Why are so many Americans leaving California and New York? Meet the households who have fled the skyrocketing rents and rising crime in America’s major metropolises – and vow they will never return!

Vered DeLeeuw and her husband Ido Sarig lived in Palo Alto, California, for twenty years before finally deciding they had had enough of the state.

“When we got to Palo Alto, it was a small town,” food blogger Vered, 52, told DailyMail.com. ‘Now property prices are so crazy that if you want to buy a standard family home you have to spend millions of dollars.’

Crime in nearby San Francisco also became difficult to bear: “It’s gone up so much that we didn’t even go to the city for the last two years we lived in California,” she said.

“We just felt like the cost of living kept going up and taxes kept going up, but our quality of life was slowly declining.”

It’s a story that’s becoming increasingly common in the US – where families are leaving sky-high rents, punitive taxes and rising crime in the country’s coastal states in droves in search of a better quality of life.

Data from the US Census Bureau this month showed that California was the state that lost the most residents last year – followed by New York.

In 2022, California recorded a net loss of 341,866 people, compared to 244,137 for the Empire State.

The states combined lost a total of 1.4 million residents last year, many of whom moved to Florida and Texas.

Vered and her husband Ido, 59, stayed in Palo Alto until their children, now 21 and 23, graduated high school before looking for a way to leave California.

While Palo Alto – considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley – may be expensive even by California standards, the cost of living is high across the state.

According to real estate company Zillowthe average home in the Golden State is valued at $747,352, with the average price of a home in several California cities surpassing the million-dollar mark.

The couple’s first stop in July 2021 was Bethesda, Maryland, where they stayed for a year and a half.

Then Ido, an executive at a startup accelerator, received a job offer that took them to Memphis, Tennessee.

Fortunately, Vered, founder of a good blog Healthy recipescould work from anywhere, so the couple moved to a suburb just outside the city in January this year.

‘It was difficult at first. It is very suburban and the pace of life is very slow. But gradually we fell in love with it. There are so many good things here,” Vered said.

Now she says she never imagined moving back to the West Coast.

“My husband was asked about an opportunity in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago and we realized we don’t want to go back there. So I thought that was great. We really love it here,” she says.

“The cost of living is a fraction of what it used to be and there are no income taxes in Tennessee, which is a big difference from California.”

There are varying income tax rates in California, but the highest income earners face a punitive tax of 12.3 percent – ​​plus an additional 1 percent surcharge for those making more than $1 million a year. Wage earners must pay this on top of their federal and local taxes.

Low real estate prices in Memphis allowed the couple to immediately purchase a four-bedroom house. According to Zillow, the average home in the state is valued at $311,706.

“You can buy a house on both coasts for a fraction of what it costs,” she said.

An added bonus for Vered is that the kitchen in her new home is a huge improvement over the kitchen she had before. “I have the best kitchen I’ve ever had, so I’m very grateful,” she added.

According to William Frey, a demographer at the think tank The Brookings Institution, saving money is the main motivator for Americans to move.

He told DailyMail.com: ‘Interstate movers are motivated by work, housing and family reasons.’

He noted that major relocation trends in recent years have led New Yorkers to flock to Florida and Californians to choose Texas.

But other popular areas are starting to emerge, with the latest Census Bureau data showing that Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina also saw more arrivals than wavers last year.

Garrett Ham and his wife Callie, both 38, and their two children, aged ten and twelve, fled the east coast for a little further afield in 2022 after living there for just three years.

The family moved to Bentonville, Arkansas, after being deterred by rising costs in New York and Connecticut.

They lived in New Haven, where Garrett was in a program at Yale, and Callie commuted to New York City every day for work.

“We planned to stay there a lot longer than we ended up doing,” Garrett told DailyMail.com.

“Where we live now, in Arkansas, you can buy a house three times the size for the same money,” he said. ‘And the salary difference for the same work is not enough to compensate for that.

“We might make 10 percent less than up there, but the cost of living here is probably 20 to 30 percent lower.”

Taxes in Arkansas were also a consideration, he added, where income tax rates are as high as 5.9 percent.

Garrett, who owns a real estate company, said he misses the energy of New York City but would rather visit occasionally than live there.

“It had become a little too hard to live up there,” he said.