Residents explain why they fled the Bay Area: Homelessness was 'just getting out of hand'

Former residents report having found better quality and cost of living outside the Bay Area, where homelessness and housing prices have skyrocketed.

"It's a challenging place to live — the most expensive metro area in the country for consumer prices and buying a home. In a recent poll of Bay Area residents, nearly half said they were considering leaving in the next few years," the East Bay Times reported.

One family who left the Bay Area to live in Idaho said that homelessness had become a problem.

"The homeless situation in downtown Martinez was just getting out of hand," Ken Freeze told the Times. 

"Beautiful Marina Park was just littered with needles. People didn't want to take their families down there," he added.

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In 2005, Freeze and his wife bought several acres of land in Placerville, California, with plans to retire. 

"But by the time retirement rolled around, the state had changed too much for them," the Times reported.

Per the Times, "They decided to swap out the foothills of the Sierra Nevada for the foothills in Idaho, and move to Meridian, a fast-growing suburb of Boise. They'd first traveled there in August 2017 for the total solar eclipse, and were struck by the good condition of the roads and how affordable the homes were."

But the Freezes weren't the only ones attracted to the area.

"In the short time we've been here, areas that when we first moved here were just open fields are now apartment complexes and buildings," Freeze told the East Bay Times. "I'd just like to see them pull back the reins a little bit and let the infrastructure take a breath."

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Another Bay Area couple felt the housing squeeze and saw prices elsewhere "too good to pass up." 

They found a house in Phoenix they loved and "now pay less for their mortgage than they did for their one-bedroom in San Bruno." 

As the Times reported, "It came with a pool, palm trees and a view of the mountains. 'You can't get all that in California anymore, unless you're Elon Musk,' [Jared] Troutman joked."

A family from Oakland moved to the South due to the area feeling like a "third-world country."

"I didn't want to wait until everything got worse than it already was," Mary Ezell-Wallas said.

"Living in Oakland was stressful every day and night," she said. 

She explained further, "It's so much better down here."

Ezell Wallace, a resident of Oakland for nearly four decades, ran a beauty parlor in the 90s. She said Oakland had good shopping downtown back then.

"We could get anything we wanted real fast," Ezell-Wallace said. 

She added, "I thought Oakland was one of the greatest places there was."