The 50-year grudge: North Idaho and the Californians

Say "California" at a Coeur d'Alene backyard barbecue and watch what happens. Somebody groans. Somebody tells a story about a license plate. And somebody, sooner or later, admits they grew up in Orange County.

North Idaho has been grumbling about Californians for about half a century. The papers have kept a running record of it, and reading it end to end tells a story that is funnier, and more complicated, than the bumper stickers.

They were here first, sort of

The Sandpoint Reader's local historian points out that some of the earliest non-native settlers in Sandpoint came from California in the 1880s, and they helped build the town. She would know. She grew up in Southern California herself.

The grudge gets a name

In 1979, a Washington Post story by an Idaho Statesman writer put the feeling in a headline that compared Californians to a plague of locusts. Some newcomers in the 1970s swapped their license plates just to dodge the glares, according to a Tribune News Service look back at the history.

By the early 1990s, as droves of Californians headed north, a bumper sticker in North Idaho summed it up: "Welcome to Idaho. Now go home." Fox News dug that one up in a 2024 series on West Coast movers.

The Californians who changed North Idaho

Here is the part the bumper stickers leave out. The Californians who came north did change North Idaho.

High Country News traced it back to 1965, when an Orange County Republican organizer moved to Coeur d'Alene. Conservative newcomers, mostly from Southern California, helped quadruple Kootenai County's population after 1970 and, working with conservative locals, remade county politics. In the 2010 election, not a single Democrat won a partisan county office in Kootenai County. Reason, writing about that report, noted that by the end of the 1990s more than 500 retired California police officers had moved to North Idaho. In Sandpoint, a club of retired police and safety officers was mostly made up of Californians, the Inlander reported.

That pattern still holds. Fox News reported that about three out of four Californians who registered to vote in Idaho in a 2023 analysis signed up as Republicans. Bonner County Commissioner Luke Omodt put it plainly: "Politically, we are not changing anything."

Who is still coming

In 2019, the Coeur d'Alene Press tracked where the newest Californians came from. Of the roughly 3,000 newcomers who chose North Idaho the year before, the biggest group, 1,302 people, came from Orange, San Bernardino and San Diego counties. Another 737 came from Kern, Ventura and Los Angeles counties. In all, 36 California counties sent somebody north. One Coeur d'Alene Realtor told the Press it isn't just Californians, and that people come from all over.

The pandemic turned it up. Coeur d'Alene grew from 24,848 people in 1990 to 54,600 in 2020, the Idaho Capital Sun reported. KREM found locals who grew up here shopping for homes in other towns because they could no longer afford their own. Fox Business profiled an Orange County mortgage banker who moved to Coeur d'Alene during the pandemic, part of a wave it tied to California's politics and pandemic rules.

The Census keeps counting. Kootenai County gained about 3,100 residents from 2023 to 2024, and moves to and from the rest of the country added a net of about 2,900 people, according to USAFacts.

What locals are really mad about

Read enough letters to the editor and the complaint is rarely about where someone is from. It is about what changed after they arrived.

The Inlander reported that three-quarters of Kootenai County residents could afford to buy a home in 2016, and only about a quarter could by the time of its report. Renters were paying an average of 51% of their income. A 10-minute drive had become a 20-minute drive.

Jim Hammond, then Coeur d'Alene's mayor and a North Idaho resident for about 50 years, told Fox News in 2024 that he used to run into so many people he knew that he budgeted extra time for errands. Now he can't put a name to everyone he passes. Back in 1997, when he was Post Falls city administrator, he told the Spokesman-Review that the newcomers were building a more diverse economy for North Idaho. Both things can be true.

The twist: the newcomers complaining about newcomers

The sharpest edge of the grudge often comes from people who moved here themselves. In 2013, a lifelong Southern Californian who visits Sandpoint every year wrote to the Bonner County Daily Bee, urging the town not to let California liberals move in and change it. In 2021, a transplant wrote a Coeur d'Alene Press column welcoming Californians but asking them to respect the town for what drew them here. A Rathdrum reader answered with a column of his own titled "California: Just have to leave it behind."

Then-Commissioner Chris Fillios called out the irony to the Inlander: some recent arrivals want growth to stop right after they got here. One former Encinitas resident leaned into the joke, giving council speeches pitching a satirical "Make Idaho California Plan" with bike-only roads and a gas stove ban.

In Sandpoint, the Associated Press found longtime locals irked at Realtors marketing North Idaho as a conservative refuge. One resident said newcomers go to council meetings and tell people who grew up here to go back to California.

And not everybody wants the door shut. Back in 2015, a Post Falls man wrote to the Press hoping enough Californians would come to push his home value back up.

So who is a local?

A Coeur d'Alene Press humor columnist, Dave Oliveria, remembered moving to Kalispell, Montana, in 1977. A new neighbor warned him not to pull any "dirty California tricks." When he asked what that meant, the neighbor told him he already knew, and walked off.

Fifty years in, nobody can quite say what the trick is. What the record does show is that a lot of today's locals were yesterday's Californians, and the people arguing loudest about who belongs here often arrived the same way.

Moved here from California, or grew up watching them come? Tell us your side. Every number in this story names its source below.