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Coastal SLO County and the City of SLO. The City of San Luis Obispo does have a snob element. Probably not what you're used to, but some people there are world's apart than anyone on the coast.
Bakersfield has beautiful homes and zero snobs. Lots of oil money here, and great schools. Something to consider. I know what my ship comes in, I'm staying put!
Pebble Beach is the area you want. A large gated community with a wide variety of neighborhoods and homes, has five entrances, gorgeous coastline drive, is situated entirely within the Del Monte forest yet convenient to Monterey/Carmel-by-the-Sea and all shopping. [Trader Joe's just four blocks out of one gate]. Large hospital right on the border of the forest.
PB is friendly but not "snobby", like the "village" of C-b-t-S, etc. Unbeatable room temp weather almost year round, and great recreational opportunities all around. Check it out before you decide.
When I bought, if I had known then what I know now, I would be there.
I ****ing hate LA. I grew up in Orange County, but I spent a ton of time in LA, and I can conclusively say that it is the worst city I've ever spent any time in, short of Tijuana.
There is something to be said for pride in your home town, but eventually you have to realize that you just might live in an enormous hellhole. It's not just the smog, either (although Riverside, just 10-20 miles to the east, has the worst air quality in the nation). Let's break it down:
1) Traffic. I want to stab myself in the eye with a fork when I hear anyone complain about traffic in other cities. LA's urban planning looks like someone dropped a plate of wet spaghetti on a road map. There is no fully appropriate metaphor to describe the freeway system other than a botched abortion of concrete and steel, because there is zero logic to it. Driving across town? Give yourself an extra hour, because you never know when the 110/10/5/405 will lock up. This completely ****s one of my biggest personal tenets: BE ON TIME. BE SOMEWHERE WHEN YOU SAY YOU WILL BE THERE. LA traffic makes this impossible, because it could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours to get ANYWHERE. This is true 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as I can attest from the four-hour delay I once hit driving home from the Bay Area at 1 A.M. on a Sunday. And of course, every once in a while this is the result of...
2) Televised car chases. These happen with alarming regularity. In 8th grade I remember coming home from school just in time to see a guy stop his truck on the 10, delaying thousands of people for two hours, and then set the vehicle on fire with his dog in it. This was just before he blew off his head with a shotgun. On live television. For about two weeks all the TV stations were contrite about showing a graphic scene of real-life violence to an audience of the hundreds of thousands of kids who were undoubtedly watching. Then like a month later they aired another one that ended in a motorcycle slamming into the back end of a bus. You stay classy, KTVU.
3) Size. The city itself is ENORMOUS even for the number of people who live there, spreading in a more or less uninterrupted stream of low-lying industrial buildings from Thousand Oaks to San Clemente. You can walk across San Francisco or Boston in like two hours in any direction. Try that in LA and you'd better bring a week of rations and a bulletproof vest. This means more time spent on those beautiful freeways.
4) Pollution of all kinds. Everyone owns at least one car, since the public transportation system is virtually nonexistent. Sports practices are occasionally canceled due to "air hazards." Nowhere else outside of Mexico City have I heard of this. Furthermore, a good 50% of the beaches are contaminated by some variety of toxins and the ocean has the appealing color and consistency of a can of watery pea soup. Not only that, everyone goes on about the weather like it's not virtually identical to what's found anywhere from Cabo to San Francisco - and you can't get lung cancer just by being outside in other places on the West Coast.
5) Sports franchises. Expect fair-weather Lakers flags every time playoff season rolls around, and expect the seats at any sporting event to be filled with a combination of a) Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz, and equally abhorrent celebrities on the lower levels and b) bitter Raiders-tattooed vatos in the upper deck waiting to get drunk and stab someone. In the absence of an NFL franchise, the football fans, too, are like homeless divorcees – blindly wandering around, searching for something new to glom onto, pretending they don't care about their loss. They're also all Raider fans – imagine downtown Oakland on game day except without the benefit of an actual football game being played.
6) Violent crime. Parts of East LA make "Falling Down" look like a fairy tale, except with much less English. Feel unsafe in New York? LA's murder rate is TWO AND A HALF TIMES AS HIGH. You have to go to the South or Detroit to find a comparably violent city.
7) The women. The thing with LA/OC producing swarms of hot girls is true, but most of them don't end up staying in Los Angeles. They all either move to San Diego or end up going to school at ASU, U of Arizona, or Colorado. Most of the women I've met there that are around 22 or older are attractive enough, but they look so beat and used-up they'd probably feel sticky if you touched them.
