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“Everybody has lots and lots of feelings,” said Rebekah Rosler, 42, the founder of a Facebook group called “Into the Unknown,” which she conceived in the spring of 2020 for “those of us who have decided or are considering — willingly or otherwise — to join the exodus from NYC to greener pastures.”
The group, which has 13,500 members, is closed to reporters, so Ms. Rosler summarized the attitudes. At one pole are New Yorkers who were nudged by the pandemic into the premature fulfillment of a dream to leave the city and have not been disappointed; at the other pole are those who took flight more impulsively and are eager to return.
“Leaving has broken their identity,” she said.
Jasmine Trabelsi, 42, occupies the malcontents’ end of Ms. Rosler’s spectrum. In the fall of 2020, she and her husband, residents of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, who both work in the tech industry, closed on a three-bedroom house in Woodstock, N.Y. Having already enrolled their 8-year-old daughter in a local school, they threw themselves on the mercy of the seller, who granted them two of the 15-minute slots doled out for viewing and accepted their bid in the mid-$600,000s.
Their sense of triumph did not last long. “We had a couple of friends in the area, but Covid is not a good time to move to a place where you don’t have a community,” Ms. Trabelsi said.
Many of the nearby houses were owned by seasonal residents or locals who had rented them, so the neighborhood had a transient feeling. And their own wobbly status as pandemic escapees who might stay or go discouraged easy attachments. The sense of dislocation made Woodstock seem to Ms. Trabelsi more like a vacation setting than a home.
Furthermore, they were on a mountaintop, and businesses and services (when they were open) felt remote.
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