Folks left San Francisco in droves in the course of the pandemic. I moved again.

I left San Francisco on a suitably foggy morning – my items, acquired in my 25 years in the Bay Area, were jammed in a U-Haul – in the summer of 2019.

I moved to Southern California, Long Beach, to be precise, to do my PhD in English at UC Irvine. But I also wanted to get away from it, as Joan Didion says when she wrote about her exodus from New York. It was my first move from the Bay Area since I was born, other than a six-month stay in Europe during college.

During my three years at SFGATE before I left, the Exodus became my bread and butter, so to speak. I became the de facto Exodus reporter for the website that recorded people’s journeys from the Bay Area to Austin, to Portland, to the most remote places anywhere else than here.

Exodus has become ingrained in my memory after so many interviews, people keep telling about their familiar problems with the place: it’s too expensive, too technical, too busy. I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe there was something about this Bay Area exodus. Maybe I should try somewhere else for a change.

“Choosing whether or not to leave the Bay Area is not the same as answering a yes / no question,” I wrote at the time. “I knew that as a PhD student in the Bay Area I couldn’t survive without accumulating limitless debt… and finally I realized that I wanted that degree badly enough to leave my home from birth. I had to fill the scales and see which way they leaned. “

“After living in the Bay Area all my life, I’m scared of leaving,” I wrote. “But I am also encouraged by the many come and go stories that I have been able to tell over the past few years.”

So I moved to Long Beach with my two cats and my boyfriend. And so began the adjustment phase.

I am hardly the only person to leave San Francisco in the pre-pandemic and during the period. Big tech started to go – and so did people. According to U.S. Postal Service data received by the Chronicle, churn “rose rapidly” in March 2020 after California was forced to stay home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned from Hearst, but work independently). In March 2020 alone, the Chronicle reported, there were more than 4,300 address changes out of the city – more than double the previous March.

Although I didn’t move during the pandemic, I suspect my reasons for leaving weren’t dissimilar to those who left when COVID moved through the US – and like those who went after me, there was a major adjustment period going on life across the bay.

SFGATE Feature Reporter Michelle Robertson returned to San Francisco from Southern California in December 2020.

Immediately after the move, everything in Los Angeles seemed to sparkle like it had a brilliant movie – perhaps because it was too close to Hollywood for too many years. I dug up the kitsch and pomp. The 50s bar with the 70-year-old lounge-singing duo. The disguised girls post Instagram of their boozy brunches. The roller-skaters whiz down the beach path in Long Beach. The friendliness of strangers on the sidewalk.

But there were things that felt too different for a longtime Bay Area resident that sometimes I felt like I was suffocating. Driving, for example. An hour and a half from Long Beach to Irvine on a bad day. Two hours to Echo Park. Twenty minutes to the motorway entrance.

And then there was the flatness of it all. The town felt small without the hills. It sounds like a minor criticism, but without any bump, the city felt like it slumped, like I couldn’t see where I was going.

For the first year I couldn’t bring myself to return to San Francisco. Even visits to my parents in the East Bay were too much for me.

I told myself that after so many years I was overwhelmed. Who needed San Francisco, a place where I could never buy a home or put down roots in it? The complaints my sources shared with me while writing “weed is greener” stories suddenly became my complaints. The traffic was bad. Tech culture was tiring. And what about these rents?

At least that’s what I said to myself.

Then the pandemic came and things suddenly took on a different shine. To see my parents in the East Bay, I had to drive for six hours without stopping – careful to avoid the germ-infested toilets and restaurants – and then we spent our visits outdoors, crossing the paths only indoors with great care and attention.

I returned to San Francisco on this visit. Just to check things out, I told myself. Just to look around. But really, I knew I was looking, “Could we maybe come back here?” I wondered. It felt too painful to know that I would be moving to a place where it is so financially difficult to live even to ask.

But the seed was sown. In tears, I waved goodbye to my parents, went back to Los Angeles and noticed that the SoCal shimmer was starting to stink.

There was not a moment that cemented my sudden dislike of Southern California. Rather, it was an accumulation. I started to loathe the little things in LA: the cheesy palm trees, the hot summer nights, the smell of sewage wafting from the garbage-strewn ocean, the driving and the driving and the driving.

However, it wasn’t so much what I didn’t like, but what I missed. For one thing, I missed living close to my parents. Missed my friends who saw me grow up from childhood to adulthood. I missed the smells, salty sea mixed with taqueria mixed with flowering box trees. And I missed the way I knew it, so deep and deep, like a worn out sweater that I had run down – holes and everything.

It happened in December 2020. My current fiancé, cats, roommate, and I moved back to San Francisco, I invited myself in with a new Masters degree and an additional U-Haul of things I had acquired along the way.

Leaving Los Angeles wasn’t a difficult decision. We actually hardly discussed it. It just felt like going back to San Francisco, like it was the right thing and natural, like there was no need to think about it at all.

Despite the masked faces on Valencia Street and the closure of many local shops amid the pandemic, San Francisco welcomed us with open arms. At least that’s what it felt like. The rents were the lowest I’d seen in years. In July, for example, rents fell by 11.8% across the board. Two-bedroom apartments in the mission no longer cost $ 4,000 a month, but were much more manageable at around $ 3,000. We got a month for free in our current apartment, which looks out onto an alley where children ride bicycles and a dog sniffs at the foot of our stairs almost every hour.

It’s not perfect. I wish we had as much space as we did in Southern California. The rents are rising steadily again. Sometimes people throw trash over our entrance. I’ve already got four road tickets. But in the six months we’ve been back, I haven’t regretted coming back once, despite the fact that I miss the friends I made in LA.

It’s a strange time to be in San Francisco. It feels like the city has changed big and small since I left. My favorite bar is closed. I have lost my rental price-controlled apartment. My two best friends moved to New York.

But despite everything that feels so new, it still has that cozy, old sweater feeling. For now, I’ll take it as it is.