"quite liberal and tolerant"

The Bay has a kind of a specific moral view, which is sometimes applied in a fairly authoritarian manner.

It's not very Liberal, and arguably not hugely tolerant either.

For example, all sorts of activities which are common and normal in the rest of America and the world are either frowned upon, or considered fully uncool in the Bay. Things like fishing. Hunting. Most sports. Talking about sports. Twangy accents. Country music. This is a long list.

For example, promoting vegetarianism, and frowning upon those who are not (or forbidding it) as is now the case at 'We Work' - isn't remotely liberal. (Can you imagine if Texas Oil required their employees to be meat eaters?)

Though most of that won't get you in trouble in the Bay, it puts you in the 'out club' in much the same way that being a little bit to colourful or effete might put you in the 'out club' in Texas.

FYI - Having lived both in Texas and The Bay, I'm confident in saying that in the vast, vast majority of Texas you have nothing to worry about if you don't fit the Texas profile though in some legal cases it might be tricky. You just won't be 'cool' in their sense. There are tons of out gay people in Texas, working in all sorts of industries. It's not as good as the Bay, surely, but it's not hell on earth.

When I was in Texas, the ladies in the office would not have it that a young single man would be alone for Thanksgiving. They put myself and the other ex-pats into homes for the holiday dinner.

In Cali, nobody really cared about Thanksgiving, and certainly did not think to care that some people might be alone during this festive time.

Both areas have a general view of how things ought to be, and that view is applied sometimes in an authoritarian manner, and neither of them are hugely tolerant or Liberal. They have 'their ways'.

> most young people I know/work with in California who comes from the South does not want to return for these specific reasons

I lived in the City of St. Louis† for 13 years (and in the County for 6 before that) before moving to NYC. What I find is that young folks here who say they're from, say, Cleveland or St. Louis or similar cities in the South and whose experiences since moving have led them to believe that nothing they've found here exists back home, are often from the exurbs of those places and don't actually know what it's like to live in the center of a Midwestern or Southern city.††

I suspect they wouldn't much like the exurbs of New York, either.

We like to talk about red states vs. blue states, but the reality is that blue cities give way to purple and then red counties pretty quickly, even in liberal strongholds like New York.

Now, look, that's not to say that there are no differences in culture between, say, Atlanta and San Francisco. Obviously there are big ones! But when you dig into what people actually know about living in this or that part of the country, there's often not a lot there. Or, more charitably, individual experiences vary wildly (even within a single metro area).

† Not the South, but I think the point I'm trying to make here still holds.

†† It also seems worth noting that the experience of living in a big, new city in your early 20s (with all the new freedoms that come with that) as compared to wherever you happened to be when you were 14 is -- well, let's just say there are important perception-shifting factors.

It’s less pretentious and more that you’re just missing out on what the south has to offer. The south definitely has these negative aspects, but I argue that letting bad apples define a whole region of American is missing the forest for the trees. I likewise read headlines of mobs attacking FAANG charter busses, out of control office and apartment rents and employees living out of their cars, pervasive homelessness, and high local taxes, and I wonder why these educated, open and well travelled people put up with it.

If Tim Cook opened a research center or similar in an SEC college town like Auburn, AL, as an example, they could 1) totally dominate the university’s research pipeline relatively free from other corporate competitors, like create a custom departments silicon, materials, sensors, AI, whatever else 2) high quality of life for employees and their families with good public schools and high quality cheap housing, 3) win over the school’s board of trustees via major partnerships and get the university to do a lot to work for you for free, 4) abundant land for cheap office space 5) a high quality transit system 6) 1 hr from Atlanta’s enormous international airport plus a high quality general airport big enough for large private jets.

It just seems like a win-win, yet I don’t see anyone doing it (and maybe there are great reasons why!)

The south is definitely more xeno/homophobic, and that's unfortunate, and there's really good reasons why that might be a reason that people might not want to live there. There's also good reasons to live in the big southern cities. To compare with Northern VA, for example--growing up there, I didn't know a single black person. The area is almost exclusively white and Asian, with Hispanic people occupying a different economic tier and being quite segregated socially (and quite a bit of political tension as a result). Atlanta, by contrast, is far more integrated, with wealthy black communities, black professionals, athletes, media personalities, politicians, etc. You're almost certainly more likely to encounter racists in Atlanta, but much more likely to encounter the sort of integrated society liberals profess to want.