The Emigrants : Recession and tumult have driven Californians from the Golden State. But have they found new opportunities where they landed?

For Judith King, who left Southern California seven years ago to escape traffic, crime and congestion, it has been a long and rough road to a new home.

First King and her family moved to the open spaces of Santa Fe, where they indeed found enchantment in New Mexico’s sunsets and desert vistas. But she also encountered resentment from locals, who blamed Californians for raising property values and stealing jobs. She struggled for a year before she found full-time work at a biotech company.

There were other problems: culture shock, her son’s academic woes, a divorce. All of which made King, 49, question the wisdom of leaving in the first place. Santa Fe “was a lovely place if you’re retired,” she said. “But not as a midlife career person.”

So in 1993, she moved again, this time to this centuries-old mill town of 65,000, about 20 miles west of Boston. Here, living in a white clapboard house nestled among the trees, she feels she has found a spot where the grass really is greener.

King’s experiences exemplify the problems that many Californians have faced when pulling up stakes in search of a better life away from earthquakes, drive-bys, traffic jams and riots.

Though much has been written about the thousands who have washed their hands of urban life in California since the late 1980s, little has been said about how they fare once they land in their new homes. Recent interviews with expatriates around the country, as well as with relocation and demographics experts, suggest that it has been a jarring experience for migrants from California, no matter which direction they headed.

That holds true even when expatriates describe themselves as happy, on balance, with their new lives--with bigger houses in crime-free neighborhoods, 10-minute commutes and car insurance that costs a third of what it used to.

Many encountered deep resentment on the part of locals, who blame California migration for ballooning property values or bringing in L.A.-style crime, pollution and congestion. In some parts of the South, Californians are known as the new carpetbaggers.

Others had difficulty finding new jobs, particularly in areas with heavy California migration, such as the Pacific Northwest and New Mexico, where Californians get blamed for taking jobs away from locals.

The migrants had trouble selling their homes, or took much less than they wanted simply to get out. This was particularly true of people who left at the height of California’s recession, when real estate prices had collapsed.

And a few, like King, report that it took more than one move to end up where they finally felt comfortable.

All of these difficulties are added to the stress of bad weather and leaving behind family and friends--perhaps the most often-expressed disadvantage of moving as some Californians retrace the routes back east that brought their forebears westward.

“We have placed people out of state who now want to come back,” said Chuck Hayes, vice president at Chaitin & Associates in Woodland Hills, a firm that helps people relocate. “They have families here, sometimes strong family ties, or they want to come back to be with older parents, or they don’t like the cold winters.”

Last year, Beth Glazer, 32, moved back to Los Angeles from Chicago, where she had relocated two years earlier after marrying Andy McLaughlin, 37, a Chicago native whom she had met on a trip.

The return was motivated in part by business concerns: McLaughlin, who managed parking garages in Chicago, felt that business opportunities would be opening up in L.A. as the recession ended. (In fact, the two recently opened their first garage in Santa Monica.)

And Glazer, a screenwriter, missed life in L.A.: “I did miss my family. I missed them terribly. I missed my friends. I had been trying to get into the entertainment industry for 10 years and felt that I had given up and left too early.”

She is not alone: There are preliminary signs that the flood of Californians leaving the state for other climes has stopped.

For the last four years, spurred mainly by the lingering recession, the number of departing Californians had exceeded the number of U.S. residents coming in. But that is changing as the state’s economic recovery picks up steam.

For the first time since 1990, the number of Californians exchanging their driver’s licenses for ones in other states has dropped. The driver’s license gauge is a key indicator of U.S. residents moving in or out of California.

During the 12 months ended in November, the number of people who turned in their California driver’s licenses in other states fell to 367,022, down from the 405,000 in the comparable period a year earlier, the state Department of Finance reported. Since 1988, more than 2 million people have exchanged their California driver’s licenses for those in other states.

Starting in 1991, the number of Californians leaving exceeded the number of other U.S. residents moving in. According to Department of Motor Vehicle records, the largest numbers of California transplants have moved to Washington, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Colorado.

