I think that the divergent views in this thread pretty well express my experience of Grass Valley/Nevada County. I've lived here three years, and it's not for me, and I dream of getting out. But I know that some people love it.
I'll start with someone who loves it. My husband has relatives, a couple in their 50s or so, who have lived here a long time but met here and were married only about seven years ago. They have good jobs. They bought land with a view back before the prices skyrocketed and built their house just in the nick of time. It's a lovely little house. They go to the river, they go out on the lake, they travel a lot. They have some friends but are content to hang out mainly with each other. No pets, no kids. Everyone knows them, and they're warmly greeted wherever they go in the county. They recently got concerned about the high ozone here. (However, the ozone actually has been here a long time, but the area rose in ozone rankings nationally when the measurement system was changed from one that measures only the peak levels to one that takes a 24-hour average or something like that.) When they talked about moving away, I told them that every place has its problems, and since Nevada County is so perfect for them, why would they want to leave? They appear to be in what, for them, is paradise.
On the other hand, I'm dying to get out of here. I moved here from Austin, where I lived for 16 years, and I loved it there so much. I'm a southerner and a Texan born and bred, and I'll give a general disclaimer here that part of what I've experienced is a general culture shock in California.
Austin is an intensely friendly place, considering its size and its pace and the massive growth it's been undergoing. It still has fairly southern values. When people moved to Austin (this may not be so true anymore, especially for Californians moving there), we always reached out to support them in becoming part of the community, just as we'd been welcomed. We helped them out. It's a neighborly place. I was just there, and although it has grown way too crowded, the people were still really nice, and my old friends were talking about all the new friends they'd made.
I have never experienced so much hostility as when I moved here. I'm done taking it personally and I'm done crying over it or feeling sorry for myself for being so lonely, but the fact remains. Many people here insist that this is a friendly place ... maybe the standards are lower than I'm used to, but I'd say certain locals are very friendly to each other, and that's about it. I have often been taken for a person who's moved here with wealth and driven up prices, even though we seriously can't afford to live here and have been in financial turmoil, and I feel sorry for the locals who can no longer afford their own houses.
I also find that demographically, as a middle-class white-collar professional with a small child and somewhat mainstream values, I meet very few people with whom I have much in common. I meet some women whose families cashed out of a higher-cost housing market, and they aren't working outside the home and are in a great financial position. Good for them, but I am working and struggling to make ends meet, so there's an automatic disconnect. Then, many of the locals are just not well educated and/or have no real professional experiences or aspirations. Some of the young locals, in their twenties, are actually pretty nice and are going to the local community college. But the people in their thirties, like me, either have different values from me or, alternatively, are so busy trying to make a living in an expensive place that they have no time to hang out. There are also quite a few people into alternative spirituality here; I have some interest in that, but not to the extent that I would ever want my spiritual inclinations to be the very first (or only) thing people noticed about me.
There are lots of retirees here and a lot of businesses to serve their needs (retirement villas, medical care). I'm not sure whether they make lots of friends among themselves; my guess is that it varies according to whether they are local or relocated, and whether they live in some kind of community setting or not.
Lots of people here isolate themselves. They buy their little (or big) piece of land and have no real neighbors, on purpose. I initially resisted that, but now we are living in a house with no neighbors anywhere in sight, and it's a relief ...
Because, going back to the locals, there is a big problem here with white trashy living. We initially purchased a beautiful little Victorian in downtown Grass Valley, where some of the people were nice if distant but others were downright scary--on meth and yelling obscenities at me through my office window while I worked, for example. For all the jokes that people make about the South being the land of white trash, when my very southern, rural-raised mom first came to visit, she was shocked because she had never seen so much of it as she saw here.
Nor had she ever been stared at everywhere she went. I've had several out-of-town visitors comment on the staring, and I've experienced it, too, but, again, many locals do not believe that any hostile staring goes on here. I've mainly gotten used to it, regardless.
Prices for groceries and gas here are higher than in, say, Sacramento, and I have a friend/acquaintance who lived in the Bay Area many, many years ago, and she agrees that she can still find bargains even in the Bay Area compared to here, because she knows where to go and there are deals to be had. This place is just expensive. No deals. Anything secondhand has been picked over, and I have learned to leave it for people in even worse straits than me, although I used to be a serious scavenger of thrift shops and yard sales. (I like finding stuff and rehabilitating it.) Now, despite the high prices, there's a big emphasis here on buying local. I will buy local if it doesn't mean getting reamed. Otherwise, I find that I have to do quite a bit of shopping in Auburn, Roseville, and online. I would go broke if I didn't.
