Layoffs, high costs force some to leave Bay Area life behind
Piece by piece, Kristin Demoro put the artifacts into the box.
Here were the photo negatives, taken by her grandfather Ralph Demoro, a historian who documented the changing skyline in San Francisco and the Bay Area’s transit systems. There were the articles, written by her father, veteran journalist Harre Demoro, who covered transportation for the
Oakland Tribune and The San Francisco Chronicle. Her family had been in the Bay Area since the 1800s, by virtue of a Spanish sea captain who brought cocoa beans to San Francisco. For Demoro, living in the Bay Area meant being connected to her lineage, and her father, who died unexpectedly in 1993.
She’d always felt it was her duty to stay. But now even she had to leave.
“There’s this whole legacy of just being so proud of the Bay Area history of my family,” Demoro said, “and not being one of the people coming in and taking over and changing it.”
The coronavirus pandemic, it seems, has prompted a minor but disorienting Bay Area exodus — back to childhood homes after mass layoffs, or to states where living is more viable on the salaries that remain. The urgent time has forced many people into one of two dimensions — to freeze where they are in hibernation, or to quickly make gargantuan life decisions in the 11th hour. Though there are no official data on people moving because of the pandemic, anecdotal evidence like scores of open rooms listed on online housing boards, with little reciprocation, suggests an uptick in relocation since the virus entered society. And the unprecedented move to remote work has some asking whether the postcoronavirus future even needs San Francisco.
Demoro, 53, was laid off from her job as a textiles librarian before the pandemic. She made the difficult decision to move because she hasn’t been able to find work since. She had dreamed of buying a condo in Oakland. But here she was, packing up five decades of memories and her dad’s collection of street car controllers, getting ready to settle into her mother’s home in Washington state.
Unemployment from the effects of the virus was also the final impetus for Juliet Paramor, 25, to move and to reevaluate whether it was worth living in Oakland: Paying rent on a dancer and gig worker’s salary had never been easy. As she grappled with the unrealistic idea of staying, childhood friends in Washington reminded her they had a cheap room for her,
should she ever need it.
She decided to leave the Bay Area for good and go back to her roots — to Anacortes, the small town in which she grew up. She’s hoping to get remote work or an essential worker job at a grocery store, with a salary on which she’ll be able to actually support herself.
In a way, the pandemic helped her realize that her creative options in the Bay Area had plateaued, and it was time to say goodbye — go back to her place of origin. “I feel like uprooting and rerooting are kind of in the cyclical nature of my life so far,” Paramor said.
Amid the decisions to stay or leave, many are reevaluating whether the Bay Area is still their home — and if it ever really was.
A little over a week after shelter in place began, Bethany Cagen read an article that warned of airlines shutting down. Almost instantly, she knew she had to go back to Rhode Island, where she’s from and where her family lives. “It was almost like a primal urge,” said Cagen, a therapist who lived alone in Oakland. “That level of isolation — something deep inside of me just knew I wouldn’t be able to do that.”
Cagen packed a few suitcases, gave her plants to her friends, and offered her building manager all her food. She was on an empty flight to Cranston, R.I., the next day — and plans to stay at her mother’s home until August, at the least. Her sister, who was living in Argentina, came back home as well. The three of them, all used to living alone, are adjusting to a new reality. But she hasn’t doubted her decision once. The Rhode Island air has made her reconsider staying long term in the Bay Area.
“There’s this saltoftheearth flavor here that I don’t often feel in the Bay Area,” Cagen said. “It’s not an ideal situation, going back to live with your mother at 40 years old, but I feel happy. … My nervous system is a lot more calm.”
For Hannah Angely, the painful reality of leaving came right when the Bay Area was beginning to feel — truly — like home. She had begun to find herself here.
Angely, 22, had less than 10 hours to pack up three years of memories of her life in the Bay Area, where she’d moved as a UC Berkeley transfer student from France. She was just getting settled in, had grown deeply attached to her role as a development officer at the French American Cultural Society, and also, to a guy she’d met at Berkeley.
Angely, who is asthmatic, was worried about being far from her family should anything happen, and felt more comfortable with the French health care system. So she made the quick decision to leave and has been sheltering in place at her family’s home in Nice. She doesn’t know when she’ll be able to come back, or see her boyfriend again.
The plane ride was excruciating, Angely said, as she began to process what leaving meant and the possibility of it being a long time before seeing them again. “It was the toughest trip ever. Usually when you take a plane you know what it means,” she said. “Now you don’t know for how long, for what, if it’s for life.”
On Sunday, Paramor planned to load up her car before heading off to Washington. She planned to drive by each of her friends’ houses and wave out the window, almost like a little parade — the best option in place of a closer goodbye. The same day, Demoro was to fly out to Washington, with her Oakland native and rescue cat in tow. One of the only unexpected comforts is that she’ll now have her mother back in her life again, after years of being apart.
But Washington’s quaintness is no replacement for what made the Bay Area so inimitable to her. The sparkling sidewalk, falling in love with Beat history in North Beach, the Ukrainian ladies whom she worked with for more than a decade at Britex Fabrics. Her and her father’s photo excursions to the West Oakland rail yards near the old 16th Street Station, where he taught her to use a camera.
She’s having to let go of all of that, let it live in a box for now. “It’s very bittersweet,” Demoro said. “I’ve had days where I’ve just been like: Let me just avoid this happening. Because if I don’t do anything, it’s not happening.”
“There’s this saltoftheearth flavor here that I don’t often feel in the Bay Area.”
Bethany Cagen, on moving to Rhode Island from Oakland