They were part of the Bay Area exodus. Now, they’ve decided to return

When the coronavirus pandemic struck, two couples decided to leave the Bay Area for different reasons, citing everything from high housing costs to dwindling opportunities. Yet, four years later, they’re back.

In the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he and his wife were locked down at home in the East Bay, Ricardo Diaz would call his brother in Texas and get a snapshot of life there.

Lockdowns? They’d lasted just a few weeks. Vaccine passports? Not in Texas. And masks? What masks?

“In Texas, it was like nothing was happening,” the 35-year-old said.

He had to admit — it sounded appealing.

The automotive parts specialist and his wife, Victoria, had already been considering a move from the Bay Area. During the lockdown, the couple lived with Victoria’s grandmother in San Leandro, saving up to rent a one-bedroom. For the same amount as a deposit and the first few months’ rent here, they could afford the down payment on a home in Texas.

So in June 2021, with a baby on the way, the pair bought a home for $145,000, sight-unseen, in Gilmer, population 4,894, two hours east of Dallas and 90 minutes from Shreveport, Louisiana.

That same summer, San Franciscan Rob Surrency took a major leap of faith: He quit his design gig at a tech company and bought a place in Anchorage, Alaska, with his girlfriend, Tanya Chantara, of just a few months.

But in the four years since the pandemic broke out in March 2020, both couples — though they left the Bay Area for different reasons — have made the same decision: to return.

Whether freed by remote work to live where they wanted or motivated by lower housing prices and more lenient pandemic policies, tens of thousands of people moved out of California during the pandemic. The population of the nine-county Bay Area declined by 50,400 people in 2021, and another 34,000 residents in 2022.

In a 2023 poll conducted by this news organization and Joint Venture Silicon Valley, about half of registered voters said they were likely to move out of the Bay Area in the next few years. Young people say they are even more likely to get out — with 59% of respondents age 18 to 34 saying they’re likely to leave, compared to 42% of those over 65.

Now, though, some of those who moved as part of the COVID mass exodus are moving back. While there aren’t any precise counts, talk to almost anyone and they know a Boomerang — someone who left the Bay Area and then decided to return.

In the tech world, some of the venture capitalists and founders who decamped to Miami and Austin, hailing them as the new hotspots for startups, are slinking back to San Francisco, enticed by the local boom in artificial intelligence companies.

For the Diaz family, Texas seemed — at first — to align with their more conservative politics and be a better place to raise children.

“I felt like, ‘Screw it,’” Surrency said. “If I’m going to do something drastic, then let’s do it.”

Neither of them anticipated they would end up back here.

“Leaving, it’s not been an easy thing,” Diaz said in October from his three-bedroom home on a wooded lot in East Texas. “We wind up asking ourselves a lot, ‘Should I stay or should I go?’”

“People come here for a reason, and they make their trade-offs,” said Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley. “It doesn’t surprise me that people continue to see the Bay Area as appealing and that they are changing their minds about leaving.”

A ‘family’ state

A Bay Area native, Ricardo Diaz grew up watching the region’s home prices skyrocket, along with its homeless population. As crime increased during the pandemic, he and Victoria began wondering if they would be better off raising children somewhere else.

At first blush, Texas seemed an ideal place.

“It was a pretty pleasant change of pace, how peaceful it is out here,” Diaz said.

But as the rhythms of daily life set in, so did regret.

Diaz left home at 6:30 a.m. to drive 50 minutes to work at a BMW dealership in Tyler, where he pulled a 9-hour shift before returning home at 6:30 p.m. The work paid about $30 an hour — more than the $23 he’d been making in the Bay Area — but the hours were longer than in California, where workers get overtime pay for shifts over eight hours. When his wife gave birth to their first son in San Leandro, he’d gotten six weeks of paid leave, as required by California law. But when she gave birth to their second son in Texas, his company gave him just two weeks off; Texas doesn’t mandate paternal leave. California had also required Diaz’s dealership to provide three days of paid sick leave. In Texas, no such requirement exists.

“I have been more conservative in my lifetime, but as I’ve seen more of this, it’s made me rethink a lot of those positions,” Diaz said. “Texas puts on that it’s this great ‘family’ state, but when push comes to shove, what is it actually doing for families?”

In choosing to pursue a better life for their children, they’d isolated themselves from the community they’d grown up with. Victoria spent most of her days at home, dividing her time between her remote job working in operations for a California hair salon franchise, and taking care of their young sons. She downloaded an app for mothers seeking to make friends but struggled to maintain those connections. They filled the holes in their social life with animals — backyard chickens and ducks, and a black lab puppy.

On social media, Diaz posted photos of his family in Texas and wrote about the joys of raising his two sons there — seeing his 2-year-old, Waylon, zoom around the neighborhood in a toy Jeep he’d gotten for Christmas, shopping for tiny cowboy boots.

But on long commutes, he found himself warding off bouts of depression, wondering if he’d made the right choice.

The regrets hit hard this winter when Victoria’s 12-year-old son who lives in California with his dad decided he didn’t want to fly to Texas for Thanksgiving. That meant she would go nearly a year without seeing him.

Though they’d tried desperately to make it work, neither Victoria nor Ricardo were happy in Texas. More than the security homeownership offered, they craved the comfort of living near family.

Now comes the unwinding. They will put their home up for sale this spring. If there’s any equity in the house, they’ll use it to repay some of the debt they took on for home renovations and medical bills from the birth of their second child in May.

Diaz has set his sights on a management position in the East Bay or Sacramento — but even with a salary of $100,000 a year, he and his wife can’t afford a home here. They’ll rent again — but they wonder how long they can make that work, especially when they consider their sons’ futures.

“When you’re in your 30s, life starts going by just real quick,” he said. “So what happens if you hit senior age, and you don’t own anything? What do you do then? Do you just keep on working?”

‘We didn’t know what the hell we were doing’

In the year before the pandemic hit, Surrency, 37, felt a sense of stagnancy in his life in San Francisco.

All of a sudden, though, life seemed to accelerate.

In the fall of 2020, he moved to Anchorage — a city he’d fallen in love with over several visits on freelance photography assignments.

“I told him, ‘Just do it, you always talk about it,’” recalled Chantara. As a vet, she couldn’t work remotely, so she spent most of her time in San Francisco, visiting as often as she could.

“We were in it for the long run, wherever that took us,” Surrency said.

In the winter of 2021, though, Chantara’s dad — who had been diagnosed with advanced liver cancer two years earlier — suddenly started to see his health decline. Surrency, worried about picking up an infection while traveling, stayed in Alaska, while Chantara remained in San Francisco to see her dad through hospice until his death in January 2022.

Just as Chantara was losing a parent, she found out she would soon become one: She and Surrency were expecting a baby.

“At that point, we had to pick,” he said.

With Chantara’s mom and sister in San Francisco, the choice was obvious. In October 2022, their daughter Chloé was born in California.

“Family is everything to us — and that’s what the Bay Area really means to us. It’s not just career opportunities — it’s home,” Surrency said. “That’s why we stay here.”