(1) Taxes. (2) Cost of housing. (3) A government that insists on intervening in every aspect of my life. (4) A culture of people who actively want the government to intervene on every aspect of their lives. (5) Traffic.

I can afford to live in California. I just don't want to. I spent 8 years in the Bay Area, love to visit, but ultimately I can have more freedom elsewhere.

I just recently moved back from TN to CA. For the same reasons you listed.

You find the cost of housing in CA to be lower than in TN? If so, where in TN did you live, and where in CA did you move to?

On an absolute scale no. However my wife's salary tripled when moving back for the same position.

I moved from Knoxville, TN which is experiencing a large housing crunch due to lots of speculative real estate investments. I've moved to a comparable sized city that is not the Bay area.

- Enormous population density. Anywhere even halfway desirable has an outrageous housing market, very high rents, a homeless problem, or all of the above. I will straight up never be able to afford a house in CA. Even with a ~very~ small inheritance, I still wouldn't be able to afford a downpayment on somewhere decent in or near LA.

- Overcrowded nature. This one personally bothered me a lot. Many trails in Southern California are almost always crowded. Beach access is long, difficult, expensive (if you use a parking lot) and exhausting if you live inland.

- Fires. Fires get worse every year, and will continue to get worse. The AQI is constantly above 100 in some areas for most of August/September. For people like me with autoimmune conditions, this is pretty dangerous for health.

- Increased summer temps. 120 degree days are getting more common in many ares of CA.

- Government corruption. High taxes, especially if you're "middle class".

- Earthquake risk.

I moved to Upstate, NY. Yeah, the weather sucks, but not always. Fall is lovely. Early winter is lovely. Spring is lovely when it's not raining. Summer is humid and gross, but it's an absolute joy in my town with all the festivals. The housing market is crazy, but no so crazy that I couldn't afford a home. The town I live in has decent local government, several lakes, and abundant state forests and hiking trails all around.

I miss the LA I grew up in, but it's just not the same any more. I'm trying to convince my mom to retire out here.

> Overcrowded nature. This one personally bothered me a lot. Many trails in Southern California are almost always crowded. Beach access is long, difficult, expensive (if you use a parking lot) and exhausting if you live inland.

This is a huge one for me.

> I moved to Upstate, NY. Yeah, the weather sucks, but not always. Fall is lovely. Early winter is lovely. Spring is lovely when it's not raining. Summer is humid and gross, but it's an absolute joy in my town with all the festivals. The housing market is crazy, but no so crazy that I couldn't afford a home. The town I live in has decent local government, several lakes, and abundant state forests and hiking trails all around.

I went to school in Rochester and I really enjoyed it. Even though it may be described as a dying industrial town, I still found it a better place to live than booming SF.

I'm close to Rochester! I'd love to visit. I've only heard lovely things. And I think the town is gearing up for a revival :D

>Increased summer temps. 120 degree days are getting more common in many ares of CA.

That is not correct. Death Valley, one of the hottest places on the planet, may occasionally reach that temperature, but essentially no one lives there.[1]

Inland areas may get up to 100 degrees F. several times during the summer, but the humidity is low so it is not oppressive like the midwest or the south.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley

An area I visited near Sacramento was routinely 112-120 degrees last summer.

High cost of living, constant fires, high taxes without good government services, homelessness everywhere, highly politicized COVID policies like lockdowns, lopsided political landscape with democrats controlling the entire state with no competition from another party to drive change.

It's frustrating because the GOP could compete in CA if they put any effort into it. Instead they push nationalized issues and loonies

Their problem is that they have to kowtow to the crazy religious element, which makes them as a party completely unpalatable to the modern, secular west coast human.

Wow you just listed every reason of why I dislike living in Texas.

TFA did not mention anything about "so many people".

Besides,

"Growth is not a goal for most Californians: Asked to look ahead 10 years, 35 percent of respondents believe it would be better if the population decreases significantly and 46 percent want it to stay about the same. Only 19 percent of those surveyed said that the state would be better if its population increases."

"By nearly a 2-to-1 margin, Californians respond that they still believe in the “California Dream” (that it’s a great place to live and raise a family) but belief in that dream depends on demographics, economic status and partisan affiliation. Spanish speakers, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and younger Californians are more optimistic, while middle-class Californians, white respondents, older residents and Republicans are more pessimistic."

source: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-studies...

Speaking for myself, the sole reason was cost of living and impracticality of owning a home anywhere within a reasonable drive of an urban center. While I was able to afford renting, I wasn’t getting anywhere with saving and wouldn’t have been able to change that without downsizing to a drafty shoebox of an apartment. That was fine in my 20s but now in my 30s, it felt a bit like I was spinning my wheels.

If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t mind continuing to live in California. There’s a lot to love about it, but it’s just not conducive to my current set of goals unless I manage to land a senior position at Google or something (which comes with its own set of problems).

because they can't afford to live there

California is huge with many inexpensive places to live. However the coast and some of the more desirable interior are very expensive.

Pretty much anywhere in California that's a desirable place to live with reasonable job prospects has a high cost of living.

Those inexpensive places to live are inexpensive for a very good reason. They are often very unsafe and undesirable.

Everywhere good in California has been claimed :-(

Depends on your definition of undesirable. There are many remote, hilly towns if you enjoy nature and potentially living off-grid.

But yeah, if you're looking for sun, water sports & nightlife in CA, it's going to be very expensive.

I left because a mortgage for a single family home in a nice neighborhood was 40% less than the rent I paid to live in northern california, and my neighborhood now is quieter, cleaner, safer, and I don't have to step over human feces in the street anymore because we don't have a homelessness or housing crisis that won't be remedied in my lifetime.

There's pretty nature everywhere in America. And the weather isn't that bad most places.

high taxes, cost for everything is through the roof (even something like a McChicken from McDonalds is 30-40% more expensive here), if you live in the big cities then traffic can be a big problem. But for the majority, i think it is just the absurd cost of everything paired with high taxes.

"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

That's the free space on the "edgy word salad" bingo card. You're going to have to write out a few more of those phrases to actually win the crappy clock-radio.

What is woke culture? Isn’t culture an attractive part of melting pot places like NYC or SF?

That’s not what woke culture is. Here’s an example in California: the state has formed a commission to investigate paying reparations to slave descendants. Why? Because of BLM in 2020. Knee jerk Twitter politics running the state.

Edit: some replies saying reparations are nothing new. Yes, reparations have been discussed before. When we say “before”, we mean a long time ago. The current discussions are not the same continuous discussions from before, but new ones that came out of BLM riots of 2020. Show me California’s reparations task force before 2020. Also, this task force according to NPR is the “first in the nation”: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089629383/california-group-v...

The conversation around reparations dates back to the Civil War, it’s not some new trendy idea. The aim is to fix an injustice done by the US to millions of people. CA should not do this on its own, but with the lack of leadership in Washington you can see why a state might step up to try and fix past inequalities.

You can disagree about how the US should make amends, but it’s very wrong to present this is a recent conversation.

Reparations has been a thing for a very long time. It's hardly knee jerk.

Slavery was and still is a vile concept.

Frederick Douglass talked about reparations a century back.

So your issue is something you have no control over? I am not sure you’ll be happy anywhere. Where did you come from?

Libertarian tech bros don't like progressive politics as a general rule

My experience was that the Bay Area was only progressive inside the state buildings. On the streets and out in the world, people seemed to be more "on your own" than the crappy little right-wing town I grew up in.

Honestly, with the Nimbyism and horrible inefficiencies in the public programs, California considering itself progressive is a joke.

Liberals don't like it either, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw