I'm born and raised Sonoma County (as is my wife) and we are about the only people we grew up with who still live here. We saved/worked through college bought a house at a decent time (2014), and our mortgage payment for 3BR/2BA is less than many friends pay for a room. If my wife wasn't a winemaker we would most likely not be living here either. I cannot begin to understand how or why people would move here, and many people have come from out of the area to work at the City I work for only to leave after a year or two of living in a home 1/4 the size of where they come from and saving absolutely no money despite their pay increase. We've had 3 people hired for the same position all decline after a month or so of looking for housing, saying they cannot find a place where they could afford based on the salary (and the salaries are high).

It’s hard to beat CA weather, scenery, and access to outdoors. And be a drive from a major city like SF. Hence lots of rich people are willing to pay a lot for housing. Plus, CA has some decent socially liberal laws that set it apart.

If one can afford to live here I get it - sorry writing during short breaks at work. I don't understand how someone who is young and in an entry level service industry job could make the decision to live in Sonoma County, however with my wife supervising 10-40 seasonal interns a year (shes worked in different sized wineries) I have become friends with a lot of them. I wish them the best but more often than not I see them give up after a year or two and move home. This has led to a lot of well loved restaurants slowly decreasing in quality and closing, or offering limited menus (I eat out only a few times a year so I am not decrying the loss of restauarants, but rather pointing out a visible expression of the rising cost of living).

If you have the money I can’t imagine much better places in the world than Sonoma, Marin or Mendocino county.

Scenery and access to outdoors can be had in many other places. It's mostly about the climate.

If your salaries can't sustain a workforce they're still not high enough no matter what you say.

Weird is certainly the word for it. The SF real estate catastrophe is pushing up prices here, particularly the south end of the county, while (in the small tech scene at least) salaries haven't adjusted. I've lived here since 2011 but I don't think I would start here today. But of course, anyone who bought a house 20 years ago is just fine since their costs are fixed. Renters and recent buyers pick up the tax bill. Thanks a lot, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association!

(Seriously, Prop 13 is awful policy.)

Housing prices are going up in Sonoma because nobody is building houses (in SF, Sonoma, or any of the other counties in the 9-county Bay Area). Sonoma needs to build as much (well, more thanks to PG&E) as anywhere else out here.

Yes, absolutely. I'd add that this area loves its urban growth boundaries, so the only way to add lots of housing is to build up. This makes the carve-out in SB-50 for counties with a population under 600,000 problematic, in my view.

>Seems most people here are either rich retirees or people whose families have lived here for a long time and made a ton of money with real estate bought before prices exploded

Yep - I lived there between 2015-2017 and this about sums it up.