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Old 10-08-2012, 04:34 PM
 
3 posts, read 6,568 times
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I would be a little worried living in a house backing the freeway. Forget the noise, the air pollution is really high next to a freeway. Too many health risks.
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Old 10-08-2012, 10:52 PM
 
Location: Sandy Eggo - Kensington
5,291 posts, read 12,714,990 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CWinMD View Post
Back story: My Husband & I (in our 40s, no kids, two dogs) vacationed in San Diego three years and fell in love with the city. Came back last year for 5 days, stayed at a B&B in Banker’s Hill, met with a Realtor and visited every neighborhood in the city, came back home to Maryland and said “YEP we love that city”! Paid off all our bills, saved for eight months, put our house on the market (sold in 1 day) and off we went! Here is what we learned along the way! We moved from Northern Maryland to North Park, San Diego, CA.

In no particular order:
Costs: Housing – Big difference; we spent almost three times what we paid for our MD home (13 years ago) and got ½ as much house in CA! It is also three times the age of our last house! Gas- big difference, .35 more per gallon. Food – a little more in some areas, but fresh fruit and veggies a lot less! Utilities – a little less but I work from home so everything runs 24 hours. Water – higher, if you have a yard/grass an irrigation system is required. To compare, CA = $100/month, MD=$40/month. Car Insurance – Less, guessing it was because we don’t have snow/ice or rain to worry about in SOCA. Taxes= overall I pay $34 more per month. A few areas we find less expensive in California are services – like landscaping & home improvement. Also, the restaurants are amazing, we find great deals on Happy Hours!

Moving: We downsized from 2000 to 1200 square feet and two cars to one car garage. Best advice –sell/get rid of as much as you can! Moving companies charge per pound and it adds up quick, moving our 3 bedroom home and transporting one car cost over 5K. When moving cross country do your homework on moving companies! We thought we found a great company, and had we just done a pick up drop off may have been ok, but our stuff was stored for two months. We ran into trouble getting a delivery date, it appears moving company’s contract out storage pick-ups & delivery. So you wind up with whatever guy is in the area and bids on the job!

Real Estate– Anything under $500,000 is a hot market! We had one weekend to find a new house and there were only about 10 in our price range (3 B/2 Bath, under $475k, & move in ready) in the entire city! If you want to buy then give yourself time and consider renting. We totally lucked out and found a house the first weekend (our compromise was that the house backs to the freeway). A few interesting things about buying in CA , once you make an offer you can back out in 17 days and unlike other states you sign the contracts/completed sale and 24-48 hours later get your keys to the house. Also with condo buying we found it interesting that there are rules that a certain percentage of a condo building must be Owner Occupied in order to qualify for certain types of mortgages (FHA, etc.). A good realtor will help with the details; these things are just very different in my home state. WORDS OF CAUTION: Pick you Realtor VERY carefully (ours was a gem) as a general rule we found CA realtors are not very reliable. I can’t tell you how many did not call our realtor back on properties we wanted to see and two sent us to houses that had completed contracts! Do a lot of research on Mortgage brokers! The one we picked was horrible and we almost lost the house. Also, if you’re buying a house, insist on getting the house tented for terminates! Being from the East coast we didn’t know much about termites and allowed the sellers to “Treat the problem”; we later learned you can’t treat areas of wood!

General Observations – People move SLOW in SOCA! Getting estimates for work (i.e landscaping and contracting) can takes weeks! Being from the East Coast we want everything yesterday and here everything is tomorrow! We have found that people are really nice, friendly, and helpful. Traffic sucks, but no worse than any other big city. Employment – I transferred and work from home, but my Husband got a job within a week of posting his resume to the online sites, he is in Telecommunications. We thought everyone in CA would be all about the wine, we learned in San Diego it's all about the micro-brew!

Conclusion: It’s expensive to live in California. If you want to move, plan for it, save as much as you can, and research everything, then you won’t be surprised! The weather is amazing and living in San Diego (the city) everything is less than 10 miles away! I mean EVERYTHING! The locals joke that it’s the price you pay to live in the perfect city! Seven months living here and we don’t regret our move for one second!

