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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

California is very expensive for what you get, and grew to become quite unpleasant to live in. High crime rate and a bunch of woke DAs and activists makes family life in the Bay area uncomfortable. And then you're supposed to pay a premium for it all? Expensive daycare, indoctrinating schools, crappy government and private services, high taxes, NIMBYs, and the constant moral judgment of kidless activists who know what's best.

If I were single and in my 20s, SF would be where I go for all the bright minds. But the calculus as a 30s yo with a family is that California overplayed its hand. We left and aren't coming back unless a lot changes.

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> Expensive daycare, indoctrinating schools, crappy government and private services, high taxes, NIMBYs, and the constant moral judgment of kidless activists who know what's best.

All of this applies to Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Arizona in particular has had the highest increase in housing cost since the pandemic started of out of any state.

High increase != just as high entry price

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.

Youre conflating living in SF with living in every other part of CA. I can assure you that not all of CA is like SF

Urban California mostly is as such. Otherwise do tell me where?

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

LA is less bad.

Even more, SF is just a very small part of the Bay Area in general, which with the remote-first movement has also expanded to the north (Santa Rosa) and south (Santa Cruz).

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. :)

Aptos and Capitola are really nice areas for sure! But I don’t think they’ll be overrun any time soon as there’s nowhere to build :) and I agree, there is much more to California than the Bay Area. Across the bay there’s PG, Monterey, big sur. Further down you have SLO, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, Laguna, San Clemente, …

SF isn't even in the top 20 most dangerous cities in California.

> makes family life in the Bay area uncomfortable

> If I were single and in my 20s, SF would be where I go

You're conflating SF and Bay Area. SF is not the Bay Area. SF isn't even in Silicon Valley, technically. The issues with SF are not the issues in SV/BA.

> California is very expensive for what you get

California is crazy expensive. Often I look for alternatives. What would be a good alternative?

I want to be near the ocean. I don't want to freeze in the winter and don't want 100F with 90% humidity in the summer.

Just with that criteria I ruled out most of the country.

But then add the requirement of having good jobs. So what's left?

So, here I remain in California.

I live in an area that meets most of these requirements, plus many others that California doesn't meet. I lived in many different places, including California, and in the end it's a matter of balancing the advantages and disadvantages of each place.

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.

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