Edit: I'm not saying that the state doesn't have high inequality. It does, as does the US in general. I'm saying it's not poor. California is rich, but does not distribute that wealth equitably.
Never cross a river that is "on average 4 feet deep".
Just as an anecdote I live in a 650 sq ft 1 bedroom apartment. The previous tenants were a family of four. My good friend lives a block away - he's cycled through phases of 3-4 room mates in a run-down 2 bedroom apartment.
There are millions of people in this state packed together like sardines and paying 40-50% of their meager income for that privilege.
This state is riddled with economic inequality, we may not be a poor economy but we have an enormous number of poor people shouldering its weight.
And the city itself is a dump outside a few outrageously priced neighborhoods.
I think California is far more tolerable if you don't have kids. Without kids, you don't need a big place. A couple could live comfortably in California in a home that's 1000'.
But once you have kids, you need to live in a zip code with good schools, and you need SPACE.
That gets expensive.
Myriad state and municipal benefit programs overlap with one another; in some cases, individuals with incomes 200 percent above the poverty line receive benefits, according to the California Policy Center. California state and local governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments, and “other public welfare,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Unfortunately, California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients. The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse.
And you know who gets hit the worse when we enact punitive "climate change" policies? The poor:
Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon-dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor. On some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50 percent higher than the national average. Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics, author of a 2015 Manhattan Institute study, “Less Carbon, Higher Prices,” found that “in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ‘energy poverty’—defined as energy expenditures exceeding 10 percent of household income. In certain California counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15 percent of all households.” A Pacific Research Institute study by Wayne Winegarden found that the rate could exceed 17 percent of median income in some areas. “The impacts on the poorest households are not only the largest,” states Winegarden. “They are clearly unaffordable.”
The fact California is a one-party state is also a huge cause:
California’s de facto status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove California to its golden years.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/california-poverty-capital...
Many will be stuck well below the poverty line.
Outside of the elite coastal town, interior California has lot of poverty and the other aliments.
So when you take out the distributional concern by looking at the average instead of the median, California goes from being in the bottom 10 to merely being in the bottom half.
(The analysis above combines this list of GSP-per-capita, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per..., with this list of price deflators, https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/%24100%20Map-sta...).
I also don't know if I'd trust the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation to provide an unbiased estimate of state PPP. Doing a Google search for "GDP PPP of US states" and clicking through some citations brings up a very different set of rankings that WaPo cites [1]. It places California in the top 15 along with the other economic powerhouses, right between Switzerland and Norway, not exactly known for being poor countries. UBS [2] says that Los Angeles has the highest purchasing power of any major city in the world!
Who's right? Clearly it highly depends on one's methodology.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/26/i...
[2]: https://www.ubs.com/microsites/prices-earnings/en/explore/?c...