Sure, but take Santa Cruz: $66K median wage or so, but $900K or so median house price. Incredibly unaffordable despite being far cheaper than SF or San Jose, u

Sure, but take Santa Cruz: $66K median wage or so, but $900K or so median house price. Incredibly unaffordable despite being far cheaper than SF or San Jose, unless you clog its NIMBY constrained highway driving 25+ miles each way to your tech job in the valley. On the bright side, Amazon opened up a small office downtown, but that's nowhere near enough, and the weird local government does a lot to make the place unappealing to prospective businesses. Merced OTOH is probably more of what you're thinking, and it has some really nice houses priced competitively with the suburbs of Dallas, but other than a new UC campus, there's not much else to recommend the place and it has a huge meth issue. But I do think the future of California is in places like this (and there are many more), but I have no idea how to make that future happen.