Behold the ancestral home. My grandparents' parents ranched Claunch, NM and the Mountainair valley as sharecroppers. 400 acres of cattle, subsistence corn, the whole nine yards. Then a drought hit in 1908. And since the soil is so alkali and the groundwater so brutally artesian, if you sunk a well and watered your trees with it they'd die. Town of 400 people up and left. What's left now is the church. The family (7 sons, 8 daughters, of which my grandfather was the 4th oldest) reunites every year down there because it was Great Grandma's "dying wish." there's nothing but dust, heart disease and fried catfish. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah... are full of townships that are about to cease to exist. Purchase your real estate accordingly.
First off, 60 miles east of San Francisco isn't Northern California. Second, as a Californian, I support any attempt to cut back on water usage. I don't care if the farmers lose all their business, they shouldn't have been growing cotton and rice in California in the first place.
What is it then? I always find it interesting how people from different parts of the sate divide things, but to me as someone who's lived just about everywhere from San Francisco south, anything that's geographically north of Santa Cruz is "Northern" CaliforniaFirst off, 60 miles east of San Francisco isn't Northern California.