Marcus Jung
415-505-2524
[email protected]

SOURCE Frank Residences

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