Families who used to love living in the Bay Area share why they were forced to flee.

Ken and Michelle Freese have few regrets about putting the Bay Area in their rearview mirror.

In 2019, they sold their duplex home for $750,000 in Martinez, California, and bought a much larger property with a five-car garage in Meridian, Idaho, for $496,000.

Ken, 69, said homelessness in Martinez was “out of control” and local landmarks were “littered with needles.”

“People didn’t want to take their families there,” he told The Mercury News.

The Frisians are far from alone.

New polls show that nearly half of Bay Area residents are struggling with rising housing costs and a range of quality of life issues and are looking to leave in the next couple of years.

Ken Freese, 69, and Michelle Freese, 68, were enchanted by the Idaho countryside.

Those fleeing the Bay Area say they are being driven out by crime, homelessness and rising housing costs.

A poll conducted by the Bay Area News Group and a Silicon Valley joint venture found that 47 percent of residents want to leave the five-country metropolitan area.

Sociologist Russell Hancock said the findings revealed residents’ “complex feelings” about the once desirable area, which he said was at a “tipping point”.

The Bay Area has long been plagued by vagrancy, drugs, crime and other social problems, which critics say are made worse by the region’s liberal politicians’ failure to crack the whip.

Concerns about housing and crime are dominating San Francisco’s mayoral race, in which London Breed, who has led the city since 2018, faces stiff opposition from four primary opponents.

Critics say the city is caught in a fatal loop characterized by street homelessness and open drug markets.

Downtown’s post-pandemic recovery has been slow, with many empty storefronts and low street traffic.

Despite this, Bay Area home prices jumped 6 percent in the year through June, with the median home price reaching a staggering $1.4 million.

For many home buyers, this is out of reach.

The rise is believed to reflect gains for Bay Area tech workers driven by rising stock prices in their sector.

Rising real estate prices were the main reason for the eviction of former San Bruno tenants Jason Trautman, 45, and Grace Xu, 37, who once planned placed an offer on a small cottage in Half Moon Bay.

“At the end of the day, we couldn’t go ahead and pay a million dollars for a tiny one-bedroom house,” they said.

Instead, they chose a quaint $695,000 home with a pool, palm trees and mountain views in the Ahwatukee neighborhood on Phoenix’s south side.

“You can’t get all this in California anymore unless you’re Elon Musk,” said Trautman, who works remotely.

Their mortgage costs less than the $2,600 monthly rent in San Bruno, and they finally have room for the cat and dog they want.

However, Trautman said they miss the natural beauty of the Bay Area, its culinary scene and their family ties there.

“We didn’t necessarily want to leave the Bay Area,” he told The Mercury News. “But it made a lot of sense.”

Jared Troutman, 45, and Grace Xu, 37, didn’t want to spend $1 million on a single bed.

Mary Ezell-Wallace, 73, and Samuel Wallace Jr., 83, traded Oakland for El Dorado, Arkansas.

Mary Ezell-Wallace and her husband moved to Eldorado, Arkansas. They left their four-bedroom, three-bathroom home, which they originally bought for $106,000 in 2006, and bought a stunning 5,500-square-foot home for $400,000, which they lovingly refer to in Facebook posts as “the Wallace estate.” .

The sight of homeless people struggling with fentanyl addiction on the streets of the Bay Area has become all too common for some longtime residents.

While millions of Bay Area residents object to housing costs, the number whoHowever, according to the survey, the number of people wanting to move is falling.

Last year, 52 percent said they wanted to leave; in 2022 it was 56 percent.

The survey of 1,773 residents found that around four-fifths also complain about house prices, while similar figures say the number of homeless vagrants is a major headache.

Local residents also expressed concern about the cost of insurance and the growing influence of big tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Former Oakland residents Mary Ezell-Wallace, 73, and Samuel Wallace Jr., 83, are among those who voted with their feet.

In 2006, they bought a large brick two-story home in El Dorado, Arkansas, where Mary grew up.

Mary told The Mercury News that she used to think “Auckland was one of the greatest places in the world” and enjoyed the convenience of local stores where “we could get everything we wanted very quickly.”

But in the early 2000s, the increasingly deteriorated region began to “resemble a Third World country,” she said.

“I didn’t want to wait until things got worse than they were.”

They sold their four-bedroom, three-bathroom home in the hills above East Auckland for $575,000 and bought a 5,500-square-foot home. ft. in El Dorado, Arkansas, where Mary grew up, for $400,000.

“Life in Auckland was stressful every day and night,” she said. – It’s much better here.

Likewise, longtime San Jose residents Susan and Dan Hyland, both 47, are another couple to join the exodus from the Bay Area.

In 2018, they wanted to leave their home in the Willow Glen area because they were looking for better schools for their sons, a fifth-grader and a high school sophomore.

They refused to rent a house with an area of ​​1200 square meters. feet and bought a house with an area of ​​4200 sq. ft. for $1.1 million in Granite Bay, California.

“I have roots in Willow Glen,” Susan told The Mercury News.

“We were really scared to leave, but once we found a community and environment like us, we never looked back.”

When they moved, Susan’s mother also sold out and joined them. Susan currently works as an executive assistant at a venture capital firm.

“A lot of people are afraid to take this step because of their community, but it really is possible to find happiness outside of a place that feels so special and irreplaceable,” she said.

Dan and Susan Hyland, 47, and their two sons moved to the mountains of California.

The Highlands decided to move east into the California mountains.

Now the Freezes spend their weekends in Idaho, searching for gold deposits in nearby riverbeds, searching for artifacts with metal detectors and spending time in their garage-built woodturning shop.

Nearly all Bay Area refugees say they have benefited from the opportunity to upgrade the homes in which they lived.

Some say they appreciate the change of pace and the opportunity to put California’s social problems in the rearview mirror.

But moving out of the Bay Area doesn’t always solve all problems, says Ken Freese.

They are enjoying their new life in Idaho: Michel has opened a woodturning studio in their five-car garage; Ken collects coins and is involved in a local history group. This summer they spent several weekends in the mountains with a gold prospecting club.

However, they now say California’s problems with traffic, urban sprawl and overcrowding have followed them into Idaho, which is growing rapidly.

“In the short time we’ve been here, places that were just open fields when we first moved here have now turned into apartment complexes and buildings,” Ken said.

“I just wish they would let go of the reins a little bit and let the infrastructure take a breath.”

Survey respondents lived in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.