Four tales of city dwellers who fled New York

NY Daily News ^ | September 16th 2007 | KIRSTEN DANIS

[lowbridge]

Four tales of city dwellers who fled New York

More New Yorkers leave the city every year than move here, a trend highlighted in a population study released last week.

The report showed that in 2005, 300,000 people left New York, and only 200,000 arrived from across the U.S. and other countries to replace them.

The results prompted the Daily News to ask: Why did you say goodbye to New York?

Here are the stories we heard:

He's getting more bang for his bucks

Carlos Thompson and his wife owned a house in Brooklyn and made a decent living as graphic designers, but for years he wanted to escape the city's crippling expenses and the threat of terrorism.

Research led Thompson, 36, to the Charlotte area, where the mortgage on his five-bedroom house costs $1,000 a month - a third of what he was paying in Brooklyn. Plenty of other urbanites have relocated to the same area. His broker and builder were former New Yorkers.

"I'm getting a lot more for my money and saving at the same time," said Thompson, a Trinidadian native and the dad of a 7-year-old daughter.

"I do miss my Caribbean food, but other than that, I wouldn't trade it back."

Salary plus kid didn't compute

The first time the Bogens tried to leave New York, it was a bust.

The couple, high school sweethearts from Kentucky who came to New York for college in 1995, fled to Nashville after 9/11. But instead of finding solace, "we spent a lot of time at home watching TV," said Bonnie, 30.

They moved back in December 2002, scoring a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment for $750 a month. They joined a church and planned to raise a family.

But after their son, Matthew, was born last year, the Bogens slowly realized they could not afford to stay on the salary Josh, 28, made as an NYU computer programmer. They soon returned to Nashville, where they're about to buy a $180,000 house.

Bonnie said she misses New York's street life and diversity, but she's learning to like Nashville, where they're close to their parents, and her husband can come home for lunch. "I think that we have a good balance here," she said.

Bureaucracy drove her away

If you had told Ann Marie Hughes a decade ago that she'd be living in Iowa today, she would have laughed.

Even though her husband grew up in Dubuque, Ann Marie, 38, was a Brooklyn girl from birth. But their plans changed when the couple's third child, Teddy, now 5, developed severe autism. Ann Marie couldn't navigate the city's sluggish bureaucracy to help Teddy and couldn't work while she cared for him.

The couple made the tough decision to send Ann Marie to Iowa with their children while Dan, also 38, stays with relatives in New York for weeks at a time to toil as an ironworker.

For the most part, it has paid off. The family cut their $1,300-a-month housing expense in half, Teddy got help right after the move and the kids can play outside the way Ann Marie remembers doing as a child in Brooklyn.

"I'm living the way I wanted to live in New York," she said.

[presidio9]

I left NY twice. Once to live in Florida, and once to live in Arizona. Boredom drove me back both times. Living in NYC is like owning a Harley. If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand (not you personally lowbridge).