Idaho, apparently, isn’t for everyone. A conservative family who relocated to Idaho from California have packed up and returned to the Golden State because they had difficulty “fitting in” in America’s far north.
Coree Ray and Melvin Galang returned to California in April, announcing their change of heart on TikTok. They cited a culture of gossip and judgmentalism as the reasons they decided to leave Idaho behind.
The family left an LA suburb for Idaho in 2021 with their twin daughters as well as Coree’s four other children who pre-dated their relationship. But, to their dismay, they discovered that political comfort is not enough to make for a good cultural fit.
Coree, a 51 year-old caucasian woman did not mention address questions and claims from commenters about whether prejudice against her interracial family was part of the trouble that she encountered in Idaho, or whether such issues played any part in their decision to leave.
In their departure video, the family danced together in the driveway of their seven-bedroom Idaho Falls home—a neighborhood whose crime rate is twenty-six percent below the national average. Los Angeles, by contrast, boasts a crime rate a little over fifty-two percent aboce the average. California has seen an explosion in open-air drug abuse and homelessness in recent years, especially in its major cities.
These factors are among those driving the current mass exodus from California. Idaho—which—ranks among the top five destinations for exiting Californians—is a landlocked state with weather far more extreme than anything a coastal Californian could hope to experience on their home soil. But despite its natural beauty and low living costs, Idaho can be isolating. Outside its major city, Boise, it is characterized by scattered, small, close-knit communities that can be tough for outsiders to break into. Even Idaho Falls, which Coree and Melvin tried to make into a home, has a population of under 66,000 people—and it is one of Idaho’s biggest cities.
