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I'm so tired of people pumping up this 'pump and dump' city called Temecula. This city is nothing but a bunch of people living off of Refinanced Homes = Loans, Refinanced Cars = Loans, Credit Card debt to the max and even higher than that...lol, EBT Cards = Free RESTAURANT Food and groceries, and overpaid politicians doing absolutely nothing for real growth. Temecula is a complete joke.
No, sarahj000 is telling the truth. If we could get a lower mortgage (we live in Murrieta), we would leave this ultra-conservative, backwards of an area of nothing but strip malls in a NY minute. If your idea of living and having any kind of fun is going to the mall or bowling or to the movies or the over-rated "wine country" then this is the area for you. It's ok for raising kids, but if you don't have kids or if they're grown and gone, you might want to consider somewhere else.
You might have heard about the Murrieta mayor (we're the city that runs into Temecula - it's really one area of 200,00 people) who resigned after plowing into 4 teenage girls while DUI. Fortunately, none of the girls was super seriously hurt. He went ahead with a run for city council and won. He was the spearhead of the group who wouldn't let the buses of immigrant kids and their moms drive their bus through Murrieta to somewhere else. It made the national news. People are so self-righteous here, it's disgusting. When anyone says California is a bunch of liberals, they couldn't be more wrong.
We moved here from Central California in 1977 and what with jobs, etc. ended up staying. A huge mistake.
I am responding to request links because there are elements of your post that provide details contrary to other claims I've heard, and it's always nice to do a reconciliation, right? Here are the elements to which some links would be very much appreciated:
1) That the mayor hit some girls with his car and then ran for city council. I heard a city council member hit some girls with his car and then ran for mayor (and won!)
2) That the kids on the buses were with their moms. I heard that most of them were without parents.
3) That the buses were attempting to drive through Murrieta. I heard that they wanted Murrieta to process these immigrants.
4) That California is not, actually a bunch of liberals. I loathe government, whether conservative or liberal, democrat or republican, fascist or communist, right or left. It's all based on using force to get people to behave a certain way, and California tends to lean left/communist/democrat/liberal, though there are (sometimes large) pockets of right/fscist/republican/conservative (and Murrieta/Temecula does seem to be one of those pockets).
Anyway, if you ignore all the propaganda and authority and marketing, it's a nice area because it's a valley protected from the smog of LA and the heat of the Mojave, and far enough from the ocean that it isn't too crowded. The weather is wetter than the rest of Riverside. I think I still like further south better. That's where I was born.
I was wrong about Long - he was mayor and now he's been elected to the city council, where he was before he became mayor. Thanks!
The LA Times article says the crowd forced the "buses to turn around before they reached a Border Patrol station in the Riverside County city." - the Riverside County city being Murrieta. It was poorly written as well, since it says "The detainees are primarily children accompanied by mothers or fathers," but in the next paragraph talks about "52,000 unaccompanied minors." It is oddly left to the reader to imagine how many children on the bus were unaccompanied by parents.
In any case, I like the area. It is being ruined (as all areas are) by the presence of government authority which, at the same time it pretends to be helping, makes people behave in suboptimal ways, pretending it's perfectly moral to force people to pay for things they don't want, and using the proceeds to cover the cost of the mistakes the government makes. But it's still a nice area.
I suspect that if such busloads of people didn't represent a forced drain on our pocketbooks, we would welcome and help them. Private charity is vastly superior to government programs.
OK, now I will weigh in, as a new (6 months) resident of Murrieta, and I have a lot to say, so pass or bear with me. Your call.
For 32 years, we lived in a city in the SF Bay Area's East Bay, having been transferred there from North San Diego County for my husband's job. In the last 10 of those 32 years, we started seriously looking for places we might like to live once we no longer needed to live in the Bay Area for our work.
We looked in the Pacific NW, since we have lots of friends up there; we considered Colorado, and we considered Texas (Well, I did, because that's where many of my family lived, but my husband was never really on board with that. )
We even looked several times at Redding, since my husband has family there. We looked at El Dorado Hills, CA.
We looked at California's Central Coast, which I love. We also looked back at North SD County, as well as at Orange County, since OC is where we lived when we first met and where other family still lives. These locations were all discarded for various reasons.
Yes, we left out a whole bunch of the rest of the country. Although there are many places I hope to visit, I knew that I didn't want to be too far from the Pacific coast and we didn't want to have to start over entirely in our 50s. I felt that I needed some familiarity with my surroundings for a stable home base, wherever else we may travel.
