Might be moving to Sacramento from North carolina, a few questions.. (Los Angeles: apartments, for rent)

[Biolumen]

Hey guys, I'm very thankful to anyone who can read this as I could REALLY use some input.

A little information..
I'm a 20 year old woman and I currently reside in North Carolina. I have been looking into Sacramento as a new home town, As my current town is small with a crappy college and low life druggy students.

I plan to stay put now and go to college to learn the Japanese language in hopes of entering an exchange program in the future.

My main questions are basically..
1.What is the average apartment price for a 3 bedroom in a not extravagant - but not dumps location.
2. As far as a College, I am specifically looking for a community college that offers Japanese, what are some of my options and how are the colleges for a young professional student?
3. What are the people like? I'm a very open minded woman as far as religion and I can't take another backwards thinking community.
4. Jobs, I know the unemployment rates are high but I'm not looking for some fast food job. I have past work experience in health care/HR management so how is finding a job in this field?


That's all I can think of right now, can someone provide a bit of information based on what I wrote and also their personal input? I would appreciate it very much...Thank you!

[wburg]

Sacramento City College offers beginning and intermediate Japanese:

Sacramento City College

It is also located in the neighborhood of Curtis Park, which is a pretty good neighborhood which also has a large Japanese population, including a few Japanese-specific businesses that might give you the opportunity to try out your language skills. There are a lot of healthcare jobs just to the north of that neighborhood in the Sutter/Mercy/UC Davis Med Center/Shriner's complex of hospitals and other healthcare support services. Not sure what your baseline is for backwards-thinking communities, but the city of Sacramento is considered moderately liberal by California standards (when compared to San Francisco or Los Angeles) which is probably flamingly liberal by any other state's standards. It's also an enormously diverse city in terms of race and ethnicity. Not sure about the rent for a 3 br apartment--apartments that large are kind of hard to find but small houses for rent in that part of town aren't hard to find. Maybe $1500?

[K-Luv]

Originally Posted by Biolumen

Hey guys, I'm very thankful to anyone who can read this as I could REALLY use some input.

A little information..
I'm a 20 year old woman and I currently reside in North Carolina. I have been looking into Sacramento as a new home town, As my current town is small with a crappy college and low life druggy students.

I plan to stay put now and go to college to learn the Japanese language in hopes of entering an exchange program in the future.

My main questions are basically..
1.What is the average apartment price for a 3 bedroom in a not extravagant - but not dumps location.
2. As far as a College, I am specifically looking for a community college that offers Japanese, what are some of my options and how are the colleges for a young professional student?
3. What are the people like? I'm a very open minded woman as far as religion and I can't take another backwards thinking community.
4. Jobs, I know the unemployment rates are high but I'm not looking for some fast food job. I have past work experience in health care/HR management so how is finding a job in this field?


That's all I can think of right now, can someone provide a bit of information based on what I wrote and also their personal input? I would appreciate it very much...Thank you!

First off, if you plan on attending a community college in Sacramento, you will first need to establish residency if you do not wish to pay non-resident tuition. California, unlike other States, makes it a little bit more difficult to claim residency when it comes to trying to get in-state tuition, and non-resident tuition is currently set at $254 per credit, on top of all the other fees.

As to your questions:

1. Not sure, but not many people actually rent apartments. Renting a house is more common, followed by renting a converted home (into a duplex or triplex). A three-bedroom will be around $1500, depending on location.

2. Community colleges, also known as junior colleges in California, are very well respected in the State. It is also easier to transfer from a California community college into a UC, if you'd like, than to transfer into a UC from out-of-state or even to enter straight from high school.

3. Sacramento has plenty of "backwards thinking" people as there are a good number of areas that can be considered straight-up hick. The white power movement was fairly prominent, as much as it could remain visible, back when I lived in Sacramento and Sacramento is one of the few places I can think of where someone would not hide that sort of thing. I wouldn't label Sacramento as Liberal as much as it is "not Conservative". it seems that most people would rather not talk about politics, though, and residents, for the most part, will be accepting of you as much as you are of them.

4. The job market in Sacramento is tough, even when the economy is good. It is simply a logistics game; too many people.

[wburg]

Depends on the neighborhood--there are a lot of apartments in Sacramento, especially the older neighborhoods. And a lot of the buildings people often assume were converted into duplexes/triplexes/fourplexes/sixplexes were actually built that way.

There is a big difference between the city of Sacramento and its suburbs in terms of politics. Sacramento itself isn't radically liberal, but our mayor's race tends to be between the liberal Democrat and the less-liberal Democrat, our state Assembly and Senate representatives are Democrats, as are our Congresspersons. Because we're the state capital, Sacramento has a reputation for being a little stodgy, but politics is basically the most popular sport in the city (especially since our basketball team kind of sucks now.)

Sacramento's suburbs are a lot more conservative than the city of Sacramento proper, as k-luv points out--the "white power" idiocy was out in the suburbs. But, again, it's a matter of degree; a friend of mine who grew up in rural Shasta County (far more conservative than Sacramento or even its suburbs) and currently lives in a trailer moved to Georgia for a while and then moved back to California (again, rural Shasta County) because it was way too conservative for her family!