SAN FRANCISCO – For 49 years, Jinky Demarest de Rivera has lived and thrived in dense, vibrant cities. The nonprofit finance director grew up in Manhattan and for the past 16 years has made a home in Oakland, where they live with their wife, Sara Demarest de Rivera, and dog, Onyx. Now the family is packing everything up for a large house in New York’s rural Hudson River Valley with enough room for chickens.
Two months of sheltering in place in their rented two-bedroom apartment gave the pair some unexpected clarity about what was important to them. And new policies letting them work remotely indefinitely at their respective jobs gave them an opportunity to do something about it. They wanted to be closer to their aging parents on the East Coast, and saw no hope of ever owning in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.
“There’s nowhere we want to be other than with our families right now. It’s really heartbreaking to be far away,” said Sara Demarest de Rivera, who grew up in rural Maine and is excited to get back to her roots. “We’ve gained a lot from living in the city, but as we get older, and going through this pandemic, we see the value of being close to family and having land.”
They aren’t the only ones making a big move. After months of forced stillness, unable to make many major decisions or follow through on some already planned, people are jumping into one of the biggest life changes there is and moving out of cities. For some, it’s a chance to be closer to family, which feels more urgent in the midst of a global health scare. For a large swath of people in the country’s most expensive cities, it’s a way to get more living space and be closer to nature, something increasingly made possible by the growing trend of remote work. And for many others it’s not really a decision at all, but a necessity in the face of growing job losses and still sky-high rents.
Malia Guyer-Stevens left New York City to stay with family in Cape Cod when her summer job prospects dried up and she couldn’t sublet her apartment. Kendall Perry similarly left the city, at least temporarily, when the coffee shop they worked at closed during the pandemic and regular freelance jobs as a musician became scarce. Perry is staying with family in Longmont, Colorado, but trying to make it back as soon as more cafes reopen.
They are part of a broader U.S. shift after the global coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, triggering a major restructuring of our lives. More than 100,000 people in the country have died of covid-19 in the past three months. To try to save lives, governments have shut down economies, prompting more than 40 million to apply for unemployment over the past ten weeks. Other workers have been sent to work remotely for months, while companies including Twitter and Facebook are reconsidering whether workers ever need to come back to the office. – READ MORE
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