It was 70 degrees and sunny every day, and Mason Snow had, by his account, access to the best breakfast burritos in the country each morning in San Diego.
He couldn’t think of why he would ever want to leave, except for the nagging feeling that he was blowing $5,000 every month on rent rather than doing what he’d always wanted to do: buy a house.
In December 2024, Mr. Snow and his wife, Malary, joined the latest swell of first-time home buyers fleeing expensive metro areas in search of affordable living. The Snows left California’s second-most populated city, moved 2,500 miles and bought a house in Staunton, Va., population 26,000.
Home prices across the country have hit record highs in recent years, adding dread to a housing market that’s bound tight. For some prospective buyers, the dream of building equity with a picket-fenced yard around a three-bedroom, two-bath home with a Nancy Meyers kitchen requires giving up the conveniences of city living and the proximity to friends, family and long-held community.
After the Great Recession, millennials flocked to cities in their 20s at higher rates than did previous generations as they sought out professional, social, and cultural benefits, according to a 2024 article published in the journal Urban Studies. As they enter their delayed home buying years, however, they’re fleeing urban hubs in search of affordability.
In cities with the lowest amount of affordable housing, the researchers found the most pronounced migration of millennials was to suburban areas and beyond.
Mr. Snow, 30, was born and raised in San Diego, and it’s where he met his wife. His family is there, and so are his golfing buddies. But the cost of living there is 46 percent higher than the national average, and it became clear to him that buying property in the city he loves would be near impossible.
“We had saved our money basically our entire marriage so that we could buy property,” said Mr. Snow, a marketing professional for an e-commerce platform. He and his wife waited for prices to drop, “but that just never happened,” he said.
First-time buyers in particular are having to make tough decisions, said Joel Berner, a senior economist at Realtor.com. Without the existing home equity to put toward a down payment on a purchase, these buyers are having to look farther afield, he said.
Many of them are also saddled with high interest rates and inflation on top of creeping student loan and credit card debt. Not much is working in their favor.
“As a first-time home buyer in a big city, you kind of have to gamble one way or another,” Mr. Berner said. “You can gamble on mortgage rates and maybe extend yourself a little bit right now with the hope that you can refinance later or gamble on uprooting your life and buying a home somewhere that’s less expensive.”
Mr. Snow said he and his wife weren’t looking for anything extravagant in San Diego. They had set a budget of up to $600,000, but struggled to find anything for less than $800,000. In July, the median sale price there was $935,000, according to Redfin.
The Snows also didn’t want to wait. While the median age of first-time home buyers started pushing 40 last year, according to the National Association of Realtors, they decided they’d be better off gambling on a big move.
“We just decided, we’re getting into our 30s and we don’t want to sit here and wait to build equity and build wealth for our entire life,” Mr. Snow said.
They searched far and wide, taking into account political leanings, looking for a place not too liberal, but not too conservative. They closed on their house last year for $690,000, right around the time they found out Ms. Snow was pregnant with their daughter.
Though they moved away from family and friends, Mr. Snow said he has been surprised at how natural it has felt to find a sense of community in a new place, even for an introvert like himself.
The Snows go to the farmers’ market every Saturday and engage with people in the community. If Mr. Snow ever wants to go golfing at the club he joined, he just posts in a Facebook group and gets responses within minutes. The people in small-town Virginia are just friendlier, he said.
“It’s probably like this in other big cities though, you think it’s the best place ever and you’re like, ‘How could I live anywhere else?’ Could I even be happy somewhere else?’” Mr. Snow said. “Well, what we discovered was yes, we could be happy somewhere else.”
Typically, when people leave more expensive cities in search of affordable living, they move to nearby suburbs, or the next town or city over, said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin.
In her estimate, people aren’t usually interested in moving a plane ride away from friends and family. But she said she has seen more buyers moving because of job loss and economic turmoil, and affordability has become a harder mark to reach.
“Mortgage rates just make the affordability part even harder if homeownership is your goal,” she said. “Rates have been high for the last couple of years, but it is a more recent push for people to be even more price sensitive when it comes to their homes and deciding where to live.”
The rent for Christian Perez’s one-bedroom apartment in Miami that he shared with his wife, Lilly, went up by $300 a month, to $3,000, in May 2024. He was tired of how expensive the city was and a culture that didn’t fit his lifestyle, he said.
They bought a $355,000 home last year in Maricopa, Ariz., a town about 30 miles south of Phoenix with a population of around 58,000 people, where his wife has some family.
“We’re all from New Jersey, but have moved here,” said Mr. Perez, 37. “With the amount of money we were spending in Miami, we were burning through savings. Now I have palm trees in my backyard for crying out loud. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Rebekah Rosler, 46, moved her family of five out of their apartment in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town neighborhood during the pandemic in 2020, eventually buying her first home in 2021 after “squatting” in her parents’ home in New York’s Hudson Valley for eight months, she said.
The decision to move wasn’t entirely a financial one, though they were definitely living beyond their means, spending $12,000 a month for rent and day care, Ms. Rosler said. But they also wanted more space.
Ms. Rosler and her family landed just a 90-minute drive away, in Fairfield, Conn., but the move was a financial and social shock.
Ms. Rosler and her husband, Nathan, bought a small house on a cul-de-sac street that suited their needs for about $680,000. They locked in a 2.8 percent interest rate, and at first the decision seemed to be paying off.
Two heavy rain storms later, however, and they were shelling out tens of thousands of dollars on unexpected repairs and a retaining wall. Then, a custom window broke.
“I thought we were golden and that we were saving money; we were doing great, and then we had to drop $50,000 pretty much in the first year just to live,” Ms. Rosler said.
Their financial standing is looking a little better now, but Ms. Rosler said she feels beholden to their current home, despite wanting to move, because interest rates have ballooned.
But it’s really her social life that has suffered the most. Ms. Rosler has some friends in Fairfield, and she’s hosted book clubs and other events in her home, but it often pales in comparison with what she had in New York, she said.
She has worked hard at trying to find and develop her community. Early on, she said, she forced her son to play baseball so she could become friends with the baseball moms, but when he wanted to quit she was gutted.
“I’m mourning a life that was,” Ms. Rosler said. “I’m mourning the days my husband and I could get up and go for brunch at 11 a.m. Or the days that we could take the kids and just go to the playground for hours. That’s not what life is anymore.”
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