8) Culture. This is a place where Ryan Seacrest can get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the home of "Us Weekly." This is a city that has put on the mantle of the American film industry and then used it to give us "Soul Plane," "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter," and "Cheaper By the Dozen 2." This is the Mecca for faded jeans, metrosexual douchebags and pink drinks. Everything about LA is saturated with an insatiable drive to impress the perceived yokels from Middle America with shiny pretty things. Furthermore, the residents tend to look down on the rest of the country through their Chanel sunglasses like they're the world's authority on anything pertaining to style or entertainment. If you need barely-legal fetish porn or a man-purse, welcome to paradise.
Plus, all this trendier-than-thou attitude is thinly spread over a giant proletariat of Mexican immigrants that grows larger by the day. I can't wait for ten years from now when the entire valley becomes a war zone. When the Battle of Dominguez Hills is fought I'll be watching from the Bay Area or someplace and thinking "****, I hope my parents are okay. Good thing they laid that minefield in Garden Grove back in '08."
THIS POSTING IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT!!!
i GREW UP IN ORANGE COUNTY, LIVED IN LA.. and i am moving to arizona to go to a university... I'm sick and tired of planning out my day 5 hours in advance according to traffic!!!
It's ridiculous.... and when I considered a boob job.... and another woman told me i needed botox at the age of 25, I knew it's time to go...!
Women in LA glue hair to their heads, inject animal fat in their lips, and surgically implant foreign objects in their body... but hey..! You look hot right!?
No thank you, I'll spend my money on a university graduate degree...
So tired of the expenses.. and living my life, knowing I could never afford a home here....
And YES.. the men are a joke here... They think THEY Are gods gift to women..
To Stay in LA, you must be.. either brain damaged, retired, a billionaire that's shallow, have no moral values.. a desperate wanna be actor looking for approval from your peers,
I had a girlfriend that lived in Walnut and one day decided to go visit her. Being the simpleton at the time looked at a map and saw that 5 went all the way up and over so I'll just stay on the 5.
I ****ing hate LA. I grew up in Orange County, but I spent a ton of time in LA, and I can conclusively say that it is the worst city I've ever spent any time in, short of Tijuana.
There is something to be said for pride in your home town, but eventually you have to realize that you just might live in an enormous hellhole. It's not just the smog, either (although Riverside, just 10-20 miles to the east, has the worst air quality in the nation). Let's break it down:
1) Traffic. I want to stab myself in the eye with a fork when I hear anyone complain about traffic in other cities. LA's urban planning looks like someone dropped a plate of wet spaghetti on a road map. There is no fully appropriate metaphor to describe the freeway system other than a botched abortion of concrete and steel, because there is zero logic to it. Driving across town? Give yourself an extra hour, because you never know when the 110/10/5/405 will lock up. This completely ****s one of my biggest personal tenets: BE ON TIME. BE SOMEWHERE WHEN YOU SAY YOU WILL BE THERE. LA traffic makes this impossible, because it could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours to get ANYWHERE. This is true 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as I can attest from the four-hour delay I once hit driving home from the Bay Area at 1 A.M. on a Sunday. And of course, every once in a while this is the result of...
2) Televised car chases. These happen with alarming regularity. In 8th grade I remember coming home from school just in time to see a guy stop his truck on the 10, delaying thousands of people for two hours, and then set the vehicle on fire with his dog in it. This was just before he blew off his head with a shotgun. On live television. For about two weeks all the TV stations were contrite about showing a graphic scene of real-life violence to an audience of the hundreds of thousands of kids who were undoubtedly watching. Then like a month later they aired another one that ended in a motorcycle slamming into the back end of a bus. You stay classy, KTVU.
3) Size. The city itself is ENORMOUS even for the number of people who live there, spreading in a more or less uninterrupted stream of low-lying industrial buildings from Thousand Oaks to San Clemente. You can walk across San Francisco or Boston in like two hours in any direction. Try that in LA and you'd better bring a week of rations and a bulletproof vest. This means more time spent on those beautiful freeways.
4) Pollution of all kinds. Everyone owns at least one car, since the public transportation system is virtually nonexistent. Sports practices are occasionally canceled due to "air hazards." Nowhere else outside of Mexico City have I heard of this. Furthermore, a good 50% of the beaches are contaminated by some variety of toxins and the ocean has the appealing color and consistency of a can of watery pea soup. Not only that, everyone goes on about the weather like it's not virtually identical to what's found anywhere from Cabo to San Francisco - and you can't get lung cancer just by being outside in other places on the West Coast.
5) Sports franchises. Expect fair-weather Lakers flags every time playoff season rolls around, and expect the seats at any sporting event to be filled with a combination of a) Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz, and equally abhorrent celebrities on the lower levels and b) bitter Raiders-tattooed vatos in the upper deck waiting to get drunk and stab someone. In the absence of an NFL franchise, the football fans, too, are like homeless divorcees – blindly wandering around, searching for something new to glom onto, pretending they don't care about their loss. They're also all Raider fans – imagine downtown Oakland on game day except without the benefit of an actual football game being played.
