indeed, hutch. Since you have been here a long time, presumably your house has appreciated greatly; so sell it, and move somewhere cheap where your profit alone will sustain you for a while.

About the transit projects stymied by NIMBYs and others, if they had been built commuting would be less horrendous. Along w/more transit we badly need all of the denser housing the NIMBYs blocked. Allowing the dumb corporate designers to build low rise offices all over greater San Jose instead of towers wasted much acreage which could have housing. Same stupidity for years in Berkeley--the I liked the small town where I went to college, all you others go back where you came from crap, only works in an area not worth living in.

Why do I stay? For starters as a movie buff, the best single film Archive/Theater outside LA is a civil half hour stroll from my front door. And I have a network of kin/clan.
As to the whining about safety and health regulations, I support most of them; I like cleaner air. Forty-seven years in doing construction work, I have never been seriously injured and ,like it that way. You want looser regulatory oversight, I am sure WV, KY, TN AL, MS all have cheap housing and lower taxes. Oh, and we have trains here too.