A small price to pay for the young hot blonde babes walking around…
ETA, and that was meant to be gender non-specific, for whatever floats your boat.
I moved from Peekskill to SoCal in the 80s. Didn’t like it so much, moved back after a year. Things are different out west. This was the LA area, tons of transplanted people there, lots of nice locals, but also lots of ‘plastic’ people trying to reinvent themselves, trying to break into show biz, trying to create an image instead of a life. My kids were very young, preschool age, so there was no impact on them but my wife and I both grew up in the Northeast burbs and aside from people we already knew out there we didn’t find ourselves fitting in.
But that was us, you might be entirely different. Work was scarce then, and I hear similar things now, lots of applicants for every job. There may be work for someone with experience in a bank, I can’t say. Housing costs are high, but so are they in the NYC metro area. You absolutely need to travel by car there, and longer commutes are common.
Have you ever spent any time there? Do you know anybody there already?
I grew up in rural Ohio, moved to urban Ohio, then Boston, and ended up in Los Angeles. Compared to Boston, LA is harder to get to places, but more and better places to get to. Traffic is more crowded, but drivers are less rude. Urban sprawl is endless, but lower density. People are image conscious, but laid back. You can be as isolated as you like, or find a community (and LA has every culture and club you can imagine).
I tell people I immigrated from the Midwest. The difference compared to Ohio is palpable, but I’m happy here, despite a lot of misgivings I had.
Nah, pretty much the same when I left. On the positive side, ‘Dude, I flaked,’ is a perfectly reasonable excuse.
Let’s Go: California, c. 1985, called Southern California drivers ‘confident and speedy’. My now-wife and her cousin were shocked at how close people drive to one another when they visited me there. The thing about driving in SoCal is that, for the most part, everyone knows what the other drivers are going to do. They know that Honda is going to move over a lane, so they let him. ‘I’ll let you get away with what you’re doing, and then someone will let me get away with what I’m doing later.’ It mostly works, as long as everyone understands The Rules. Which most of them mostly do. (I can tell you, it’s maddening for a born-and-bred SoCal driver up here in Washington!)
I grew up in LA. Central LA.
Things that I like and still miss.
-There are lots and lots of distinct neighborhoods. Walk to the store, the park, know your neighbors, has a distinct feel, actual neighborhoods.
-There’s a lot of culture. I miss the museums, like the Getty and the Tar Pits, and the Art Museum next door.
-Fabulous restaurants from every cuisine you’ve ever heard and some you haven’t.
-A real melting pot of a city. A lot of different cultures. 53 different languages spoken at my elementary school.
-It’s open. The sense of the city and the skyline is open. Compared to NYC or other cities, LA is sprawling and, for the most part, you see the sky. You’re not hemmed in by concrete canyons of skyscrapers.
What’s not to like:
-Traffic. It sucks. You learn ways around it, or just live with it. Public transportation is not great.
-Expense. This is relative. Compared to NYC or the Bay Area, it’s not bad.
My advice is to do some research on the areas you think look interesting and go out and visit for a few weekends or weeks to get a feel for things. The further inland you go, the hotter and dryer it will get.
Endorsed. I was stunned when I moved up to the Bay Area. Folks are insane. Left turn from the right lane? Sure! Moving to Oregon was actually a relief. They might not know the rules, but there are a lot less of them to worry about!
Oregon: Purgatory for L.A. drivers. shudder
When I lived in the DC area, I desperately wanted to move to California, and lots of people said some variation of that. But it’s really not that easy. If you don’t have friends there you can stay with while you look for a job, you need to have a LOT of money saved up if you’re moving into a high-cost-of-living area. Nobody will rent you an apartment without a job and you’re going to be hemorrhaging money until you find one.
I live in Northern California and I would gladly trade places with you even though I love the weather here (In SoCal, too).
Why? Because the people. I just can’t get a fix on them. The whole passive-aggressive thing is just something I don’t get. Even after 20 years here. I was raised in the urban Midwest but with something more like an East coast attitude. Whenever I’m in NYC I instinctively get where the people are coming from and have no problems communicating with them. Here in California? Nothing but issues.
It’s a popular notion in California that New Yorkers are rude and Californians are oh so casual and nice. Don’t believe it. If you (the OP) are from NYC you should get that New Yorkers aren’t rude so much as they are “brisk”. It’s not the same thing at all.
As for Californians, yes, they certainly are casual, but often to the point that they are rude because anything outside of their little bubble of interests does not concern them so they mostly can’t be bothered with other people and their concerns.
Be very, very careful about pulling up your New York roots and heading out here. It could be a social shock that you will never get over and desperately wish you were back East.
