People have mentioned Asheville as a place for your to consider, so I'll address what I can about it considering your criteria:
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Originally Posted by CaliNative
1. Affordable living cost---rents less than $1000 for a nice one br apt. or under $250,000 for a decent house. Reasonable taxes and govt. services.
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This might be difficult. You can still find one-bedroom apartments for under a thousand, but they'll still be close to that amount. They'll also be tend to be in charmless suburban complexes. The cheapest I was able to find was $835 for a rundown 70's complex on the east side of town. You won't find anything affordable in or near the cool neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, if you're very lucky you can find a house inside the city for $250k, but about the only places that go for that are doublewide trailers. The farther out from town you go the lower the prices will be. In town, for a house though, expect to pay $300k at minimum.
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2. Climate not intolerably cold in winter or insufferably hot, humid and bug ridden in summer. Moderate 4 seasons OK. I think I could get used to a cold winter as long as it doesn't get much below 0 degrees F. Long hot humid summers more difficult, and bugs that bite are a negative. That rules out much of the south and Maine during the early summer black fly season.
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The past couple of summers have features 90+ temperatures for weeks on end, and bugs will be awful if you are near any source of standing water like a pond or a wetland. Mosquitoes can be a special kind of hell. In the winter it can get viciously, bitterly cold, and I've been informed by knowledgeable sources from northern climes that there is something about the cold here that is just somehow more unbearable than the cold found in Connecticut, Wisconsin, or the Andes Mountains (which is where the knowledgeable sources were from). The coldest is has ever gotten here is -35F.
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3. Decent cultural attractions, nice parks, museums, libraries etc. Major sports teams a plus but not essential. Smaller cities (under 500,000) OK as long as there is a good university nearby, and a fair concentration of intelligent people.
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Decent attractions, yes but you likely won't consider UNC-A a good university, nor any of the others nearby like Western Carolina, Mars Hill, Appalachian State, or any of the colleges. The closest "good" universities are probably Wake Forest and the University of Tennessee.
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4. Tolerable traffic & commutes, decent economy, fair air & water quality, no EPA superfund cleanup sites nearby.
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To a Californian traffic is tolerable so long as it is actually moving, I have been informed, but to the natives here, traffic is godawful. We are a city of 90,000 in a metro of 250,000 accommodating -- according to the latest figures -- roughly 27,000 tourists per day (or about ten million per year if you prefer). That's a lot of people driving.
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5. Crime and homelessness not rampant; opioid and drug use not out of control.
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We can have, depending on the weather, between 500 and a 1000 homeless people in town on any given day. Crime isn't out of control, but the drug problem is. In 2016, 400 babies were born addicted to opiates at the hospital here in town, which is ten percent of the total of babies born there, and double the number of addicted babies born in 2015. Meanwhile, a drug bust in a neighboring county ended up with so many arrests that school buses had to be brought in to transport the arrestees, and it turned out they were the center of a drug ring that supplied heroin to all the big cities in Tennessee.
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6. No bias or dislike against ex-Californians ( I guess that rules out Oregon & Washington).
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Anyone from outside gets bitched about, whether they're from Florida, Atlanta, up north, or anywhere else, but people will be decent enough not to say anything to your face.
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7. Minimal risk from hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, fires, droughts, floods etc.
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Increasingly it seems we're having more erratic weather, leading to more droughts and fires. Otherwise we have the occasional flood but we're safe otherwise. Tornadoes are extremely rare and only touch down briefly. I can recall a huge to-do made in the news when one touched down on the Biltmore Estate and tore a branch off a tree, and again when one did the same thing in West Asheville. You won't have to worry about volcanoes, and you won't have to worry about earthquakes until the New Madrid fault lets loose again, or the one that hit Charleston back in the 18-whatevers.
Now, I know you weren't likely to consider my city in the first place, but you did ask, and I figured I'd answer all the same.
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