Rancho San Diego (El Cajon) (Santee, Spring Valley: fit in, rental, house prices)

[Clark SD]

I’ve seen a few comments to stay away from Rancho San Diego and I am a bit surprised. My wife and I have been looking at communities to settle in and Rancho San Diego is the only place that we can both agree on. We are targeting to spend about $400K and want a 3-4 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood. Anything neighborhood closer to the 805 with houses in the same price bracket seem to be run down. When we are looking at communities I look for the normal stuff like trailer parks, tattoo parlors, liquor stores, grafitti, and bail bonds places. RSD didn’t really seem to have any! We just looked at places in Santee and there were some nice houses, but the RSD “downtown” seems better. I would prefer to live as west as possible, but there is definitely not a good value for the $$. Any words of wisdom as to why Rancho San Diego gets a bad rap? Is it because it is part of El Cajon?

[Sassberto]

Rancho San Diego is nice. My wife was out there yesterday and made the same comment. Yes it has a bad rap because it is technically "El Cajon" and close to Spring Valley, but that's just a little bit of San Diego's snobbiness showing.

[thealohaman]

I agree with RSD being a nice area, and don't understand some of the comments I've read. Also some decent schools according to test scores. I am curious as to the downtown comment, however, since I can't recall seeing a "downtown" area in RSD. Where was that located in your mind? I confess that I'm not that familiar with the area. Also, do you recall seeing any new homes in RSD?

[Clark SD]

Originally Posted by thealohaman

I agree with RSD being a nice area, and don't understand some of the comments I've read. Also some decent schools according to test scores. I am curious as to the downtown comment, however, since I can't recall seeing a "downtown" area in RSD. Where was that located in your mind? I confess that I'm not that familiar with the area. Also, do you recall seeing any new homes in RSD?

On Jamacha Rd. around the Willow Glen. Not a downtown per se, but a good amount of places for shopping. If you look at places like Granite Hills, I could not find anything similar. To go to the grocery store I think they either go to RSD or to El Cajon.

[joyfulgirl1]

I like the area, we lived there for about 6 months. It was safe and clean. No complaints!

[breeze823]

Yeah, I always considered RSD to be one of the nicer areas of EC...but then I've been gone for almost 10 years and alot can change!

[crashingsucks]

You would fit in the part of Rancho SanDiego thats more east if your from the middle east. When I went to Cuyamaca College each class was about 70% middle eastern. They were nice to me but I always felt left out of their conversations because they were always talking about the convient stores they owned even the real young ones owned or ran a store. the guys were always cool to me but the girls-about seven years ago-were snooty and all of them would wear blue jeans and dark tops. If you go further south it gets alittle more scary for a family to live. just my opinion...

[sdlife619]

Rancho is god awful boring. It's perfect if you have a family with kids, but for singles it sucks, because your too far away the city of SD+ it's typical suburbia, not to mention it's really expensive to live there.


Yeah, a lot of Chaldeans attend Cuyamaca, the thing is, many of them come from money, I see a lot of the young guys driving nice brand new cars, wear flashy designer cloths, yet are getting a free education+financial aid all at the expense of our government, because we feel sorry for them. What about us Americans? Even if you have a lil bit of money, you automatically disqualify for aid, that is not fair and completely screwed up, no wonder why this country is broke, giving social security to to people that are not even US citizens aside from financial aid for education.

[HHollywood]

RSD is nice, I personally think Mount Helix (especially the El Cajon part, where we've just moved) is nicer still. Agree with the comments on boring/good for families. If you're a 25 year old single person you should be living in Hillcrest or somewhere cool. If you have kids and want schools, space etc, this area is great.

Can't comment on house prices as we're renting right now. But we get a lot more for our rental money here than we would have in all the other areas I looked at.

[oddstray]

There is a subtle dog-whistle* of racism that's starting to creep into this discussion.

*(most folks don't hear it but it's there)