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My wife is a CA native. I moved to CA after college in 1973. I loved it for 30 or more years; then it all started changing rapidly. The incredible success of all the new companies in Silicon Valley (first HP, Lockheed, Ford Aerospace; then a new wave of Cisco and Apple; finally the wave of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tesla and many others) created such wealth that it really ruined the place. Traffic is absolutely horrendous. Rudeness of close quarters living and wealthy brats is off the charts. Then the staggeringly stupid progressive politics and tax policy further ruined it. Now every house buyer in our neighborhood on the peninsula is either Chinese or Indian and you hear English less than half the time in our town. Every kid enrolling in our school district is a transplant from China.

Then drought, wildfires and forest fires the past few years. The lack of any improvements in water infrastructure. Now this power debacle. The whole state is a freaking mess.

To top it off, the Dems want to do away with Prop 13 which has made it somewhat affordable for long-time house owners like us. Now the Dems in the State Assembly are working to get rid of single family zoning and make everything high-density. Everybody can build an auxiliary “in-law” unit in their backyards (”in-fill housing”) with almost no setbacks.

The last straws are the incredible filth, feces, needles, graffiti and bums everywhere.

As dragnet2 said, “it became something we didn’t even recognize.”

While we still love the great natural beauty of CA, we really cannot stand it anymore. I didn’t want to leave in my late 60s - I had hoped it would be a nice, pleasant middle class town where we could keep the ancestral homestead and have kids and grandkids visit. But, alas, that is not to be. We decided to buy a place in North Idaho and really like it here. Right now we are splitting our time between two places and will spend another year figuring out our retirement game plan.