The Californian’s Dilemma
This week in The Bold Italic, we are publishing The Californian’s Dilemma, a series that goes beyond the headlines about the “California Exodus,” featuring essays from San Franciscans about why they’re choosing to stay or leave. Check back daily for new essays.
Last night, my husband and I were eating our children’s leftover grilled cheese for dinner when I turned to him and asked, “How much would you give for our favorite ramen right now?”
He smirked at me. I was making that face. The San Francisco nostalgia face. It doesn’t come up much anymore, and I put it away quickly when he reminded me that “our” ramen place closed down six months before we moved.
We don’t live in San Francisco anymore. We’re ’burb people now.
I wish that I could tell you I regret it. But I don’t. And it’s not for the reasons you probably think.
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We moved out of the city to Placer County (the suburbs of Sacramento) almost exactly a year before the pandemic shutdowns: March 9, 2019. I sobbed all the way to our new home, wondering if I was selling out, if we could raise our children with a deep appreciation for community and diversity anywhere else as well as we could have in San Francisco.
It didn’t help that while friends were impressed by the home we could afford, they certainly weren’t optimistic about the area we were moving to. Our Bay Area goggles — which led us to perceive that everywhere that is not the Bay Area is simply inferior — had the same strong prescription as everyone we knew.
And yet I knew we had really stuck it out in the city, for more than 10 years — a lot longer than most we knew. I dare say that my husband and I were the only couple we knew without any connection to the tech industry who stayed in the city long enough to have multiple children.
San Francisco was anything but a cesspool to me. I had loved and made memories on just about every block of those seven-by-seven miles. Over the decade, the conversations at bars changed from “So did you grow up in the Bay Area?” to “I bet in this group we have people from at least five states!” but that was fine with us. We got married and started having babies. When those babies started walking, talking, and needing access to education, though, things began to get tougher for us apartment dwellers.
You can probably guess how the rest of the story went, but just know that we didn’t go willingly. We tried to work with our daughter’s preschool (where two kids would have cost us more than $40,000 annually… and that was part-time). Time and time again we redesigned our use of apartment space, getting rid of our coffee table to jokingly reveal our “open floor plan” of three feet by three feet. We switched bedrooms with our kids, giving them the bigger space when our youngest was old enough to move out of our room, and then we bought five kinds of white noise machines so that the Fulton bus wouldn’t disturb their slumber. I stayed up doing dishes every single night without a dishwasher and spent a roll of quarters every few days washing spit-up out of clothing, blankets, and stuffed animals. My children didn’t have a backyard, but took some of their first steps in Golden Gate Park. We found cheap family entertainment at the zoo, the botanical gardens, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum.
It wasn’t enough. We were being financially and spatially squeezed too hard. I knew we didn’t belong anymore when I nearly broke my ankle one day getting the double stroller out the door in time to avoid a street cleaning ticket (“DAMMIT IT’S WEDNESDAY”), and forgot about the last step. I looked down to see our 22-year-old upstairs neighbor (the fifth or sixth in as many years), crouched just a few feet from me, smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. Her slow gaze shifted from me to my two wide-eyed kids strapped into the stroller before it seemed to occur to her to blow her cigarette smoke in the other direction. My youngest coughed.
Shortly after that, we revisited the numbers of enrolling our youngest in any kind of childcare or preschool so that I could devote more time to my business, and the conclusion couldn’t have been more obvious: We had to move. I was done trying to force the situation. The rest happened quickly — we opted for a great school district exactly two hours from our city apartment, and I’ve never been so pleasantly surprised by anywhere in my life. We now live in a beautiful community. We’re an hour from Tahoe and 20 minutes from Sacramento, which is certainly no San Francisco, but there’s comfort in being affiliated with an urban city. And we hardly have a single neighbor who isn’t from the Bay Area.
There is another way of doing life, it turns out, and the mild trade-offs (mostly having to drive a bit farther for family events) are worth it.
But you know what? If we didn’t have kids, there is no doubt that my husband and I would be very happily still living in that two-bedroom apartment on Golden Gate Park. There would have been no impetus to leave, and the sacrifices of living there (smaller space, homelessness in the park, no parking spot, the insanity of festival weekends) would also be worth it. Probably.
I wish there had been a way for me to raise my kids in San Francisco without inordinate wealth. There just… wasn’t, with almost zero ambiguity, and I can look back knowing we fought as hard as we could. But just because our residence in San Francisco wasn’t permanent doesn’t mean we won’t be forever grateful and fond of it — as I am for all of my relationships, regardless of their duration. In other words, I now see our move as a healthy and conscious uncoupling.
I can’t wait to bring my kids back to the place where they were both brought home from the hospital, to tell them stories over the best ramen bowls (surely there’s a new spot), and to tell them about the choices we made, then and now, to ensure them the best quality of life. I’ve accepted that we’ll soon be the out-of-town suburbanites driving in for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and making someone else nuts by parking too close to their driveway, and, hopefully, I still won’t regret a thing.
