U-Haul: CA residents moving to red states!

[Silent3]

9. I just don't understand how people afford to live there in the first place!

Property is pretty expensive where I live in southern NH compared to, say, Florida, Ohio, or a lot of other places in the country. We could buy a palace in some areas for what our house costs here.

But the San Diego area makes our property look cheap. What we have in NH would cost well over a $1M there. I could probably double my salary as a software engineer by working in that area, but the trade-off for the cost of living still wouldn't be worth it. Unless I could work at home all of the time (which, because of COVID, I'm doing now), I'd probably have to commute two hours each way through miserable traffic just to have a house half the size at a semi-affordable price.

I don't understand how all of the minimum-wage people (even at CA's higher minimum wage) who are vital to the functioning of these high-cost-of-living cities manage to work there and get by.