Since moving here, I have seen several people move away in frustration. A retired couple from the Bay Area who bought a gorgeous house in Nevada City were treated poorly by locals (and they were such sweet people!) and couldn't make any friends, and even though they'd moved here to be nearer their grandkids, they turned tail and ran after only a few months.
A super nice couple with two small children moved here from the Bay Area but were quickly disillusioned. It didn't work financially, they had a limited social life, there was nothing to do, and they didn't want to live with the ozone problem ... they moved several states away just a couple of months ago.
I met a couple in the coffee shop I frequent who were in despair living here and have since moved away.
I met a single mother and befriended her, but she moved to Austin. She couldn't afford it here.
My former Grass Valley neighbors, separately and on both sides of our old house, moved to Mexico. I think they liked it here, actually, but it made better financial sense for them to go elsewhere with cash from the sale of their houses.
We sold our house the week before the housing market went squish. Lots of the houses that come up on the MLS say they are bank-owned. There is very little going on in the local economy to support even the fallen housing prices. It is, from my perspective, a mess.
There is some alternative education here, in the form of charter schools. If you're moving here for those--some people do--make sure you can get in. Some classes at some schools are wait-listed. But they are good schools. The regular public schools may be good, but their test scores being high doesn't tell the whole story; the testing is mainly an issue of demographics. If you look at test scores nationally, some ethnic groups as a whole have poor standardized test scores. I grew up in ethnically diverse places and saw how disenfranchized many people of color were, so I say this only as a clarifying fact. Nevada County is the whitest county in California, and that pretty much accounts for the test scores. It doesn't mean the regular schools are doing anything different. The high school definitely is not a place I would ever, ever send my child. There is a smaller high school that might be a good alternative, but I haven't thoroughly checked it out.
Speaking of how white Nevada County is, be aware that if you value ethnic diversity and the enrichment that can happen when various cultural streams converge, that doesn't really happen here. It's just white.
Like a previous poster, I find it very hard to walk here (and will not ride a bike--too dangerous). I had to join a gym to get basic exercise, which means I must drive into town (i.e., pay for gas) and pay for a membership. Even when I lived downtown and walked to lots of places, I found it rough going. The streets were originally built for horses and whatnot. The sidewalks are, in many places off the main street, crumbling or nonexistent. Drivers here are generally pretty good--compared to in Texas and New Mexico, for example--but there's so little accommodation of pedestrians in the town and county designs that it's dangerous anyway. This is one big illusion I came here with; I pictured myself spending a lot of time in nature. Now we live near the NID (irrigation ditch) trails, but I don't feel safe on them alone. One day when I was walking there, a guy on a four-wheeler just sat there, staring at menacingly, unsmiling, wordless, threatening. Maybe it's safe, but the truth is that if someone wanted to hurt me on those old trails, they could do so unchecked.
There is a long-term plan to create a public trails system connecting the various parks. That would be a huge boon to this area, but it's a long way from happening. I'm not sure that any funds have been earmarked for it, and I can't remember if any kind of actual time frame has been assigned to that project.
One last negative thing is that many of the shops and stores here have no real customer service sensibility or professionalism. I often walk up to little shops to give them my business, only to find signs on the door saying "Be back in two hours" or the like. I'll go to a sandwich shop to find a sign saying "No bread today"
or "No turkey and ham today." I'll walk into a place and try to buy something, but the people working there are talking with a friend and ignoring me; that's their prerogative, but in a couple of cases they're even lamenting how they're not making enough money in their business, while I stand there ready to buy something but ignored.
I do think this is a beautiful place, at least most parts of it. Picturesque. If you want rural living but would like to retain the ability to drive to other places, it's good for that. Sacramento is pretty close by, the Bay Area is near enough to visit for special purposes, Lake Tahoe is quite accessible.
Oh, by the way, the weather is fairly mild, and there are four distinct seasons, but of course the summers do get very hot, and the winter can be brutal not in the sense of snowfall, but because it is a long rainy season. Last year saw too little rainfall, but the first two years I was here, when it rained day after day for months, I did get depressed from sunlight deprivation. All that rain can make people antisocial, too, and if you have kids, just get them some serious raingear and let them play in the weather, or you'll end up with major cabin fever--that's my advice.
I'll sum up by reiterating that, as I mentioned at the beginning of this diatribe
, Nevada County and its towns are different for different people. I don't know if someone considering moving here will be able to determine in advance what their experience will be like, but I hope that if you bothered to read all this, you found something helpful in it. I have omitted some of the extremes of my experiences and opinions, believe it or not.
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Grass Valley As of Now
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