Fewer Californians are moving to Texas, but more are going to FL and AZ

If you can't afford a million dollar home you're gonna have a much harder time in urban or suburban coastal CA than you will in... almost anywhere else, including AZ, TX, FL.

The rest of the parent poster's complaints are pretty SF-centric, though.

Also I'm talking about my perspective living in the Bay in general.

LA is less bad.

There are many many places that are nice to live in California - and I almost don’t want to tell anyone about my town (Aptos) because I don’t want it overrun. :)

You are basically defining your requirements in a way that can only be met California. If California didn't exist, would you jump in the ocean? What I mean is that perhaps one of your requirements could be relaxed so you can get many other benefits. For instance, the "100F with 90%" humidity is greatly mitigated by Air Conditioning or going out very early in the day. When I spent some time in Louisiana, which is crazy hot and humid, I was able to mitigate the heat in the way I describe to the point that it didn't affect my life.

They are probably downsizing a bit. A little random checking on for sales houses on Redfin gives me the impression that someone with maybe a 2300 sq ft house in San Antonio could get maybe a 1500-1700 sq ft house for about the same price in the the central valley in California (e.g., in Modesto, Merced, or Fresno).

My guess is that it is mostly people who are not living in major cities in Texas moving to not major cities in California.

> If over 65, you can defer paying property taxes indefinitely for a 5% yearly interest rate as long as you don't move. You still owe the taxes, but they'll be taken out of your estate.

"Taken out of your estate" suggests they take the taxes when you die. If you move before you die to you have to pay when you move, or does it still come out of your estate when you eventually die?

California has lost people to net domestic migration for a few decades (with lower income workers and retirees flowing out and, on average, higher wage workers flowing in at slightly lower rates from other states), IIRC, but until recently it was making up for it between natural growth and international in-migration [0] (the latter also often of higher wage workers); international migration tailed off just before (and even more with) the pandemic, which shifted things to a net loss of population.

[0] Carefully not saying "immigration" because a H-1B admissions, an important part of this, aren't immigrants, even though they may later become immigrants. But its still in-migration of population, regardless of status.