“Recessions eventually end, and the influx will resume once California bids farewell to economic hard times,” Rand Corp. demographer Peter A. Morrison said in a recent paper.

For those who have left, the first hurdle has been selling their houses in a depressed market where values have fallen as much as 50%. “People are willing to move, but they’re just having a hard time selling their homes . . . because the value has decreased,” Hayes said.

It took Lockheed Corp. executive Jim Steele, 48, and his wife, Angela, 46, nearly two years to sell their home in Lancaster after they moved to suburban Atlanta in 1991 as part of the exodus of aerospace industry workers.

“I just barely got out,” Steele said. The house, for which the Steeles paid $90,000 nine years earlier, went for just $110,000, though it had been valued as high as $160,000, he said.

Beyond housing, the biggest problem for migrants has been finding a new job.

Many who relocated in recent years did so to follow work, particularly as the California recession ground on. But others left for lifestyle reasons: to shorten commutes, to get a bigger house, to escape urban decay.

These are the people who have found that the welcome mat may not be out professionally, even though the economy of the state to which they’ve relocated may be healthy.

Brial Wissman, 37, and his wife Lisa, 35, wanted to leave Southern California to escape crime and to raise their children in a more wholesome environment. Wissman, a onetime executive with Glendale Federal Savings & Loan, and his wife, a human resources specialist, made a vow that they would move when one of them found a job in another city.

Lisa was able to persuade her employer, a medical products company, to transfer her to Pittsburgh in a sales job. Brial quit his job, and the family moved.

As an outsider, Wissman found it difficult to find work. He recalled being told by a bank personnel director that he would have a better chance of being hired if he were from the Pittsburgh area. “I was flabbergasted,” he said.

When his wife needed to hire someone, she said her boss told her to recruit locals: “He said, ‘The people here want natives. They want to buy from someone they know is from Pittsburgh.’ ”

*

Other resentments vary by region. In Seattle, “they don’t like Californians very much,” said one recent arrival, a software entrepreneur who has hung on to her Marina del Rey home for two years rather than sell at a $1-million loss. “We were warned by the real estate brokers . . . to change our driver’s licenses right away. . . . I even heard that sometimes the cars are vandalized.”

The reasons were clear: Equity-rich Californians drove up real estate prices in the late 1980s. “You hear stories,” said Bonnie Fletcher, a relocation expert in Seattle, “ . . . about people rolling down their windows and shouting, ‘Go back where you belong!’ You hear people move into neighborhoods and find the neighbors not very friendly . . . because they have California plates.”

In Georgia, Lockheed’s Jim Steele was mindful about the perception that Californians are the South’s new carpetbaggers. He was particularly careful to avoid giving the impression that he received a huge bonus after moving. His compensation “is not what people think it is here,” he said.

For King, the problem was being part of the exodus of Angelenos that flooded into New Mexico in the 1980s. By 1990, about 23,000 outsiders, including many Californians, had moved to Santa Fe, boosting that artists’ colony to a city of 62,000--including 650 real estate agents and 51 acupuncturists, author Jim Robbins wrote in his 1993 book, “Last Refuge: The Environmental Showdown in Yellowstone and the American West.”

*

A former public relations specialist who had worked with Merv Griffin and other entertainment industry clients, King is a thoughtful woman with bright blue eyes and a ready smile. Sitting in her office in Massachusetts, she recalled her days in Santa Fe without excess affection.

She would meet and befriend other expatriate Californians only to find that they had decided to return to Los Angeles after failing to find work. She found the natives suspicious. “I found it to be a closed and guarded society on all levels,” she recalled.

Which is not to say that locals weren’t willing to take advantage of the influx. One longtime Albuquerque resident recalls that she bought her house for $150,000 less than two years ago, then turned around and sold it for $205,000--to a new arrival. “My realtor said, ‘Look for the Californians,’ ” the resident said.

King now lives with her son, Kyle, 11, and her daughter, Elizabeth, 17, in a town with snow, a 19th-Century train station and a Colonial-style Village Hall, a distinct contrast to the sun, chili peppers and luminaria of Santa Fe.

