Well, approaching retirement, I had to let go of two houses and some lovely mountain property I just couldn't realistically keep up with
getting older, near three National Parks, six official Wilderness areas, and with a hundred square miles of unihabited de facto wilderness right across the road. So it's certainly not necessary to move out of State to avoid oft-incorrect stereotypes of California. Fortunately, I bought my Bay Area house nearly fifty years ago, certainly not a middle class bargain back then, but manageable, for about 5% of what this house might sell for today, were I to sell it. My wife is a city gal, so wouldn't be happy permanently living in the mountains anyway,
with its weather extremes, and, originally being from Portland, likes living here on the coast.
But it's hard to give up this wonderful climate, and all our freely accessible nearby open land, despite earthquake risk. Clogged traffic is actually a bigger annoyance than fear of crime; but being retired, I don't have worry about driving during rush hour anymore. And most of my favorite hiking and photographic haunts are the opposite, easier direction from rush hour crunches.
Wilt - nearly all of SoCals power was once generated SoCal Edison dams and hydroelectric facilities right upriver, or even right down below, from where my place was. PG&E had just as many competing facilities, but serving central and costal Calif like here. Those began as the most massive engineering projects in human history up to that point (ca 1915), and just got more intense, including almost unbelievable giant deep inside mountains plants built up into the 1990's. Directly below my own place, about a 1500 ft below, the was a drilled (not blasted) tunnel 20 ft in diameter through diorite (far harder than granite), 7 miles long, at a cost of $23,000 every 3-feet for the diamond cutting heads alone. But the whole problem is that sufficient snowpack simply isn't available anymore in the average year due to climate change. So fossil fuels plants are required. And getting away from CA won't necessarily reduce your rates. Even Portland, on the damned giant Columbia River with Grand Coulee Dam right upstream, is having impose higher water rates and electrical bills. And places like Idaho or the Wasatch corridor of Utah - talk about some explosive LA-style development in certain area, with all that drain on resources!
And Sirius - yeah, I like going out of State too sometimes to photograph. But things are changing everywhere. Yet prior to the pandemic I took friends into portions of the Sierra where we saw nobody else for a week at a time, and one of these guys has the income to explore climb in anywhere in the world he wishes, yet remarked that those location on my own bucket list, right here in CA, are among the most memorable of anywhere he had ever been. It ain't talkin' 'bout stepping on each other's toes competing for the favorite camera position at the first tour bus turnout in Yosemite Valley. CA is a really big place, with a damn lot to see and photograph in comparative solitude, whether farmlands, or desert, or mountains, or coastal forests. I'm planning for a tiny slice of it today, just a short drive from here in the city. And there ain't nothin' worse than people who don't even leave in CA, but across the border in LA instead, making incorrect stereotypes about it.
Of course, it could be a lot worse, like living in Barstow or Bakersfield, the infamously dusty, smelly outpost colonies of Texas.