Part of what we also looked at was our ability to transfer our California Prop 13 property tax base into a new county. There are only 8 or 9 California counties that allow that transfer. Riverside County was one, but we'd never considered this county since my husband worked in the northern part of the county in his early 20s and still talks about how bad the air quality was and how his lungs would burn after a day's hard work.
However, in March 2014, we came down to help his brother move into his new place in SW Riverside Co. I had read here on CD about Temecula and Murrieta, and we'd passed through on an earlier trip to Fallbrook, so I lined up a few houses for us to look at while we were in the area helping my BIL. I had really found online the house I loved, and the neighborhood, but it took 'boots on the ground' for my husband to get the same feeling. He got it. He walked into the backyard and said, "I am ready to go home right now and start packing boxes." That took him about 15 minutes.
We looked over neighborhoods, we visited the local places we would normally shop, and we just got the feeling for the area. It felt right for us.
We came back down in April to take another look, and we still liked the area. I continued to do my due diligence, here and any other place I could find. Two posters on this board, John SoCal and California Poppy, were especially helpful, as they'd relocated here from the Bay Area and had a good feel for what we'd be leaving and what we'd be moving into. Their information was invaluable to me, and I thought of their posts on many sleepless nights during the selection and escrow process.
We offered, we made a third trip down, and in June, we moved into our new home in West Murrieta.
It's way hotter than I'm used to, which I'd expected. But now I had to live through it. I am a gardener, or was, and the plants I brought down with me don't like this new climate much, but I do my best with them. They, and I, have to adjust to a new climate, but that would happen anywhere we'd have moved,and I am learning the flora that do well here.
The fauna? The bloody ants drive me insane. On his second night here, Labor Day weekend, my father-in-law had to leave his bed and sit up on a couch because he was being bitten by ants. My sister-in-law went for her bedside glass of water and drank a few ants. Swell. My husband's new unpaid part-time job is bugkiller. And gopher? What's a gopher? Now we know, to their detriment.
Yesterday for the first time in my life I saw and, thank God, correctly identified a black widow spider, which I had to 'man up' and smack and quish because if I hadn't, it'd have escaped and later maybe bitten my dog. It was sitting on my dog's cushion. That thing was HUGE. Good thing it was belly up under that cushion. Otherwise I'd not have known what it was.
(It was actually more a bludgeoning death for the poor spider, which only ended after I finally got it off the soft cushions and squirted it with spider spray and chased it to where I could tromp on it. That thing just would NOT go down! The sound effects and freaking out would have made a good Candid Camera entry. My husband was not home, so I had to do this myself. I guess the good thing is now I know what those spiders look like and I know I can kill them. But geeeeeeezzzzzzzz.)
Still, heat and bugs aside, just about every day, my husband and I talk about how glad we are that we found this spot, unexpected as it was. We live on a small cul-de-sac, and we've met nearly all our neighbors. We had dinner cooked for us one night when we first moved in. I thought we'd moved to Mayberry -- and I say that in a nice way.
We had an unusual person appear on our street one early evening, and I was out there alone, watering plants. No husband at home, and all the garage doors down. The place looked deserted. He approached me for gas money, saying he was the son of a neighbor whom I hadn't met. I didn't know the guy, but he knocked on a few doors, got the attention of a couple of the wives, and pretty soon two of the more muscular neighborhood husbands were out front, managing the situation with tact and friendliness.
Halloween night, parents brought their chairs out front and visited so that they could keep an eye on the proceedings. It was a kind of block party.
Most people we come across in general are pretty friendly, and people aren't in such a hurry to get stuff done that they can't take a minute at check out to ask how you're doing. Granted, sometimes I am in a hurry and get impatient with the 'slowness' of service, but then I remember that *I* need to slow down a bit and not be in such a hurry.
I have found a Facebook page that really works well to keep me apprised of what's going on in the area, from traffic jams at Winchester and I-15 to what's going down at the local Chevron. The police reports on Nixle should be so timely and informative! And this page beats the heck out of Twitter!
I also see many instances of generosity on that same Facebook page to local people in need, from hand-me-down toddler clothing to putting up Christmas lights for a newly disabled neighbor. I've only been on that page for a few days, but the connectedness and caring for others there has amazed me.
Some of these same posters will point out that these families are working the local area, so we can think about how and where we choose to deploy our helpfulness. Still, people here seem more inclined to offer in-kind help first and ask questions later. I don't think that's a bad thing. They even keep an eye out for escaped dogs, and get them back to their owners. It happens very quickly.
