I live in a socal suburb and there is plenty of nimbyism. Any new developments take years or get stalled indefinitely as all the nimbys who already own their home show up to complain and block everything at every turn. Because they don't want the traffic to get worse, or they don't want the community to "lose its charm" or whatever else they can think of.

People want to live near jobs, services and amenities, and diversity of those can only be achieved at scale.

You could build a million homes in the middle of nowhere and you’d wind up with a million empty houses.

Many people also want to live in large houses or apartments, which is extremely expensive anywhere with high population density.

Many people also want to win the lotto.

Even if people are saying this, what they actually do is quite different. People in CA moving out are generally moving into other metropolitan areas or smaller cities. They're not living some kind of Stardew Valley fantasy in the fields.

That was the major selling point of the CA high-speed rail when Governor Brown originally put it on the ballot - everyone would live in one of those ever-expanding residential suburbs and then take a quick train ride into a busy urban area.

Employment. Rural areas don't have much to offer in terms of jobs other than backbreaking farm labor, and Internet access is usually way too underbuilt to support full remote work.

NIMBY is everywhere in California. For being such a liberal state it's crazy how local governments are obsessed with stopping new and denser housing from being built