A millennial shares why she left pricey San Francisco and settled in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where it's 'much more accessible to buy a lovely larger-sized home'
Courtesy of Rachel Pohl
- Rachel Pohl and her husband left San Francisco and traveled around the US for around a year.
- They ended up looking for a place to settle down when Pohl was pregnant.
- While they thought Durham, North Carolina, would be the answer, Chattanooga, Tennessee, ended up being their home.
San Francisco is the home of the Golden Gate Bridge, the setting for "That's So Raven" and "Full House," and host to a robust professional and business services workforce.
It's also an expensive city and has seen more people moving out than in for somewhere else in the US.
Rachel Pohl, 34, who lived in San Francisco for several years, and her husband, Jesse Rosenthal, are just two of the people who left. After traveling around the US for around a year, they're happy having settled in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Pohl said while she was also happy in San Francisco and enjoyed living there, she's "grateful to call Chattanooga home" in her current phase of life. She and her husband moved to the city of more than 180,000 people in late 2021.
They had been considering moving away from California for quite some time before leaving San Francisco in the fall of 2020.
"It's very expensive, of course, difficult to buy a house, raise a family," she said. Pohl said they also wanted to live closer to family and wanted to be somewhere with a "slower pace of life" than the more fast-paced, large city of San Francisco, home to over 800,000 people.
"I think just the overall situation, livability there because of the cost of living is more difficult than smaller to mid-size cities," Pohl said.
The California wildfires in August 2020 were another reason the two decided to leave. "Around that time, we were thinking, let's get out of California. It's time," Pohl said.
'A grand nomadic tour of the US'
Amid remote work flexibility during the pandemic, the two ventured out of San Francisco and decided to explore the country to see the sights and decide where to settle down. "We did a grand nomadic tour of the US," Pohl said.
They packed up their things and put some stuff in storage. Pohl said goodbye to the city she had called home for years and where she met her husband. The two of them headed to Airbnb locations throughout the US.
Montana was one state they visited. Chattanooga was another place they got to see on their trip, and she found it was "very beautiful and lovely."
"It was springtime, and the flowers were blooming, and I thought, 'this is a nice place,'" she added. While she and her husband continued on, they eventually ended up moving there after roughly a year of travel because they wanted somewhere steady after finding out Pohl was pregnant. Pohl said she and her husband liked the size and Chattanooga's energy.
"It felt like there was enough and a lot going on for the size of the city, but not so overwhelming," she said.
They did end up in Durham, North Carolina, in the summer of 2021 before Chattanooga, partly because of its potential work opportunities. However, Pohl said they simply weren't feeling that location.
"We thought if we could pick to go anywhere, basically, in the US, we want to love it, and we want to feel great about our decision," Pohl said. "So we decided at that time to come back to Chattanooga. We hadn't been back since the spring."
The family-friendly location and other pros of being in Chattanooga
Pohl likes the access to nature in Chattanooga.
"We love to go on hikes and go by the river and go paddle boarding," she said. "We love to go to playgrounds and parks with our son. All of that is very accessible."
Pohl said people are also friendly in Chattanooga, and she thinks it's a family-friendly location. She has also found the people are more diversified in terms of jobs, as opposed to the dominance of tech in the San Francisco area.
"I was meeting entrepreneurs in the food and beverage industry and people doing all kinds of things," Pohl said about Chattanooga. "It felt approachable and accessible here to do that."
Chattanooga is also much more affordable for homebuyers than San Francisco. Realtor.com noted both San Francisco and Chattanooga as buyer's markets at the moment, where the "supply of homes is greater than the demand for homes." While that may be the case, Realtor.com also shows the median sold home price in Chattanooga is far below that across the country in San Francisco — $347,500 and around $1.1 million respectively.
"It is just much more accessible to buy a lovely larger-sized home in Tennessee and Chattanooga," she said. "Your dollar goes much further here. We had looked at potentially buying a house in California and just in the end thought this makes no sense because of the cost, because of the distance to family, and just kind of the whole situation we felt like, let's go yonder."
While Pohl is happy living in Tennessee, she misses the cuisine in San Franciso and access to some national parks nearby. Pohl noted to BI she had visited San Francisco since moving away, mainly for work. And while she does love the energy in Chattanooga, there's just something about the energy in California, too.
"It's such a beautiful state," Pohl said about California. "Sometimes I miss a little bit of the energy, but again, I feel like that was an active part of my choice to leave being in a big city, but there's so much innovation happening there around technology and AI. So sometimes, from a work perspective, I miss that."
Have you moved out of San Francisco or somewhere else in the US? Reach out to this reporter to share your moving experience at mhoff@businessinsider.com.