What do you think about the Eureka, Arcata, McKinleyville, Humboldt area?

[TheDragonslayer]

Originally Posted by GregFromOregon

WOW, neat. I may have to move to the Eureka area to hold on to a job(gotta follow the work), and I already don't like it there. It sounds like it has the same sickness that many other small towns get when you have a blue collar community be it fishing, logging, whatever, and you add some kind of feature like the redwoods, ocean, river, whatever, and all the people that drive through and say "look how pretty hun, we should move here" actually do camp out for the rest of there lives. You've got the added dissability of HSU and the neverending drug crowd that can't grasp the fact that the best stuff doesn't come from there anymore, but, they keep showing up. The mills close and fishing boats sit idle and the only thing that sparks your economy is the strip malls and casinos(Coos Bay, Lincoln City, Canyonville Oregon to name just a few) but thats not the town you had in you're daydream little head when you drove through all those years ago. It will never be what you want it to be because you get the "not in my backyard" mentallity, when in reality, you where the beginning of the cancer that is causing its death. Small town economy sucks, it will always suck, unless you let it grow into a big town, with box stores, strip malls, and casinos. But then it will not be the small town you fell in love with in the first place so you'll move to some other small blue collar town that has a view of Mt.Jefferson, or the Columbia River, or........Uugghh! I'm done, bash away people.

No need to bash away at you, you are mostly right in nearly all that you say. People drive through here to see the redwoods, the clean water and the quiet life. Then they move here, get in a hurry and want a star bucks on every corner. I moved to Humboldt in 1992 after losing all my garden jobs after the Oakland hills fire of 91. Every thing was so slow here then, there was no big box store in Eureka to speak of, no big K here in McKinleyville which has more than doubled since then. Now most of the towns except for McK are built to capacity, there are times that there is real traffic on 101, whereas in 92 there was very little. The price of homes have nearly tripled in less than 10 years and most long time locals cannot afford that increase, yet keep their jobs. But one cannot leave out the rape of our county and its redwoods by Horowitz of Texas, the same baron that was behind the savings and loan rip-off of the early 80's. Horowitz came in in the early 90's and basically bulldozed his way through our woods, leaving decimated tracts of land. But, I still love living up here, it is not always raining and it is not always foggy and cold. The past few weeks have been foggy, but the days have been in the upper 60's and low 70's with a humidity around 40 to 50 percent. It usually does not start raining till mid November and continues to about March and in that time we get about 40 to 50 inches of rain. Spring here is great and late summer to early fall is often very nice and in the upper 70's.

[Grenoble_slopes]

Originally Posted by GregFromOregon

And buy the way, your crime rate is almost TWICE the national average, very close that of COMPTON, CA.

High crime cities tend to have low rates of reported thefts and other property crimes. Think about it - what's the point of reporting a theft in a city like Detroit, or Compton? So their theft rates are below the national average. Overall 'crime rate' for any city, when including property crime statistics, aren't to be taken seriously for this reason. The violent crime rates in Compton are much higher than in Eureka, and the murder rate this decade in Compton is 10x higher than Eureka.

[HedgeWitch]

Thanks for so rationally explaining that, Grenoble_slopes. There are statistical crime rates, and then there's an overall environment of heavily urban crime & economic distress even in non-recessionary times (such as gang-infested, depressed areas like Compton, which is also engulfed by the cancerous Los Angeles Metro/South Central & its other depressed, crime-riddled areas!). So much of it is a matter of scale, not always obvious looking at stats without taking the big picture into account. Believe me, I'd take my chances having the Blue Lake Casino in town vs. living anywhere near Compton!

I've been here in the LA area since the late 1960s (San Fernando Valley, Long Beach, Laguna Beach, Hollywood, Pasadena and now way up in the Angeles Forest foothills, but still stuck working in downtown LA) due to family responsibilities & job requirements, can't wait to get away when we are able to retire. I miss the semi-rural area where I grew up with its open space, natural beauty and safety for kids to roam free (it's now sadly devoured by encroaching metropolitan suburbs), while remembering well the restrictions that country lifestyle placed on me as a teenager too young to drive anywhere for more urban fun!

I love the whole Arcata/HSU region, its climate, pace, lifestyles, cultural & natural resources from what we've seen visiting over the past 2 years & my daughter's reports from her college experiences at HSU and forays into Eureka, McKinleyville, Blue Lake, etc. We will be checking out Blue Lake & other nearby areas very closely -- I don't want to come in & change anything. [Who needs Starbucks when you've got Muddy Waters & other local coffee hangouts?]

My biggest concern so far is the lack of major medical providers nearby (given that we'll be retirees in our mid/late 60s when we can escape LA) and concerns about transportation if/when we can no longer drive, but senior transportation is lousy down here in the urban jungle, as well.

It's all matter of what you like and how you want to live. I truly appreciate those of you who live in/know the area sharing your experiences & examples of what to expect, the upsides and the down!

[YankeeTom]

Originally Posted by thomasw98

Here's the results of my scouting trip to the area:

Fortuna:

Nearly nothing on which to comment. Just a very simple city with some dust and some very limited retail. Nearly a ghost town at night. Completely not right for me.

Ferndale:

I was expecting a lot more from this little town. If I was mayor of that town and had some money and support, I think I could make it into a great place to live AND a really great tourist spot. As it is, it's just a not-well-executed idea and boring little place to live. Too bad.

