I grew up in Sacramento - well, one of its suburbs, aside from a brief time after my parents split and my dad moved to Sacramento proper (and then eventually m

I grew up in Sacramento - well, one of its suburbs, aside from a brief time after my parents split and my dad moved to Sacramento proper (and then eventually moved back after meeting my now-stepmom and her daughters / my now-sisters). One thing the article doesn't seem to mention at all is the 2008 financial crisis. The Sacramento area got hit hard, especially suburbs like mine. My specific hometown, Elk Grove, rapidly expanded from being mostly farmland when I was a kid to being the poster child of suburban sprawl when I was a teenager. The population exploded, the housing supply exploded (and got outstripped by demand), and then in 2007/2008 it all came crashing down, with foreclosures and vacancies and squatters everywhere. I can imagine other Central Valley cities got hit similarly hard. The article mentions people commuting from Central Valley cities to coastal cities. My dad was one of 'em for awhile, commuting from Sacramento to the Rite-Aid he managed on Van Ness in SF. He wasn't rich, and at the time neither was my mom; living closer to SF was out of the question even back then (especially after they divorced). My stepmom and her parents had emigrated from SF to Sac before meeting my dad, and she worked at the same store, making the same commute (and that's how they met, and were soon happily married 'til death did them part when he passed in May this year). It was indeed a long commute, leaving home before sunrise and getting back after sunset. All in all, even Sacramento was kind of a shithole, let alone the rest of the Valley. Now it's an even more expensive shithole. I ended up leaving to work my first job (because few employers in Sac were willing to hire a high school graduate when they're being flooded with college graduate applicants), and I haven't really looked back; decent memories, but neither the present nor future are appealing - especially when it looks like we're on the verge of another 2008.