I have several friends and acquaintances in the northern California area (as they call it; I always thought the San Fran - Sacramento area was central Cali, but that’s just me, I guess), and every correspondence I have with them invariably includes their telling me how shitty SoCal is. I mean, I hate SoCal as much as the next guy, but damn, I live here! I have that right!
So, what am I missing? Why do you hate southern California? I mean, besides the obvious. Is everyone up there escapees? If/when I move up there, is everyone reminiscing about how bad things were when we were down here all I have to look forward to?
I live in northern California, and I hate southern California. I think I’m entitled, though – I spent the first 18 years of my life there.
Ironically, when I was growing up, I thought it was the best place in the world. Fast food places and malls everywhere! Hooray! Then I moved away and learned what a shithole it is, at least in comparison to everywhere else I’ve lived so far. A smoggy, dirty, gridlocked shithole.
Well, I’ve been in the bay area for nine years, so I can’t speak for or as a native. And a lot of my anti-SoCal bias is based on sharing an office with a bay area native who was nursing a rabid hatred of southern California in general and LA in particular. But my own take:
Living in the Bay Area makes you smug and superior. Hey, we’re talking about stereotypes, right? Well, San Francisco has this general attitude of being very scene-oriented and “Let me explain to you one more time how much I don’t care what you think about me.”
All I’ve seen of southern California is the stretch along I-5 and then the LA area. So I just think of it as a crappy, boring interstate with lots of cows, and then oppressive, soul-killing suburban sprawl. I’m told that there are nice parts of LA, like Santa Monica and such, but I’ve only seen Glendale, Burbank, Anaheim, and the like.
The longest I spent in LA “proper” was a week for a trade show. It was god-awful hot, hard to get around, everything was as expensive as SF but without the “charm,” and there was a general feeling of oppressiveness as if my soul was getting squeezed out of my body by the crushing weight of tall featureless buildings, traffic lights, strip malls, and people.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, went to school at Berkeley, and have chosen to make Oakland my adopted home. I love the Bay Area with all my heart - the diversity, the culture, the politics, the (relative) compactness of it all.
But I think I’m in the small minority when I say that I also love Los Angeles as well. Of course, it’s for different reasons - a more sprawling size and diversity makes the city seem endless and waiting to be explored and THE BEACH will forever beckon. I would have more seriously considered living there as an adult if a certain mother-in-law wasn’t involved.
It’s been my impression that people in the Bay hate LA because they are expected to and it’s somewhat fashionable. If you want sprawl, go to Walnut Creek. The Bay has it’s share of traffic. LA has its superficial, plastic types in Hollywood, but San Francisco has its share of superficial hipsters and non-profit types. The places aren’t as different as people make them out to be.
I’ve asked people in the Bay who hate LA where they’ve actually been to in LA. They say, “Hollywood, Disneyland, Beverly Hills.” Other than transplants like Giraffe, it often seems like a superficial hatred to me. It’s been argued that the Bay’s self-inflated sense of superiority is used to mask a deep-seated inferiority complex. LA is (for better or worse) the cutural capital of the West Coast, so I think there’s some truth to the argument. Doesn’t Boston hate New York way more that NYC cares about Boston?
The saying goes, “There is a big war between Northern California and Southern California but only the people in Northern California know about it.”
I grew up in L.A. and discovered this when I moved to San Diego in college and lived in a dorm with a bunch of people from NorCal. Don’t get me wrong, I hate L.A. with a passion and I enjoy S.F., but the whole this is asinine.
Gridlock in the Bay Area is just as bad as in the L.A. Basin. People in San Francisco are just as fucking lame and affected as people in L.A., just in a different way.
And before some ignorant ass starts talking about the water issue, over 80% of the water that heads south goes to farm irregation, not to water lawns in Encino. SoCal gets most of their water from the Arizona River. Many cities on the Central Coast like here in Santa Barbara are self relient.
I meant to say that I’m in the minority because the “LA or the Bay” question is usually posed as an either/or question and you’re forced to take sides. Like the two places are so radically different that your answer is an serious insight into your personality.
I kind of like Southern CA. I don’t mind heat, as long as it’s a dry heat. I wouldn’t like living there so much if I had to drive everywhere and couldn’t walk to the grocery store, for example, but there are places like that in the Bay Area, too. There are a lot worse places than LA.
