Oakland

Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat of and the most populous city in Alameda County, California, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the most populous city in the East Bay, the third most populous city in the Bay Area, and the eighth most populous city in California. It serves as the Bay Area's trade center: the Port of Oakland is the busiest port in Northern California, and the fifth- or sixth-busiest in the United States. A charter city, Oakland was incorporated on May 4, 1852, in the wake of the state's increasing population due to the California gold rush.Wikipedia

California contains multitudes in a way that makes any single characterization misleading. The Bay Area and Los Angeles operate as global city-states, with housing markets, income levels, and cultural gravity that put them in direct competition with London and Tokyo rather than with other American metros. Both have lost net domestic migrants to lower-cost states for most of the last decade — primarily to Texas, Arizona, and Nevada — though both also continue to be net draws for international migration and maintain labor markets of extraordinary depth and diversity.

But California's geography is vast. The Central Valley offers costs of living that rival the Midwest with driving distance to the Sierra Nevada; the North Coast is one of the most beautiful and least-crowded stretches of American coastline; and the smaller cities of the inland valleys represent genuinely different lifestyle profiles. For remote workers who can absorb the state income tax and housing cost, the combination of climate diversity, outdoor access, and cultural institution density remains difficult to replicate anywhere in the world.