We've been to a few local events at our Town Square, which we've enjoyed. We really like the small town feel of our new town. We have found a few favorite restaurants in the strip malls. I love the Temecula Promenade, too. I am not much of a shopper, any more, but I am not afraid to go to my mall, which was not the case in my former location.
The sky here is huge, and its changeability is a nearly daily pleasure. The stars at night! Wow! I never saw such stars.
And when the rain falls here, now I really appreciate it. I give thanks for it.
When we first moved in, we were soon followed by the "Hate City USA" headlines; I've had a police helicopter buzzing my house for many hours (found out why from a random neighbor on Twitter), and our former Mayor, well, yeah . . . I am not going to pronounce on that, but I live not far from that accident site and I know that the news stations and even citizens don't have the lay of the land right there, so it makes me wonder what else is wrong with the story. I'm going to let the court and jury do their job.
It's been an interesting few months, and we wonder if we'll ever move any place else one day when we need and want less space to take care of as we age, when family members are not around, things like that. We are retired, and since we don't have kids to raise, or aren't in the earning stage of our lives, our take on this area will necessarily be different from that of others in different stages of their lives.
But we feel very, very fortunate to have found this place. It's not perfect, but it works well for us.
Last edited by Goin' Coastal; 12-05-2014 at 06:28 PM..
The fauna? The bloody ants drive me insane. On his second night here, Labor Day weekend, my father-in-law had to leave his bed and sit up on a couch because he was being bitten by ants. My sister-in-law went for her bedside glass of water and drank a few ants. Swell. My husband's new unpaid part-time job is bugkiller.
I live north of you in the hills.
This stuff works for me, but I don't put it on the landscape. Three times a year, I put a solid line of it around the foundation of the house. Haven't seen an ant inside the house for years. I occasionally sprinkle it in the seams of the driveway during extreme heat, if I see a line of ants.
"ORTHO® Bug B Gon® MAX® Insect Killer For Lawns"
I've bought the 10 pound bag at Home Depot and at independent hardware stores, so it's not hard to find.
No affiliation with Ortho. It's just worked for me
Jenny, I guess the point is that if you want to live in a Liberal echo chamber, you will lose your mind in Temecula.
Also don't move to Alta Loma.
I read your LA Times link, and they did not agree with you that the bus was on its way to somewhere else. It was definitely on its was to Murrieta, but after the protests, it proceeded to SD County. Now, it has been corrected a couple of times since the original posting, so it may have said what you said when it was first posted.
The council member with the DUI is a result of not enough qualified people running for office.
No, sarahj000 is telling the truth. If we could get a lower mortgage (we live in Murrieta), we would leave this ultra-conservative, backwards of an area of nothing but strip malls in a NY minute. If your idea of living and having any kind of fun is going to the mall or bowling or to the movies or the over-rated "wine country" then this is the area for you. It's ok for raising kids, but if you don't have kids or if they're grown and gone, you might want to consider somewhere else.
You might have heard about the Murrieta mayor (we're the city that runs into Temecula - it's really one area of 200,00 people) who resigned after plowing into 4 teenage girls while DUI. Fortunately, none of the girls was super seriously hurt. He went ahead with a run for city council and won. He was the spearhead of the group who wouldn't let the buses of immigrant kids and their moms drive their bus through Murrieta to somewhere else. It made the national news. People are so self-righteous here, it's disgusting. When anyone says California is a bunch of liberals, they couldn't be more wrong.
We moved here from Central California in 1977 and what with jobs, etc. ended up staying. A huge mistake.
I don't make my decisions on where to live based off of a mayor (1 person) who made a horrible mistake. Not sure if you know but there are many corrupt politicians who make terrible decisions on a daily basis. Wine country is not Napa but many people really enjoy it and it brings a lot of revenue to the area with SD county 1 hour away and LA 1.5 hours away.
Why are you bringing Murrieta into this anyway? Isn't the title of the thread "Just say 'NO' to Temecula"
I live north of you in the hills.
This stuff works for me, but I don't put it on the landscape. Three times a year, I put a solid line of it around the foundation of the house. Haven't seen an ant inside the house for years. I occasionally sprinkle it in the seams of the driveway during extreme heat, if I see a line of ants.
"ORTHO® Bug B Gon® MAX® Insect Killer For Lawns"
I've bought the 10 pound bag at Home Depot and at independent hardware stores, so it's not hard to find.
No affiliation with Ortho. It's just worked for me
Thanks. I'll tell my bugmeister.
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