Down Angle Icon An angle-shaped icon pointing downwards. Jesse Rosenthal and Rachel Pohl traveled around the United States for about a year and now live in Tennessee. Courtesy of Rachel Pohl
- Rachel Pohl and her husband left San Francisco and traveled around the United States for about a year.
- They ended up looking for a place to settle when Pohl was pregnant.
- While they thought Durham, North Carolina, would be the answer, Chattanooga, Tennessee, ended up being their home.
San Francisco is home to the Golden Gate Bridge, the setting of “That’s So Raven” and “Full House,” and is home to a strong professional and business services workforce.
It’s also an expensive city and has seen more people move than anywhere 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 United States for about a year, they are happy to have settled in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Pohl said that while she was also happy in San Francisco and enjoyed living there, she is “grateful to call Chattanooga home” at the current stage of her life. She and her husband moved to the city of more than 180,000 people at the end of 2021.
They had been considering moving out of 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, start a family,” he said. Pohl said they also wanted to live closer to family and wanted to be somewhere with a “slower pace of life” than the big, fast-paced city of San Francisco, home to more than 800,000 people.
“I think the general situation, livability there because of the cost of living is more difficult than in small and medium-sized cities,” Pohl said.
The California wildfires in August 2020 were another reason the two decided to leave. “At that time we were thinking: Let’s get out of California. It’s time,” Pohl said.
‘A great nomadic tour of the United States’
Amid the flexibility of remote work during the pandemic, the two ventured outside of San Francisco and decided to explore the country to see the sights and decide where to settle. “We did a big nomadic tour of the United States,” Pohl said.
They packed their things and put some things away. Pohl said goodbye to the city she had called home for years and where she met her husband. The two headed to Airbnb locations across the United States.
Montana was one of the states they visited. Chattanooga was another place they were able to see on her trip, and she found it to be “very beautiful and charming.”
“It was spring and the flowers were blooming, and I thought, ‘This is a nice place,'” he added. While she and her husband continued, they eventually ended up moving there after about a year of traveling because they wanted a stable place after finding out Pohl was pregnant. Pohl said she and her husband liked the size and energy of Chattanooga.
“It seemed like there was enough going on for the size of the city, but not too overwhelming,” he said.
They ended up in Durham, North Carolina, in the summer of 2021 before Chattanooga, in part because of its potential job opportunities. However, Pohl said they just weren’t feeling that location.
“We thought if we could choose to go anywhere, basically the United States, we would love it and we want to feel good about our decision,” Pohl said. “So we decided right then and there to go back to Chattanooga. We hadn’t been back since the spring.”
The ideal location for families and other advantages of being in Chattanooga
Pohl likes the access to nature in Chattanooga.
“We love hiking, going down the river and rowing,” he said. “We love going to playgrounds and parks with our son. It’s all very accessible.”
Pohl said people are also friendly in Chattanooga and believes it is a great place for families. He also found that people are more diversified in terms of jobs, unlike the dominance of technology in the San Francisco area.
“I met with food and beverage industry entrepreneurs and people doing all kinds of things,” Pohl said of Chattanooga. “Here I felt approachable and accessible to do that.”
Chattanooga is also much more affordable for homebuyers than San Francisco. Realtor.com highlighted both San Francisco and Chattanooga as buyer’s markets right now, where “the supply of homes is greater than the demand for homes.” While that may be the case, Realtor.com also shows that the median home sale price in Chattanooga is well below that of the entire country in San Francisco: $347,500 and about $1.1 million respectively.
“It’s much more affordable to buy a nice, larger home in Tennessee and Chattanooga,” he said. “Here your money goes a lot further. We had considered the possibility of buying a house in California and in the end we thought it didn’t make sense because of the cost, because of the distance from the family, and because of the whole situation we thought, let’s go there.”
While Pohl is happy living in Tennessee, he misses San Francisco cuisine and access to some nearby national parks. Pohl told BI that he had visited San Francisco since he moved, mainly for work. And while he loves the energy of Chattanooga, there’s also something about the energy of California.
“It’s such a beautiful state,” Pohl said of California. “Sometimes I miss a little bit of the energy, but again, I feel like it was an active part of my decision to leave a big city, but there’s a lot of innovation there around technology and artificial intelligence. So sometimes, from a job perspective, I miss it.”
Have you moved outside of San Francisco or anywhere else in the US? Contact this reporter to share your moving experience at mhoff@businessinsider.com.
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