6) Violent crime. Parts of East LA make "Falling Down" look like a fairy tale, except with much less English. Feel unsafe in New York? LA's murder rate is TWO AND A HALF TIMES AS HIGH. You have to go to the South or Detroit to find a comparably violent city.
7) The women. The thing with LA/OC producing swarms of hot girls is true, but most of them don't end up staying in Los Angeles. They all either move to San Diego or end up going to school at ASU, U of Arizona, or Colorado. Most of the women I've met there that are around 22 or older are attractive enough, but they look so beat and used-up they'd probably feel sticky if you touched them.
8) Culture. This is a place where Ryan Seacrest can get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the home of "Us Weekly." This is a city that has put on the mantle of the American film industry and then used it to give us "Soul Plane," "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter," and "Cheaper By the Dozen 2." This is the Mecca for faded jeans, metrosexual douchebags and pink drinks. Everything about LA is saturated with an insatiable drive to impress the perceived yokels from Middle America with shiny pretty things. Furthermore, the residents tend to look down on the rest of the country through their Chanel sunglasses like they're the world's authority on anything pertaining to style or entertainment. If you need barely-legal fetish porn or a man-purse, welcome to paradise.
Plus, all this trendier-than-thou attitude is thinly spread over a giant proletariat of Mexican immigrants that grows larger by the day. I can't wait for ten years from now when the entire valley becomes a war zone. When the Battle of Dominguez Hills is fought I'll be watching from the Bay Area or someplace and thinking "****, I hope my parents are okay. Good thing they laid that minefield in Garden Grove back in '08."
THIS POSTING IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT!!!
i GREW UP IN ORANGE COUNTY, LIVED IN LA.. and i am moving to arizona to go to a university... I'm sick and tired of planning out my day 5 hours in advance according to traffic!!!
It's ridiculous.... and when I considered a boob job.... and another woman told me i needed botox at the age of 25, I knew it's time to go...!
Women in LA glue hair to their heads, inject animal fat in their lips, and surgically implant foreign objects in their body... but hey..! You look hot right!?
No thank you, I'll spend my money on a university graduate degree...
So tired of the expenses.. and living my life, knowing I could never afford a home here....
And YES.. the men are a joke here... They think THEY Are gods gift to women..
To Stay in LA, you must be.. either brain damaged, retired, a billionaire that's shallow, have no moral values.. a desperate wanna be actor looking for approval from your peers,
Or you really have no clue and low self esteem..
LATER LA....
OMG, I'm speechless! This was amazing and so freakin' TRUE! You deserve an award for posting such an articulate post. I feel the same way, I think this place offers the worst quality of life in the entire nation. Unfortunately I feel friggin' stuck here. I'm in school too and my husband won't let us move until I'm done. Can you believe I moved here from beautiful Alaska? Don't know what I was thinking. Anyways, if I could get the hell out of here tonight, I would! Good luck to you, once you escape this rat-race...don't ever look back! I don't even know if I'll want to visit once I leave. And BTW - I HATE the weather here! It's boring and stagnant!
Location: where you sip the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
8,297 posts, read 14,156,795 times
Reputation: 8105
This is all very interesting, and I for one wouldn't want to live in LA ..... but shouldn't these last few posts be on an "I hate LA" thread instead of here?
At any rate I suppose the OP has found her little slice of earthly paradise by now.
This is all very interesting, and I for one wouldn't want to live in LA ..... but shouldn't these last few posts be on an "I hate LA" thread instead of here?
They probably would've been on the proper thread if the posters had any sense. That not being the case they apparently just post - I'm sorry, RANT - "wherever". It must be more fun that way. Think I'll go try it over on - oh, anywhere.
Santa Cruz/Capitola area, redwood mountains meets the ocean. Can't beat the recreational opportunities and the old hippy vibes.
Right, if you don't get snobby, then you get WEIRD -- case in point, Santa Cruz. The hippy-dippy vibe is just as annoying...can be just as "packaged." Truckee and the shoreline of Lake Tahoe can be that way, too.
All the snobby places have been pretty much named -- La Jolla, Santa Barbara, Carmel, the Wine Country.
This is a tough one. If you have that kind of money to spend, you'll obviously "go coastal" and most of those places are kind of pretentious. Maybe Ventura County around Camarillo, or maybe between Santa Maria and Paso Robles. Also, what they call the "North State"....Chico, Lake Almanor and any nice pockets up there, though the cultural amenities will be limited.
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