Living in Far Northern California

Far Northern California spans the Sacramento Valley's northern edge into the Shasta Cascade and the remote Modoc Plateau, anchored by Chico's genuine college-town identity (California State University, Chico, roughly 13,400 undergraduates) and Redding's outdoor-recreation gateway role near Mount Shasta and Shasta Lake, California's largest reservoir. Both cities carry real, disclosed, and defining wildfire histories that directly reshaped their present-day housing markets: the 2018 Camp Fire drove an estimated 19,000 Paradise-area survivors to relocate to Chico, growing the city's population by an estimated 20% and pushing home prices up roughly 15% in the following months, while Redding's 2018 Carr Fire was the first wildfire in the city's own history to burn directly across its limits. Susanville and Alturas, further north and east, represent genuine, extreme rural remoteness even within this already-rural region -- Susanville's decades-long prison-economy identity has genuinely shrunk since a 2023 closure, and Alturas, Modoc County's only incorporated city, sits roughly 114 miles from the nearest city over 50,000 population. All four towns run genuinely affordable relative to the rest of California.

Explore Far Northern California in depth

• Cost of Living & Housing in Far Northern California
• Best Places to Live in Far Northern California
• Moving to Far Northern California
• Climate & Lifestyle in Far Northern California

Places we've researched in Far Northern California

• Chico -- Butte County
• Redding -- Shasta County
• Susanville -- Lassen County (county seat)
• Alturas -- Modoc County (county seat)