I agree. Again I’ve lived in SoCal and NY (aka ‘NYC’) though I admit I’m a NY’er. But I found the CA refrain of ‘people here are laid back’ to be kinda doubtful (to say it a more laid back way than ‘bunch of crap’ 
). It can depend obviously who you work or ‘hang’ with but I found it to be crap when I was college age in San Diego working a blue collar job, and more so still in business school in LA later on. My CA native classmates were good at pretending they were ‘laid back’, as I saw it. Which didn’t make them bad people or inferior to NY’ers, and it’s all a NY’er’s impression. But it is another NY’er asking.
I lived in Japan for awhile also. IME CA’an ‘laid back’ is kind of like Japanese ‘very polite’. It’s just a surface custom, little to do with how nice people actually are.
I also moved to Northern California and this is so true. East Coasters are brusque but they understand that we all live in a society and all have obligations. But the casual rudeness of Californians is mind-boggling. They are late to EVERYTHING, and that’s even if they show up at all. They just don’t care about anything other than themselves. Anything intended for public use invariably gets trashed. Someone spiked my local hiking trail with NAILS. Who does that shit?
The California mentality is “I’m going to do whatever I want and fuck whatever problems it causes anyone else. And if something makes me uncomfortable I’m just going to ignore it.” I honestly believe that if I were attacked on the subway, nobody would intervene; everyone would just stare at their phones and pretend like nothing was going on.
Dude, I flaked.
And the worst part is not that many Californians are rude; I mean, you find that everywhere–yes, even NYC. The worst part is that if you’re from the East it takes a while to understand they’re being rude. It takes a long while to understand what people really mean because people here don’t speak directly or plainly. They avoid saying what they really mean, and, as I said, they’re passive-aggressive.
It’s like you need a translator sometimes but even that wouldn’t help much because the real problem is just dealing with people who don’t communicate in (what may seem to you as) a “de-codable way”; that they are so self-consumed (not necessarily selfish, it’s just they won’t or don’t usually see outside of their own present situation) they can’t manage to have (ISTM) a normal conversation.
Lived in San Diego (I’m an east coast girl) and hated it. Too expensive near the coast, only affordable inland in the desert. We rented a 25 year old condo in Carmel Valley (near the coast) that would have been 300K to buy in 1999. Had a 2 exit commute from San Deigo county to La Jolla that took me 45 minutes in traffic. When I worked up in Carslbad the commute was better. Incredibly expensive and many of the public schools are severely under funded. Santa Ana winds in the fall were hot and miserable. June gloom was dreary.
I’m no Long Island fan, but SD is no paradise.
We have a 3BR, 2BA house in Clairemont, about six miles from Mission Bay, that has a current Zillow estimate of $554,000. Good tenant, so he’s getting a deal on the rent.
This doesn’t sound like my experiences in California at all. I lived there for a little over four years, having moved from rural Ohio.
I did that for a while, but every time I came home it got harder and harder to see that fucking “Welcome to Ohio: The Heart of it All” sign. Like, I’drathereatabulletthanseethatfuckingsignonemoregoddamntime hard.
Good tenants are like gold.
I did almost the opposite move about 5 years ago. I grew up in LA. Lived there and loved it until I was 28. When I was 28 my wife got the opportunity to take a promotion in a NJ suburb of NYC and we moved.
Eventually we decided we kind of hated NJ and so we moved to Philly where we like it better.
Be warned, LA is really different than the East Coast. I felt like I had moved to a foreign country when I moved. It’s neither bad nor good, it’s just different. It might work for you that it’s different, but it will be an adjustment. Also, I the pizza in LA is wrong. It’s either not very good or it’s weird and too expensive. The same is true of Mexican food on the east coast in reverse. You have likely not really had good Mexican food that wasn’t horribly overpriced unless you have already spent a significant time in Southern California or the Southwest.
Traffic is as bad as you have heard, but in a totally different way than NYC. LA traffic actually is fairly logical and predictable if you know how to read it. There are thousands of unspoken rules that, if you don’t know them, will cause everyone around you to be mad at you and will make you think everyone else is a jerk. They are not, you will learn.
Also, it’s going to take you longer to get places than you expect. I remember someone who didn’t live in LA giving me a gift certificate for a restaurant in Sherman Oaks when I lived in Hollywood. They figured it made sense because they were only 5 miles from my house. It was also a half hour drive over a mountain away, in good traffic. Try to go at dinnertime and you can double that
LA is a hard city to get to know. It’s big. Bigger than you can possibly expect. Bigger than you will understand even after you have lived there for a while. But, if you have the inclination, it’s got some great stuff going on. Housing is expensive, but once you get in property taxes are super reasonable. You will need a car. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
I’m sure I have more thoughts, but this is a start.
Does it have to be SoCal? I grew up in New England, but have been living in NorCal most of my adult life, and I would not want to live anywhere else. Housing is through the roof (hah!), but this is just a wonderful place to live. Great climate, tons of job opportunities, city life, country life, and everything in-between. Ocean, mountains, almost-desert. The air is even a lot cleaner than it was when I moved here 30 years ago…