I am moving to Torrance in June and am having a doozy of a time trying to figure out where to live. I really know next to nothing about the area, and am concerned about living somewhere with a low crime rate (I started a thread on this and some kind Dopers helped me out a lot, thanks so much!)
Any good suggestions for websites or other tools I can use to find a place? I would like to spend no more than 1100ish/month, and would like my own bathroom (studio is fine) as well as off-street parking.
I signed up for westsiderentals.com, but read too late the negative reviews on yelp. Don’t think I can get my money back, sigh. Anyone have any experience with this?
Torrance is a great city. The area I would recommend is between190th and Del Amo, and between Hawthorne and the western city limit. My wife called this area the “contractors’ ghetto” as it seemed every third or fourth resident is a building contractor or subcontractor.
Downtown there are numerous older but well-kept-up homes, many of them Spanish Revival style, not surprisingly. The further south you go in the direction of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the pricier the homes. Likewise for the snmall beach area. Cheaper homes are north of Artesia Blvd or east of Crenshaw Blvd.
One thing to be extremely careful about when reading listings is the difference between “Torrance” and “Torrance P.O. (post office)”. Torrance = nice for the most part. Torrance P.O…um…not so nice. It’s actually a strip of Los Angeles city and unincorporated county stuff that has the 90501 zip code. Not quite inner-city ghetto hell-hole, but as close to it as you’ll find in the South Bay. Lots of bars on the windows, lots of graffiti.
Anything west of Crenshaw and south of 190th should be ok. There are tons of apartment complexes along Anza between Del Amo and Torrance Blvds.
When I looked for apartments in the South Bay back in the 1990s, I usually just used the Daily Breeze classifieds. I don’t know if they have their classified ads on-line though. (Plus the paper got bought out by a chain and isn’t locally produced anymore)
Actually, I have never lived in Torrance, but I have lived in the South Bay since 1965; Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Lawndale and Gardena. As you get closer to the Harbor Freeway the neighborhoods get cruddier, but if there is a really unsafe part of the city I’m not aware of it.