Change of State - Washington to North Carolina, or maybe Austin

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Or, if you have any other suggestions for reasonably major metropolitan areas that have NO snow and keep the rain segregated to less than half the year, but still enough rain to support plant life that doesn't need spikes - I'm all ears.
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Phoenix isn't too bad -- I've lived here for 30 years and have only ever seen snow in the city ONCE; I can't remember the last time the temperature went below thirty degrees, either. And despite the lack of rain (which is an inaccurate description -- we have about two or three short "rainy seasons" every year, often enough to flood our dry riverbeds), there's no shortage of water... there's all sorts of trees here, and a metric shitload of swimming pools.

As far as real estate goes, in my opinion, we actually benefited from the housing crash -- we went from prohibitively high prices to a buyers' market in five years. There was a time when you couldn't find a comfortable place in a decent neighborhood for less than a hundred thousand dollars... but a lot of those houses have dropped by now to $90K or lower, and in many cases there's no HOA to deal with either. There's a ton of affordable apartments, condos, and townhouses scattered all over the place, as well.

Culturally, we're not bad off. We've got a load of museums and libraries, several sports teams, about five hundred excellent restaurants (ignore whatever the Texans may tell you, Arizona and New Mexico are the only places in the country where you can get decent Mexican food), and a pretty active music scene -- although it tends to skew rather solidly to the Left, as you'd expect from any music scene with a major university as one of its pools of talent.

The major downsides of living here are: (1) We have apparently imported a lot of people from southern California over the last fifteen years. While they haven't quite managed to infect us with their politics yet, they HAVE brought their lack of driving etiquette with them. (2) The summer heat is particularly oppressive for those who aren't used to it; we can go as long as two weeks on end with the temperature hitting three-digit territory every day. On the bright side, humidity -- which Arizonans have come to find infinitely more annoying than mere heat -- is mercifully rare; when we say "It's a dry heat", we're usually bragging. Of course you will probably pay through the nose for your electricity once it gets hot enough that you have to run your air conditioner twenty-one hours a day, but you will also eventually realize that it's worth every cent. (3) The bad parts of town are in fact quite scuzzy, but that's the case with any metropolitan area -- and anybody who's been here longer than six months knows how to avoid them anyway. Meanwhile, I live in a place where I've accidentally left my car parked on the street unlocked overnight on more than one occasion and had absolutely nothing happen to it.

Went to college there. Not a bad town at all, but it's not always green. Quite a drought going on this year. Quite hot in the summer, too, with humidity, though not as bad as the Gulf coast. Fall and winter are generally pretty pleasant. Good tech industry base for jobs if that's your thing.

"The San Francisco of Texas"
Lived there off and on for 3 years.

A college town, liberal in politics. As Flabbergasted noted, a good tech industry. I was working in Semiconductors at Motorola and Applied Nanotech.

As you noted, there's a good music scene. There's also a big bar scene.

Also as Flabbergasted noted, they're in the middle of a huge drought. In winter, they have a lack of snow moving equipment. I was there through 2 snow storms and basically the city shut down. When I went to work (10 mile drive) I lost count of the number of cars piled up on the shoulder at 50.

Do not think of Las Vegas the economy has crashed and burned the summer weather is beyond hot and the town is ugly in the day time.

On the plus side the housing bubble burst has driven home prices into the floor so it's a buyers market here.

Then you might want to consider Cornelius, NC more carefully, 10000li. The Wiki article says the Mecklenburg area is mostly white, but Asians do have a 1.24% of the population, and Davidson College is a very highly regarded school with an AMAZING code of ethics (if a student finds a coin on the sidewalk, they have to post a found ad on the bulletin board. My nephew Trey was really delighted with the school. All of his classmates whom I met at the graduation were also well pleased with it, and the student body seemed pretty diverse.)

There are eight private schools listed in the article as being in the Cornelius area.

(PS. the thread title is from "Doc Hollywood." He hets temporarily detained in a rural town in South Carolina.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius,_North_Carolina

The town of Davidson around the university had some gorgeous older homes; on the outskirts, the development was all coordinated so that the shops, restarants, and stores all blended together with brick and stucco architecture--I was impressed, and that takes some doing.

Lake Norman is quite lovely and very big--I seem to recall not being able to see the far shore from the bridge we'd crossed. One of the parties for the kids of my nephew's clique took place at the most beautiful lake house that the families got together and rented for the weekend. Across the inlet were McMansions on postage-stamp lots, but the side we were on had very classy-looking (think expensive New England vacation home) houses.

Only you can know what it is you're looking for, but you might want to consider this area.

http://www.cornelius.org/

I did my time in the Army ar Ft. Bragg, NC. It was nice, I enjoyed it, but I don't have any experience with housing there (I lived in the barracks). I can tell you, though, that it DOES snow. Not much. So little, in fact, that half an inch while I was there got the entire base shut down. I live in Ohio, so to me that was hilarious. But it does snow, however negligably.

Also, I grew up in the LA area. I loved SoCal, and I miss it. If I could afford to live there again, I would. If you can afford the high COL in Cali, I recommend it. California is beautiful.