Eureka:

Hmmm...this one is tougher to describe. It's not bad, but not very good either. Just sorta there...

Again, it seems like it has great potential, but somehow the city doesn't seem to have every "gelled" together around any particular view or culture.

In the center area, the streets are laid out in a grid fashion with little old houses all crammed together. There are only a small number of renovated ones, with most just looking old and worn down.

In the south end, the housing is more suburban-style and there are some nice areas which back up to trees and beautiful scenery, but the prices are not cheap for what you get. Especially considering the rundown nature of the city....

I guess that word about sums it up: Eugene is very rundown and does not appear to have any plan of action to turn this situation around.

Arcata:

OK, the hippie idea really attracted me. I'm not a hippie, but the feeling and liberal mindset are good ones in my view.

First the school: It is much smaller than I expected. Nice and lots of trees, but nowhere near as beautiful as UC Santa Cruz (its closest competitor in terms of "tree hugger college"). The buildings are nothing special either. Overall, ok but a little disappointing.

The living area in the mountains east of the town is pretty cool. Very mountainy and heavily forrested. But the streets are a bit run down and the overall atmosphere is a bit too rustic for my taste. Too many weeds and mysterious pieces of wood dumped in empty lots...that sort of thing. Still, I might have gone for it, except the real estate was too expensive for my budget. Everything over 400K and some much higher than that.

The living area around downtown and west of downtown was a big disappointment. Some nice renovated older houses downtown, but not enough of them to build any momentum. Plus there seems to be a lot of small industrial and retail mixed throughout the area in between the houses. Further west, there are some neighborhoods but not many trees and the whole place feels worn, flat, dusty, and Fisher-Price-Plastic-Toys-In-The-Front-Yard-ish. Similar in some ways to McKinleyville (see below).

McKinleyville:

OK, this was my last stop and I really wanted to like this place since by then I was thinking "OK, I can not live in Arcata but at least I could live nearby and drive down there whenever I wanted to soak up some liberal college-y atmosphere". And, for sure, it has some positives.

The main retail area seems neat and well organized. A little too limited for choice in some respects, but overall not bad. Some local businesses, but not many.

But here's the problem, or maybe the good news for some readers...The typical residential profile for the area seems to be:

Blue collar.

Pickup truck owner. Truck is used for work so usually has some sort of magnetic sign logo on the side and equipment in the back.

Loves to collect and store stuff in the front yard.

Kids love that big plastic Fisher Price toy stuff, and mom and dad set it up in the front yard for them.

Fixin' cars is man's work and best done in your own driveway (it may take a few weeks though).

Saved up and bought a boat and trailer and park it out front also.

Bought that old rusted '69 Camaro from high school buddy for five hundred bucks and one of these days will fix that thing up and it will be truly awesome...until then, there it sits in the driveway.

OK, so there's nothing really intrinsically wrong with any of the above points, but for me, it just does not create the kind of living environment that I like. Admittedly, the above points are not guaranteed to exist on every single house in McKinleyville, but the percentage of houses with many of these features knocks the area off my list. On the other hand, for you, it might be a very suitable place.

Yeah...well, you get what you pay for, and it is costing more all the time isn't it?

[YankeeTom]

Originally Posted by Shadowplay

That depends on where you're looking, and what your standard of comparison is.

And there are some of us who are professional class, and while we may not have the abandoned car in the driveway, we don't conform to what you're accustomed to either. By choice. My Victorian garden isn't exactly a standard issue monoculture of a lawn, for example.

There are some places, especially in certain areas of Eureka and a few of the rural backwaters, that I agree are pretty run down. I see places like that in many parts of the U.S., it apparently just won't go away.

But there are a couple of things to consider when looking at the rest of the area. First, we're living in, essentially, a temperate rain forest. That means that in the spring, at the end of the rainy season, and a short time into the early summer, the vegetation grows faster than we can keep up with it. Leave town for a week, and the lawn and garden have tried to take over the house. By June it's back under control.

Then, in late summer, in the total absence of rain, things get a little dry and brown. Not as bad as in the south, because we still have our morning fog. Unlike in the bigger places, we mostly let it go. No sprinklers, no Chem-Lawn. The rains will come in October, we can count on it.

The winter rainstorms also fade house paint on the mostly wooden buildings faster than in many other areas, so at any given time some percentage of the houses will be at that almost-ready-for paint stage.

But you know what really is different? We're not as hung up on materialism as most of the nation. We don't need to impress anyone.

The late Hobart Brown, a well-known local artist, once said "if we ever tried to change everything we complain about, it wouldn't be the place we moved here for." I think he was right. We're not interested in being just like everyplace else, because... everyplace else is already like that. We're the outlier, the eccentric place, the place that certain kinds of creative individuals love, and that certain kinds of conformists will never understand. Some of them try, and they mostly move away two years later.

I actually find some of the "it isn't just like my tidy suburb" comments above disturbing. There are already plenty of identical car-culture suburban subdivisions in this nation. Please, leave us at least a few little remote pockets with character and architectural diversity, OK?

I hate manicured lawns as much as I hate manicured hair and manicured golf courses! I have lived in Central New Jersey and in Southern California, you can have it! I like stores I have never seen before, restaurants I have never heard of and houses that were built before my grandparents were born. Only Mother Nature gives me more Serenity.