All my life I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. Either Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and occasionally in a Contra Costa town when I was a child.

On August 31st, 2021, that lifelong status will come to an end.

I am putting virtually everything I own into a U-Haul moving van and driving it up to Reno, Nevada, to a one bedroom apartment not far from its downtown casinos.

I do not want to move. I do not want to leave the Bay Area, for more than simple nostalgic reasons, but right now I have no choice.

I am being forced out by the high cost of living. It’s all too common a story in this region. Many of my friends have left the area. Many have left because they could no longer afford to live here. Others could afford to live here, but they did not feel like renting an overpriced studio when they could move to another part of the country and could afford to buy an actual house rather than continue to pay a bloated rent for a mere apartment.

Most people living in the Bay Area are from somewhere else, another state or another country. For years the high cost of living either forced or prompted them to literally go back where they came from. I was born and raised in the Bay Area. I have travelled a lot, but I always had a home here. I have no place to go back to.

The pandemic had a lot to do with it. The pandemic and lockdowns cost me a lot of web client work, it cost me my relationship and my home, and it also cost me more than a year’s worth of income at the Oakland A’s. My ongoing struggle to find solid work is also a factor. I have been looking for solid full-time work for years, only to come up empty. My lack of consistency in the software profession, that I’m not already employed at a full-time job, is a reason I am having trouble finding work in that industry, but I also know my age is a big reason as well. I’m no spring chicken, and if I had to guess, I would say that the software industry is one of the most ageist industries in the United States.

I have looked for other kinds of work, but no one is really interested in hiring a software engineer to work in a warehouse or do menial office work when they can give that kind of job to someone who doesn’t have a college degree.

The housing market in the Bay Area is out of control. I tried like hell to find a viable living option in the Bay Area, but after weeks of looking I realized I had to start looking elsewhere in addition to my Bay Area search. I looked for places in Oregon, Southern California, and Western Nevada. I finally found a place in Reno, and it was nice enough, inexpensive enough, and in a decent neighborhood that I couldn’t pass it up.

To give you an example of what the housing situation in the Bay Area is like, I answered an ad for a studio that was at the upper end of my price range. It looked promising from the ad, but it turned out to be in a bad neighborhood, was located above a suspect looking “massage parlor”, and it was also not a studio as the advertisement implied, but just a single room in a rooming house where five people had to share one kitchen and one very small bathroom.

At the moment I do not lack for work. I still have a few web clients, and I resumed working for the Oakland A’s as a ticket seller, and I am also doing gig work, waking dogs and catsitting. In fact, for the month of August, I have worked every single day with not one day off to myself. And honestly, if you work every single day in a month without one single day to yourself you should be able to have your own two bedroom apartment.

The worst part about this move is the uncertainty. My mission, when I get settled in at my new place, is to make it back to the Bay Area. I will write code and put up mobile apps and look for solid work, as well as promoting my writing and my blog and try to come up with a better income. But where it will all lead me is a mystery. At one point this year I was facing the prospect of becoming truly homeless, but I also interviewed for a $200K a year engineering job a week ago. I could still end up sleeping in my Prius to survive, or I might be buying overpriced vegan chocolate at Whole Foods to take back to my San Francisco condo. Or anything in between.

I have no idea which direction my life will take. And it is just as frustrating as it is frightening. Like I said before, I’m no spring chicken. Yet I am changing jobs, changing homes, and looking, yet again, for a new relationship. The hardest thing to admit is that I have spent my whole adulthood trying to anchor myself. What I really want out of life is stability: an actual lifelong partner, a home I can live in until I die, and an truly bedrock career with a steady income.

Many people have encouraged me to look at this as a new adventure, and in a way it is. But what it comes down to is that I am being forced out of my lifelong home. I am leaving because I have no choice. If I stay in the Bay Area I will end up on the street.

So, barring a lottery win, a sudden high-end job offer, or a relative dropping dead tomorrow and leaving me a seven figure inheritance, I am on the road, forcing a packed van up a crowded and hectic highway 80, possibly through a lot of smoke from California wildfires, to take up refuge in a neighboring state.

And a journey into complete and absolute uncertainty, because of my inability to find a foothold in a system that is completely and utterly out of balance.