The median home costs more than half a million dollars. What more do you need to know?
That's the inverse of collapse. It's an indication of extreme growth, in which housing supply has not kept up with demand.
California is not growing any faster than the rest of the country in terms of GDP, population, or wages per worker, and it's growing much more slowly compared to other Sun Belt states. States like Texas that have actually experienced "extreme growth" over the past couple of decades have built large numbers of new homes. About the only kind of growth in which California now leads is in its homeless population.
Anyway, "collapse" as applied to California refers to dysfunction and quality of life, not population size. It ranks 49th in the country in housing supply and is building tens of thousands of units per year when market analysts are calling for hundreds of thousands. Home ownership is completely unaffordable for the median family. Renting consumes an enormous portion of working people's incomes. Group housing arrangements and extreme commutes have become common. It may not be the Crisis of the Third Century, but it's a f*cking disaster nonetheless.
Indeed, the housing situation in the Bay Area is completely out of control. I am buying a house now, and I just got in under the wire in terms of being able to afford it. Prices in the City of Richmond (where I am buying) are increasing at a rate of $50k/yr. It is closer to $100k/yr in SF. I am saving $1,200/mo by going from renting to owning, simply because of the difference that exists between the stratospheric prices of SF and the merely exorbitant prices of western Contra Costa County. And as I say that, I fully recognize that being able to purchase marks me as "one of the Fortunate Ones" in the grand scheme of things. The Bay Area is rapidly becoming unfavorable to anyone who isn't a tech bro, while, as shua pointed out, the tech bros are trying to eliminate everyone else's job.
To put not too fine a point on it, I agree with others in this thread that it is incorrrect to say that California is not collapsing, but the state is facing deep systemic problems that are hard to identify among traditional indicators of economic performance, but are obvious if you live in the Bay Area (can't comment on SoCal). If these problems are not addressed, it is possible that we could see some fashion of a collapse in the medium-term future, when critical sectors of the economy that happen to not be tech get squeezed out as nobody can afford to live on the pay that they offer.