“I chose Framingham because it seemed to have . . . the greatest mix of types of people. That was important to me for my kids,” said King, who is white. Her children are of mixed racial heritage; her husband was African American.

“I wanted to see different people in the course of a day,” she said. “That was what I loved about Los Angeles. It’s what I missed about Santa Fe.”

The Wissmans made a double move as well. From Pittsburgh, they relocated to Columbus, Ohio, where Brial grew up before moving to Southern California in 1978.

There, he manages a branch of the discount brokerage Charles Schwab. Because they can afford to live on one income, Lisa now stays at home with their three boys.

Their four-bedroom brick house sits on land fronting a stream and woods in Westerville, Ohio, a suburb north of Columbus. Across the street, a bulldozer sits in a muddy lot, a sign of the area’s rapid growth.

Though the Wissmans appear to have achieved the hoped-for Beaver Cleaver home and lifestyle, they haven’t escaped L.A.-style woes entirely. Just after moving back to Columbus, Wissman said, there was a daytime shooting in the mall near his downtown office.

“Columbus is still a fairly large metropolitan area and you’re still going to have those things,” he said. “But I feel like it’s still under control here.”

Even when the transplants have resolved employment and housing problems and come to terms with anti-California sentiments, there’s the sadness of leaving behind friends and family.

In Kennesaw, Ga., Jim Steele’s wife has one regret about moving: leaving behind her daughter, Bridget, who still lives in Lancaster with her family.

“It wasn’t an easy decision for me,” Angela said, sitting in the couple’s brick house a stone’s throw from a local highway. The house is decorated with photographs of the couple’s children at various stages of their lives.

*

“We left my daughter and four of our grandkids, and my daughter is my best friend,” she said. As part of the move, she added, “James has to put up with the phone bill. We still talk every day about things.”

For some, however, the transition has been smooth.

Jeff La Flamme, 33, an animator, and wife Suzanne Scripps-La Flamme, 27, an artist, moved to New Mexico. They made their decision at 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life and I’ll never be that scared again,” said Scripps-La Flamme, referring to the earthquake that rocked the couple’s Van Nuys home like a dollhouse, shattering their new wedding crystal, dumping a bucket of indelible gold car paint and upending the contents of their refrigerator into a gooey mix on the kitchen floor.

“I was pregnant at the time, and I said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ ” she recalled.

The quake was merely the last straw in a series of frustrations that had dogged the La Flammes in Southern California.

They came to Los Angeles after graduating from college in Providence, R.I. He was seeking a career in the burgeoning animation business and prospered for a time.

But they were immediately subjected to the pressures of modern life, first at their Venice home and later in their apartment in Van Nuys.

“Some (person) got shot and killed in Venice Beach within the first six months we were there,” said La Flamme, an ebullient man with a beard and San Francisco Giants baseball cap. “We were always saying it was just stressful going to the corner store. . . . You leave the house and you feel that there’s this sense of something happening at any given moment. Someone could be pulling up, get mad at you about something (or) some gang guys could go by.”

Within two weeks of the Northridge quake, he had quit his job. The pair packed up what they could salvage and headed to Rio Rancho, a suburb of Albuquerque. It sits on a mesa northwest of town, near the new Intel Corp. plant under construction, which has brought in a wave of Californian migrants.

*

Growth is apparent everywhere. Two-lane roads winding through desert brush are clogged with cars at 4 p.m. on a Friday. Subdivisions cover the mesa, with neighborhoods of one-story, ranch-style homes fronted by gravel, brown lawns and cinder-block walls under an immense sky.

La Flamme quickly found employment at a computer animation firm nearby. Their daughter, Annelise, was born in September. And Scripps-La Flamme plans to begin painting again: She has already set up a studio in the garage of their leased house.

They’ve taken to the new location. Their dining room sports a new Southwestern-designed table and chairs. The living room looks out on the Sandia Mountains, which glow lavender in the sunset.

“There are certain colors and certain foods that are only New Mexico,” Scripps-La Flamme rhapsodized. “It seems like you could see farther, see better, breathe easier, hear better.”