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Pushed out by high prices, these San Diegans left for greener pastures

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Nights are much quieter for San Diego native Loryanna Zalewski and her young family on the plains of southern Idaho.

After years of struggling to get by in America’s Finest City, Loryanna, her husband Mike and young son left the South Bay for Burley, Idaho, population 10,464.

Burley gave the couple a chance to save money and be near her husband’s family. It also offered the Zalewskis something they could never afford in San Diego — an apartment.

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The Zalewskis pay $300 a month for a two-bedroom, 600-square-foot apartment in Burley. In all the years they lived in San Diego the couple could never scrape together enough money to rent their own place, let alone buy. In San Diego, $300 gets you a few nights at an Airbnb.

“No, I don’t think we could move back” to San Diego, Loryanna Zalewski said recently by phone. “Unless I won the lottery.”

The Zalewskis are one of many families who have made the decision to move.

In the past year, 15,784 people left San Diego County, U.S. Census figures show. That’s more than the number who arrived. That’s also a steady increase from the previous two years, but not as high as 2005 to 2006 when 42,034 people left.

In the grand scheme of things, when people leave San Diego, they don’t go far. The top places San Diegans move to are Riverside County, Los Angeles County, Orange County, Phoenix and Las Vegas, said Internal Revenue Service data from 2016.

In an area as big as San Diego County, people are bound to leave for a number of reasons. But, according to surveys and people interviewed, housing costs were one of the biggest factors. Those who left were often younger people with lower incomes. Tax return data, for example, shows the average adjusted gross income for San Diegans who left for Phoenix was $36,457 and for Las Vegas, $33,302.

“Everyday life can simply be easier if you live in Arizona or Texas or North Carolina if you are making the same pay as here in San Diego,” said John Weeks, a geography professor at San Diego State University who studies Census data.

Some venture as far as Idaho. In 2016, 467 San Diegans moved to Idaho’s most-populated city, Boise, where Zillow says the median home value is about $257,900 and the average adjusted gross income is $35,235. In Burley where the Zalewskis live, it’s even cheaper.

Loryanna Zalewski, now 35, said she and her husband would try to make ends meet in San Diego but always seemed to fall short. She was employed as a job coach at nonprofit Arc of San Diego and her husband worked in construction and as a mechanic. They never worked up to renting an entire apartment, instead renting a room or staying with Loryanna’s parents in the South Bay.

The couple left for Burley in early 2013 after the birth of their first child. But they gave San Diego another go in mid-2014. After facing similar economic issues, they said they made the decision to pack up and go to Idaho for good in March 2016.

There were a few things to get used to in Idaho, such as the weather — it stays hot at night. Loryanna also missed good Mexican food and the horse ranches in San Diego. But she has grown to love the peace and quiet of Idaho. Her second son was born in Burley, where she is a stay-at-home mom and her husband is a potato farmer. They also are property managers at their apartment complex, so get a discount on their rent.

Loryanna said during hard times in Southern California she would dream of owning their own place in San Diego.

“I fantasized about it,” she said. “But, I don’t think it was reality.”

Today the Zalewskis are working on saving enough money to buy a home in Burley.

Phoenix: Land of Opportunity?

Outside of moving within Southern California, many San Diegans relocate to the Phoenix area, according to IRS data, because the cost of living is cheaper.

The median sale price in Maricopa County (where Phoenix is located) is about $260,000, says Zillow, versus $570,000 for San Diego County. Average asking rent for an apartment in Maricopa County is $1,018 a month and San Diego County is $1,762, said real estate tracker CoStar.

Aubrey Badger, 24, decided to stay in Phoenix after her graduation from Arizona State University in 2016 even though her brother, parents and extended family were in San Diego. . A big part of the decision was the cost of living in San Diego.

“Everybody from San Diego is like, ‘You left? Why? Are you crazy?’” Badger said.

She got a job working for Arizona State University as a digital marketing coordinator.

“When I think about my major (journalism), the job’s compensation and the (Phoenix) cost of living,” Badger said, “it just made more sense for me financially.”

She rents a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo for $1,400 a month and shares that with a roommate. In San Diego County, the average asking rent for a two-bedroom is about $1,899.

At first Badger had a hard time adjusting to the heat, and went back home frequently. Eventually, she made friends and grew to love everything Phoenix had to offer, from restaurants to music — and learned to live with the heat, too.

