I hear you on the vibes thing, nothing better then the West Coast, more specifically... Cali. imo.
Sure there is, it's called Portland, OR.
I lived in California for about 25 years, the vast majority of my life, and I chose to leave for several reasons.
Traffic: As mentioned before, Californian's are terrible drivers. Merging onto a freeway is just too much to ask for out there.
People: Everyone is late for something and the financial debacle that has touched everyone in Cali carries with it an air of tension. The douchebag to educated-individual ratio out there is very poor. I'd say 1 in every 10 people I met there was what I consider "worth while."
Water: I don't care what city you are in, if it is reclaimed and "cleaned" urine, your CA water is nasty. What the LA basin has done to the Colorado river is inexcusable. Most cities carry 5000x the toxic levels of hexavalent chromium as well. Filthy water.
Resource Management: California was the 5th largest economy in the world at one time. This is no longer the case. The poor governing, and poor choices of Governing bodies, is a major contributing factor. The "middle-management" in the CA gov't drained the state of its final resources all while assisting them to crash and burn.
Trash: Take a drive down any one of those listed freeways (especially 101) and count the trash on the side of the road. Californians are numbed to the accumulation of debris on the side of the road. The state, for all intents and purposes, is disgusting everywhere outside of the Sierras.
Smell: Yes. California is funky smelling. If you live there and don't think so, it's because you are used to it. Some places don't smell "California." Tahoe, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara... And if you can smell anything but Cow shit in Tracy I'd be surprised. Seriously though, the state has this funky ass "rotting" smell I can smell it for the first few hours I get off a plane.
Ambient Noise: People don't think about this but when you live an a place where there are 15 million or so other individuals within a 50 mile radius there's going to be a lot of ambient noise. Cars, the hum of street lights, air conditioners, garage doors... It all adds up to noise pollution and if you're sensitive towards it (listening for it at night) you'll hear this hum. A kind of frequency that I think puts people on edge without them even knowing it. Find yourself in the forest, surrounded by 1 individual in a 50 mile radius, and the quiet that was nature (and the world we lived on for 100,000 years) and you'll notice the Californian Hum. Its like nails on a chalk board to me.
Living in California, let me let you in on some things:
Renting a 10x10 bedroom in a shared house will cost $450 to $600 per month in the Bay Area.
Renting a 600sqft studio apt will cost $950 to $1000 per month in the Bay Area.
Renting a 3 Bedroom Townhouse will cost $1350 to $1800 per month in the Bay Area.
Renting a 4 Bedroom home with a loft will cost $2800 to $3000 per month in the Bay Area.
Gas is more expensive. Food is more expensive. Power is more expensive.
Everything is more expensive, from shirts to shoes, because there is a 10% sales tax in CA. So, after taking 15% of your pay for state taxes they then ding you another 10% of every dollar you spend. Living in CA is easily 20% more expensive at the end of the month compared to living in almost any other state.
What I like about Oregon is that it has all the things I enjoyed in CA. Great hiking, beauty, nice beaches, good food, artistic spirit, only now I pay tremendously less. Especially for weed. Having bought weed in CA for 10 years or so I wonder where everyone is getting these great deals on bud. 90 for a quarter is normal. Sometimes I'd get a friendly price of $80... but $25 an eighth is laughable. I suppose it is who you know. Personally, I grow indoors, and the final cost is somewhere around $2 per gram. Outdoors I could do it for less. I definitely can get behind the over-priced nat
Rather than $950 per month for a shitty little studio in San Jose, CA I pay $850 per month for a very nice 2bd/2ba apartment in Oregon. Rather than paying about $0.21 per kilowatt hour I now pay about $0.11 per kilowatt hour. A local grocery chain, Winco Foods, has taken my $330 grocery trips and turned them into $200 grocery trips.
The wine is good and cheap (I actually prefer the Oregon Pinot to the Central Coast Pinot) and the people here are really what makes it. Now, anywhere you go there will be some bad apples, but the overall post-college age (late 20's to early 30's) group of individuals here are very open-minded. I'd always heard "You're not like other people." Which I think always meant "you're not a normal Californian." When I arrived here in Oregon it just felt like home. There's a way of thinking, and looking at the world, that Californians don't have as much as a spoiled child would not have much in the way of philosophical insight.
The people aren't hurried, too busy to see the beauty around them, and it's this little change of pace that makes the biggest difference IMO. The water is clean, the stress level is way low, and the beauty of the PacNorWest is not lost here.