I know that Washingtonians (Washington DC, not Washington state) look down on New Yorkers (I grew up in the DC area). They’re not as good as us, but they don’t know it
Grew up in Berkeley, hating Southern California. But since I left California more than a decade ago, I still remember that I hate Southern California, but I can’t really articulate any reasons why… except that the goddamned LA Dodgers are from there.
Actually, I grew up in Boston, and lived there for at least a decade. The only general consensus I could surmise from fellow Bostonians was a hatred of the Yankees, taxi drivers, and a fear of having to drive in downtown Manhattan. There was also a ever-so-slight tinge of envy…
This is sort of news to me. But I’ve only been here (Northern California) a few years. And I’ve only been to the Southern California area a handful of times. My husband lived there (San Diego area) until he was 14 or so, and he’s always raving about it and saying how he’d love to live there again. I think I’d be OK with that. I do miss the beach. We don’t really have those “California” beaches up here.
I have to admit I was very underimpressed with L.A. It had a very urban wasteland feel. But I certainly don’t hate SoCal.
I grew up in San Diego, and SoCal doesn’t mean “LA” to me. SD County is too hot, too conservative, and too bland, and I’m glad I moved. LA itself is horrid – all smoggy, and the drivers are even worse than SF (but not worse than Berkeley) – but parts of the area are quite nice.
I should add that visiting San Diego is nice, because sitting on your butt on vacation by the water is very different from trying to work in the heat twenty miles inland.
Well, people from REALLY Northern California, like myself, often have Sacramento as the southern end of Northern California. Few people ‘hate’ southern California, but there is that friendly rivalry where one can bitch about it. It’s nice to have that nice tax base…
That’s pretty much it. Southern California is the only place to live. I get the bends when I go north of Santa Barbara. I have found that the “Hate L.A.” crowd is mainly concentrated in the Bay Area. I have seldom found it in Placerville, say, or Weed. This leads me conclude that SF is just jealous.
If you divide the state north/south, the usual dividing line is the Tehachapis (the Grapevine). Another usual grouping is North, Central Coast (Monterey - San Luis Obispo), Central Valley (Stockton - Bakersfield), South.
Northern Californian born & bred. The South is freeways, smog, sprawl, shallow plastic dilettante people, baseball fans who arrive late & leave early. I’ve never spent any time there, but that’s what I hear.
Hey, if I had to live in the land of cramped hills and earthquake-a-rama, you can bet I’d be madly jealous of all those SoCal folks and their abundant space and beautiful babes too!
That was me – until I moved to L.A. Now I don’t want to move back!
I still love the Bay Area, and it is great to visit, but I no longer want to live there. It just seems so small, and cliquish, especially San Francisco proper. And if you live and work on the west side of L.A. or in Santa Monica/Venice/Marina del Rey, you can avoid most of the things people complain about (i.e., smog and traffic).
Ha! I went bodysurfing at Stinson Beach once. Who needs a wetsuit? Choosing to ignore all evident signs of hypothermia, I managed to last about half an hour. Then I collapsed on the sand and every muscle in my body violently shivered for 15 minutes.
The ladies weren’t even impressed by my shuddering buttocks. I haven’t been back to a Bay Area beach since - what’s the point?
Perhaps that explains my soft view of things - I was raised in Westchester. No smog and a pleasing offshore breeze makes for a perfect climate. I guess could hate LA too if I was forced to live in Pomona or some other inland hellhole.
I went to UC San Diego, and our floor in the dorm had the usual assortment of Southerners and Northerners. This was a long time ago, but I don’t think these things change that much, and it was definitely more an anti-L.A. thing than it was North vs. South generally. I can only laugh now in recollection of a conversation where one guy was saying how he was from Torrance, and how vastly different life was in Torrance than in L.A., just across the street.
L.A.'s actions in history have gotten us a (fairly) well deserved bad rap, most notably the theft of Owens Valley’s water in the early XX century. I think because of things like this there’s a tendency for Northerners to view L.A. as a gigantic malevalent monster. But one has to remember that we have a surging population here, and we can’t manufacture water out of thin air. So we’ll have to go on taking it from somewhere, and more of it, unless the issue of population growth can be addressed.
Personally, I have visited SF many times and have always had a great time there. It would probably be better suited to my lifestyle, given my preference for dense housing, an urban environment, and good transportation. Yet by this time I don’t think it can hold a candle to L.A. in terms of museums, restaurants, and the like. And L.A. probably has just as many if not more insanely beautiful or desirable locales in which to live, just as out of reach for the ordinary resident as Nob Hill is for the ordinary San Franciscan.
