The Tech Boom's Second Cities

Last summer, after our son was born, my husband and I left San Francisco, our home for about fifteen years, and moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, a college town that is about an hour’s drive north of Denver. San Francisco is almost improbably pretty, a soft macaron of a city, and we were sad to leave, but we thought that it would be better if we did. My husband is a college professor, and I am a journalist, so we make a decent living by most standards, except those of coastal U.S. cities. We could afford to live in San Francisco only because we’d been lucky enough to find landlords who were willing, out of simple kindness, to rent us a one-bedroom apartment for well under market rate. (As Nathan Heller described in the magazine a few years ago, many longtime working-class residents haven’t been so fortunate.) But then I got pregnant. Our friends down the street, also writers, had a two-year-old who slept in a walk-in closet. Our closet wasn’t big enough for that, and we couldn’t move to a larger place in San Francisco, since a two-bedroom apartment would have more than doubled our rent. So when my husband was offered a job in Fort Collins, we eagerly moved. A couple of months later, our friends decamped to Seattle.