Well....look at it from the other end. Do you want to live in a place that's stagnating? There's plenty of those around, actually. Even in CA, lol. The trouble is, the prices of things rise - commodities, such as food, building materials, asphalt for roads, heavy equipment and cars.
If you are living in a stagnant economy, you are losing financial ground a little every day. That totals up to a lot over a few years, or a couple of decades.
Just FYI I don't know anyone who's left CA because of the drought, unless maybe it's a farmer who's given up or migrant workers who have fewer crops to harvest. Rationing water just means retraining people not to WASTE water. It's more "turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth".
My DH, who grew up in Hong Kong, tells stories about real water rationing. When the winter rains failed and the rivers ran dry (all HK's water is controlled by China, always has been), in the summer sometimes they had to do water rationing. The taps would go on for one hour, max, once a day. People filled up bathtubs, sinks, 5-gallon buckets, pots and pans! Almost everyone lives in apartment buildings or condos, only the very very wealthy own SFH in HK.
One very good reason to stay in CA? (Besides loving it here) Prop 13. If you buy a home your prop taxes are essentially frozen at that value except for a max 2% annual increase allowed by the previous year CPI. The rate is 1.1% but counties are allowed to add to that rate for any voter-approved local bond measures, so for example we pay 1.43% in our county while my niece who lives 10 miles away in another pays 1.45%.
RE is high but so are salaries. $100K is middle-class in the big cities. If you make under $60K annually, whether single or a couple, that's a tight financial situation. People come and go in CA all the time. Many people come to San Francisco, but few manage to stay. Even in the '60's, if you didn't have good skills for the current job market you couldn't make enough to get by. I remember being surprised how many young people I met who had moved across country to be in SF. They didn't know anyone here, had no job experience, and just "thought it would be fun to live in CA!"
Well, yeah - it's fun living here, but you're just one of 600 people who applied for a low-paying job. That's not quite so much fun after all, is it?
I like Oregon a lot, but I enjoy Washington more. There's just more places to go and things to do. Oregon's always kvetched about CA folks, because neither OR nor WA have ever passed anything like Prop 13 to protect their long-time residents and elderly.
Since my two Seattleite aunts were very grateful to sell their homes at a whopping profit to cushion their old age, regardless of who bought them, it's fairly safe to say that a few anti-CA fanatics who want to short themselves out of a good profit probably aren't going to have much effect on the overall migration in and out of CA.
People in the West move around a lot more than folks in other areas. That was the first thing I noticed about coming to CA in the early '60's. Native-born Californians were rarer than hen's teeth. I was in SF for five years before I met a group of born-in-SF locals and so promptly went around to all my friends (also East Coast transplants) saying, "Hey, I finally met some people who were actually born here!"
As the Boomers retire, a lot of smaller cities are going to see an increase in population. Many want to downsize and have better weather, and most have either fewer or no kids to tie them to an area.
