Comment by snide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snide | Hacker News Reader

Migrated out in 2020. These were my reasons:

- Covid made me realize how important being close to family was.

- Three straight years of serious wildfires, along with the general unease of a predictable rainfall pattern put me at unease.

- At that point I'd been working remote for 8 years. It took that long for me to feel confident I could easily get fun, well-paying jobs outside of the Bay Area.

- The Bay Area felt like a mono-culture despite it's marketing otherwise.

- The housing market was pretty silly. Got a lot more house for less money moving.

Things I miss:

- The produce is better in California.

- The restaurant variety in the Bay Area is superb.

- Harder to find certain type of nerd friends.

Surprises

- I don't actually miss the weather, and sort of prefer having seasons again.

- The schools are better where we moved. My wife is a teacher and was sort of floored by this. Both areas were "great" school districts, and I admit region to region can always have variance. Still, we didn't expect this.

Seasons get less nice the older you get. At first I loved them, but 20 years on I really wish I was in California and just went to Tahoe to get my snow fix. If you leave California, think hard about how much snow you have to remove when looking at homes. My ex was smart and she nixed a lot of homes with crazy long driveways because she knew. Also remember that in super heavy snow you don't just shovel the sidewalk/driveway but also the roof to prevent collapse.

I miss California so much, but then I grew up there.

California gets snow though?

People forget how big of a state it really is. My family friend was facing a four figure cost to dig out their Truckee cabin this past winter.

That's why they said "just went to Tahoe to get my snow fix." Truckee is Tahoe. The Sierra Nevada mountains are really the only places in CA that get real snow. Most people visit them though as only 1% of the state lives there, hence no daily snow shoveling.

With climate change unabated, the seasonal variability in most parts of the country will largely cease to be hot vs cold. In more and more places, it will be hot vs hotter.

> Also remember that in super heavy snow you don't just shovel the sidewalk/driveway but also the roof to prevent collapse.

Where do you have to do this? I've lived in several areas with snow (midwest, east coast, and Colorado), and never seen anyone shovel snow off of their roof. This sounds like an outlier case, not the norm for "leaving California."

In the midwest and east, snow shoveling has just never been a big deal in my experience, other than the occasional big storm that drops a foot or more (maybe once every 2 years).

> Covid made me realize how important being close to family was.

Ironically, being close to family is the primary reason why I haven't sold my house for seven figures more than I paid for it and nope-d out of CA (not the Bay Area though).

The schools are mediocre at best where I am and it just seems to me that it's not sustainable to have a functioning community with housing costs where they currently are, which implies that at some point I'll be living in either a non-functioning community or will have left a million dollars on the table by having not moved away sooner.

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