Some Families Who Left California Have Returned to the Golden State

Although many Californians who left the state are not looking back, Coree Ray’s family decided it’s ’time to go home' after three years in Idaho.

(L-R) Melvin Galang, his wife, Coree Ray, and their children in San Diego on June 22, 2024. Courtesy of Coree Ray

Coree Ray’s family decided to move to Idaho from Southern California in 2021 after selling their home of 20 years, and they documented their experience on TikTok.

Ray and her husband, Melvin Galang, had always talked about moving, if only for a change of scenery. The COVID-19 pandemic finally spurred the conservative family to make the move.

However, the mother of six, who makes dance videos for TikTok with her 11-year-old twin daughters, felt as though there was a lot working against them in the state of Idaho. They made the move back to the Golden State earlier this year.

Ray told The Epoch Times that although Idaho is a beautiful state, it lacked a certain lifestyle that California offers.

“We thought that the Idaho Falls community would be more welcoming and have parents that were raising kids like we were,” she said of the Gem State’s fourth-largest city, with a population of about 68,000. “We were expecting to build lifelong friendships.”

That wasn’t in the cards.

Ray, who has almost 700,000 followers on TikTok, found it difficult to make friends. In her opinion, this was because she is from California and is not Mormon. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a considerable presence in Idaho Falls, which is less than two hours from the northern Utah border.

“Idaho Falls as a whole is very polite outwardly,” she said. “They are just closed off to new people coming in.”

Her young daughters also faced bullying in schools.

Galang said that despite some negative experiences, he enjoyed his job at Teton Toyota and his colleagues there. And there were other good experiences. For example, Ray’s oldest daughter met her future husband, and her middle daughter loves Boise, Idaho, and will be staying in the state.

“So there were some good things that came out of it, and we are blessed and thankful we made the move,” she said. “It’s just time to go home now.”

In April, Galang went back to Rancho Cucamonga, a city in San Bernardino County, California, first in order to secure a home and start his job. Ray stayed in Idaho Falls with their twin daughters to sell their seven-bedroom home. After a few months, they joined Galang in California, and they finally sold their Idaho home in December.

Now that they’re back in the Golden State, Ray said they appreciate what they had taken for granted before: the weather, entertainment, and abundance of options.

“The stores are endless, and if one store doesn’t have something I need, I can drive a few minutes away to another one with more choices,” she said.

Melvin Galang and Coree Ray with their twin daughters in their home in Idaho Falls, Idaho, in March 2024. Courtesy of Coree Ray

They’re also happy to be back to a more competitive lifestyle for her daughters, who are performers and athletes, according to Ray.

“They are more challenged here in Cali, and they are able to have more choices of places to train,” she said.

“My kids can go to the beach and snowboard all in the same weekend. It’s amazing.”

Returning to California Is Challenging for Most

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an estimated 690,000 people moved from the Golden State to another state in 2023, and 422,000 people moved to California from other states.

This includes more than 17,000 people who moved to Idaho from California in 2023 and more than 2,600 people who moved from Idaho to California.

Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, said there are always some people returning to California, and it requires significant resources to come back.

“Because once you leave California, getting back is almost impossible in terms of housing,” he told The Epoch Times.

It is especially challenging to buy a house in California, Kotkin said, “unless you make a lot of money, or you kept money from the house you sold when you left and you have enough to buy something here.”

Although some people are leaving California for Idaho and coming back, Kotkin said he thinks that other states with better weather and career opportunities have a lower return rate.

“You don’t go to Idaho for a career. You go to Texas, you go to Nevada, you go to Arizona. I don’t think those people are coming back in huge numbers,” he said.

San Franciscan Returns

In northern Idaho, Juanita Garcia wrote in a letter to the editor published in September 2023 in the Coeur d‘Alene Press, a local community newspaper, that she would be moving back to San Francisco after three years in the resort town of Coeur d’Alene.

She wrote that she moved to the town in 2020 after selling her $800,000 home during the COVID-19 pandemic because she felt that the policies regarding homelessness, drugs, and crime were a problem in San Francisco, but she said she experienced other issues in her new city of 57,000.

She wrote that the snow was terrible and she “never saw the sun for weeks on end.” Garcia also claimed that her California plates got her car scratched, egged, and pelted with tomatoes.

In a follow-up letter to the editor in December 2023, Garcia said she was back in San Francisco and happy. She has a marketing job downtown, she said, adding that although downtown businesses were closing and leaving, and she was witnessing drug use in public, she preferred California to Idaho.

“I can only say I feel more free here than I did in Coeur d’Alene,” Garcia said.

San Diegan Turned Idahoan

Some Californians have moved to Idaho and never looked back, including a local politician serving the town that Garcia found hard to love.

Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, City Councilman Dan Gookin told The Epoch Times that he fled California in 1991 because he could see the state’s politics shifting rapidly to the left. Other states had lower costs of living, lower taxes, and fewer regulations, which he found attractive.

Gookin, a San Diego native and founder of the “For Dummies” book series, first moved to Issaquah, Washington, where he enjoyed the sense of community. Two years later, he left the Seattle suburb looking for something with a more small-town feel, and ultimately moved his family to Coeur D’Alene, about five hours east.

“We stopped in Coeur d’Alene and immediately fell in love,” Gookin, 64, told The Epoch Times. “As long as it had internet and FedEx, I was good. We enjoyed the small-town feel, how people knew each other, and the sense of community.”

Gookin, who has served as a city councilman since 2011, raised four boys in the North Idaho town. For Gookin, the sense of a tight-knit community beats the weather.

“No place would compare with here, so the weather isn’t that big of a factor,” he said.

A previous version of this article misstated the county where Rancho Cucamonga is located, Dan Gookin’s age, and when he joined the city council. The Epoch Times regrets the errors.