Here are the hard facts about why the Golden State will continue to reign supreme in technology, entertainment, agriculture and other vital industries.
Paying $3,150 a month for a one-bedroom apartment is absurd — unless you’re living in San Francisco. For computer engineer David Berrios and his wife, it was worth it to live in this 49-square-mile technology paradise by the Bay. From their perch near Mount Olympus in the Corona Heights neighborhood, they could stroll down the hill to Haight-Ashbury or walk to a favorite jiu jitsu studio — or anywhere else in the city, for that matter.
That changed a year ago, when San Francisco became the first major city in the country to lock down in the pandemic. A former NASA computer scientist, Berrios, 40, had moved from the east coast to California because he wanted to be in a challenging environment — the start-up kind of challenging, he says, not the kind in which two people are trapped inside a small apartment with nothing to do. They also wanted to start a family.
So in November, Berrios and his wife packed their bags and became one of the 80,000 households who left San Francisco in 2020. But they didn’t go to Austin, Miami or Wyoming, as some reports might suggest. In fact, they didn’t leave the state of California. Instead, they bought and settled into a five-bedroom house in Yucca Valley, next to Joshua Tree National Park. “We thought about moving to other states,” Berrios says. “But California…
