With few options, some are returning to the Caribbean, once their home, or their parents’ home.

“They just give up on everything,” said Tony Blackmun, a metalworker who has lived in Crown Heights for more than 30 years. Several of his neighbors and friends have left for their native Trinidad.

Many of the regulars at Trinidad Golden Place, a bakery on Nostrand Avenue, have moved to join West Indian communities in Boston, Maryland or Philadelphia. Once or twice a month on weekends, however, they come back on the bus to shop at their favorite groceries and bakeries: a reunion of the old neighborhood, as the owner, Wazo Rahaman, called it.

For many looking for a fresh start and easier living, Atlanta, the Carolinas and Virginia are popular destinations. Their migration reflects a larger, countrywide trend of blacks leaving big cities in the East and Midwest for the South.

Ms. Harris, who worked as an assistant to the C.E.O. of a health care company in New York, lived in Crown Heights for 30 years, most recently at 767 Park Place. When she began having problems with vermin, heat and hot water that she said the building’s owners did not take care of despite repeated requests, she tried looking elsewhere in Crown Heights, hoping to stay close to her mother.

Nothing came up. But her fiancé had moved to Virginia Beach to join relatives. She agreed to follow him.

With a backyard and a car, she has found life in Virginia affordable and pleasant, but “extremely boring,” she said.

She once paid $1,280 a month for her Park Place three-bedroom. Last year, another three-bedroom in her old building was rented for $2,595.

“We would like to move back to New York, but it doesn’t make sense — in Brooklyn, all the money I was making would go right back to rent,” she said. “So I think we’ll be staying in Virginia for a while.”