Not everyone leaving San Diego County are people just starting careers or those in low- or middle-income brackets. Some are seasoned professionals that the San Diego region would probably want to retain.

Allison Barnett, 38, eventually moved to Phoenix in 2014 because she, too, found it cheaper than California. It wasn’t an easy decision because she grew up in La Jolla and has family in San Diego.

“The salary just went so much so further here,” said Barnett, a real estate broker, who is now heavily involved in the Phoenix community. She’s helped form a benefit corporation called North 32nd, Inc., which is dedicated to revitalizing an area north of the city center.

Chris Camacho, CEO of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, said the Phoenix area is seeing more businesses interested in relocating to the region not just for tax considerations, but for affordable housing for their workforce.

He said the council doesn’t focus on recruiting workers, but instead concentrates on getting businesses to move. He said Southern California transplants can find value in Arizona’s capital.

“We see a lot of people that move here that can buy three times the home for half the cost,” Camacho said.

The San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. recently launched a campaign to attract science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, workers. It emphasized the many job opportunities in the region but did not mention housing costs.

Camacho said roughly 80,000 people are moving to the region every year, but unlike land constricted areas where people are coming from, Phoenix has the space needed for growth.

“Phoenix is going to continue to grow from 4.5 million people in the region to 6.5 million people over the next two decades,” he said. “We still have a lot of room for not only growth around the region but infill growth. So, you’ll see more multifamily, more urban density housing.”

Off to Riverside

The most popular destination for San Diego transplants is Riverside County, where the median home price is about $380,000 — nearly $200,000 less than San Diego.

Real estate agents in the region say Temecula is the mecca for San Diegans looking to get more bang for their buck.

Tom Richards, the manager of Coldwell Banker’s Residential Brokerage office in Temecula, said about 25 percent of its buyers come from San Diego County, 25 percent from Orange County and the rest are from a smattering of other places.

He said buying is cyclical in Riverside County and they know a big buying spree is about to hit when prices in San Diego County start rising.

“We have bigger houses, less prices, wine country,” Richards said. “We have so many things to offer that they can’t get (in Orange and San Diego counties) and they’re willing to make the commute.”

Nellie Parks, 68, moved to Menifee in April after living much of her life in San Diego County because she was sick of her rent going up.

At one point, she owned townhouses in Lemon Grove and El Cajon before selling both for a profit. She used the money from the sale to buy a home in suburban Chicago to be closer to relatives but eventually realized she wanted to be back in San Diego where her two daughters were. In 2015, she began renting in Santee.

She watched her rent increase from $1,325 a month in 2015, to $1,425 in 2017 and $1,495 before she left. Parks, retired and on a fixed income, decided to buy a home again and even considered Texas or Arizona for lower home prices despite her desire to be near her daughters.

“As a retiree, the increasingly high cost of property in San Diego County made a decent home unattainable for me,” Parks said.

However, a family member recommended checking out Riverside County. With the help of a real estate agent she found a home in a 55+ community, which made the price more affordable. At $280,000, the 1,393-square-feet single-family home was cheaper than just about any single-family home that could have been found in San Diego County.

Parks said there have been growing pains in Riverside County. She said the heat makes air conditioning bills expensive and gas money really adds up when visiting San Diego. However, Parks said she loves the quiet and safety of her new neighborhood.

“I like it much more than I thought I would,” she said.

Historical context

Migration of people in and out of California is nothing new, and the prosperity and population of the state continues to grow. Volker Janssen, a history professor at CSU Fullerton, said California’s real estate has been oversold throughout its history — such as advertised citrus fields that weren’t really there — so some people were bound to be disappointed and leave.

“No one ever oversold Wisconsin,” he said.

Janssen said high housing costs might be the latest reason why people are leaving California, but the state has experienced other periods of migration for different reasons: The mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the 1930s, an exodus in the 1990s during a recession and the most-recent exodus during the Great Recession.

He said more people are moving around the nation, in general, nowadays because advances in technology (such as cheaper air travel, Internet connectivity) keep people connected even if they might be a few states apart.

Janssen said high housing costs and growing net migration out of the state could eventually mean that the challenges of making it in California will loom larger than the path to success. However, he said one thing the state has going for it is people don’t leave for the same reason they might jettison the Midwest.

“If people leave Cleveland,” he said, “it’s because they can’t bear to be in Cleveland.”

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phillip.molnar@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1891 Twitter: @phillipmolnar

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