Corruption, Bribes, Blackouts, Fires, High Gas Prices: Who Wants to Live in California Today?

“I guess if you run out, you just die?” Ms. Summers wrote on Facebook. Then the 62-year-old lay still again, conserving energy and hoping for a miracle.

Rampant wildfires—and the precautionary blackouts that utilities including PG&E Corp. have instituted to try to prevent them—are reshaping life across the Golden State and transforming the state’s reputation.

Long known as the home of easy living, with its beaches and year-round sunshine, California is increasingly seen as a difficult place, where the government and corporate institutions can’t reliably offer basic services. Some residents are questioning whether they should leave as a result.

California has the highest gas prices in the country. Housing prices are the second-highest in the nation, triggering a statewide lack of affordable housing.

Homelessness is surging in the state’s major cities, despite billions spent by state and local governments to combat the problem. A drought, which gripped the state for more than seven years, left some towns without clean water.

Now, more than two million people have lost their power in Northern and Southern California in the past month and hundreds of thousands have evacuated their homes to avoid fire danger, a number likely to grow before the year ends.

Many of those hardest hit live in poorer rural and exurban areas like Ukiah that haven’t benefited as much from the economic boom as cities like San Francisco that, due to denser housing, are also safer from wildfires. Ukiah’s median household income is about $43,000 a year.

“It’s like living in a third-world country,” said Marilyn Dalton, 78, a resident of Potter Valley, near Ukiah.

A city of 16,000 located two hours north of San Francisco, Ukiah exemplifies the new reality facing millions of Californians this autumn’s fire season and, experts predict, for many to come.

Although Ukiah escaped the first of PG&E’s intentional blackouts, the second and third ones rolled into each other here, with no break in between. Wildfires have come dangerously close, forcing residents just outside town to evacuate. Cell signals have faded; gas lines have been hourslong; and heat has cut out on freezing nights.

Two years ago, Ms. Dalton and thousands of others were forced to flee as a wildfire swept through Mendocino County, killing nine people. Last year, school was closed here for a week because of smoke from a fire 150 miles away. During the blackout last week, Ms. Dalton’s toilet, which runs on electricity, stopped flushing.

“If I wasn’t as old as I am, I would pack up and get the hell out,” she said.

Kerry Randall, a facility administrator for the city of Ukiah, estimated that 90% of the restaurants in town were closed during the blackout. The wait for pizza at one of the few restaurants that stayed open was more than an hour.

“People are getting testier,” Mr. Randall said on the third day without power. “No milk. People haven’t had showers, because their water heaters are out. Nobody’s had a hot meal.”

Ukiah opened up a city hall as a shelter. The first day, scores of residents sat around the city council dais, charging phones and oxygenators. City officials debated what to do about Halloween if the lights weren’t back on by then—they didn’t want kids roaming the streets in the dark with all the traffic lights out.

The lights came back on Oct. 30, but Mr. Randall said the expenses, both for the city and for businesses, would be considerable.