I like the area... Sebastopol is especially interesting to me as an undercover hippie. It's like a small town version of Berkeley; every day the antiwar protestors stand on the corner, and everyone seems to be a healer of some sort. The only big chain store in town is Whole Foods.
There are a lot of homes that are seriously off the grid: built by the owners without regard to code, probably not paying property tax on improvements, and run off solar or other renewables.
But there are lots of downsides:
The main artery highway 101 simply doesn't have the capacity for all the development that has happened up there in the past couple of decades. The traffic jams would make it hard to get to San Francisco for evening or weekend events.
The real estate prices are declining faster than the Bay Area, because lots of homes were purchased by speculators from the Bay Area or hippies who were amazed that they could own a home with a subprime loan on the earnings from their wheatgrass shot stand.
The quirky housing is expensive and labor-intensive to maintain, which is a consideration for someone at retirement age.
It costs almost as much to live out there as living much closer to the city, in say the East Bay.