Extra info on “Hoods”:
Downtown – GREAT condos- totally would have lived in Mariana District or Little Italy if our very large dogs were more social! If you live downtown you can walk to EVERYTHING! Banker’s Hill – very nice, can still walk to downtown, only downside is that the airplanes fly DIRECTLY overhead. Hillcrest – Very NICE! Tons of restaurants and large LGBT community. Would have loved to live here but couldn’t afford a house! L. University Heights – nice mix of affordable homes with a lot of rentals. Tallmadge & Kensington –Both great FAMILY neighborhoods with well-kept homes. South Park – Nice area, great homes, and still very close to downtown. We wound up in North Park. What we love about North Park is we can walk to about 100 restaurants & pubs and Balboa Park. Buying in North Park afforded us a backyard, a very small one, but it accommodates dogs who like to go out at 3 AM!
Love your post! I'm currently on vacation in Florida. After reading this, I'm almost ready to go home!
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Old 10-09-2012, 09:33 AM
 
Location: San Diego, CA
1,665 posts, read 2,970,149 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PatanjaliTwist View Post
Best of luck Tony.

There are some lovely bldgs around. I, too, always opt for the convenience of living in a downtown area, mainly so I can walk to everything. And, even though the Gaslamp bar scene isn't my thing, I nonetheless enjoy walking through & living around vibrant nightlife areas. In 6-mos time, I've moved my car about 6 times & that's only because I've had visitors who wanted to drive further north. (Gerry sometimes reminds me to start my car on occasion... she sees everything... ) Even my 80-yr old mum still walks 1-2 mi/day. Must be in the blood.

Hope you find the perfect place!
I call the Gaslamp on Friday and Saturday night the doucheskank. But there are a lot of nice restaurants in there, and if you hit them up on a weeknight, they're not crowded and the food is just as good.

Since I started being able to walk to work, I drive my car maybe a couple of times a week. That's to go to Costco or something like that.

I'll definitely stick in the 92101 zip. I may not be right by everything, but I'll be a 10-20 minute walk away and I can definitely live with that.
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Old 10-09-2012, 11:13 AM
 
2,986 posts, read 4,566,202 times
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Originally Posted by tonyinsd View Post
The only critique I have is that you're really comparing apples to oranges when you talk about housing prices. Housing in San Diego is expensive, but in the more urban areas of Maryland, it's comparable. You were up in northern Maryland and you can't compare say, Carroll County to here.
exactly. here in Arlington there is a 1 bedroom place on the market that is renting for $3500 (i think they are asking $500 above the going rate and will likely only get 3k for it). Those same one bedroom places are selling between $500-$600k. Want a two bedroom? Try 890k-$1million+ and there are even more expensive condo buildings than mine in this area.

Aside from Coronado and La Jolla, prices don't even seem all that comparable. You get more in San Diego than you do in NoVA/DC

EDIT: Here are some listings from the nicer places in Arlington (scroll down):

http://www.justnewlistings.com/turnb...r-rosslyn.html
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Old 10-09-2012, 12:09 PM
 
Location: Hookerville, formerly in Tweakerville
15,117 posts, read 32,224,737 times
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I lived in Arlington before it was built up. I lived in the Buckingham Apartments @ Pershing & Glebe, when the Ballston Commons mall was called Parkington Shopping Center.
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Old 10-09-2012, 12:51 PM
 
2,986 posts, read 4,566,202 times
Reputation: 1664
Quote:
Originally Posted by moved View Post
I lived in Arlington before it was built up. I lived in the Buckingham Apartments @ Pershing & Glebe, when the Ballston Commons mall was called Parkington Shopping Center.
yea that area is very expensive as well. The entire Ballston-Rosslyn corridor is pretty much outrageous
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Old 10-09-2012, 09:29 PM
 
Location: Hookerville, formerly in Tweakerville
15,117 posts, read 32,224,737 times
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It was cheap when I lived there, but I left in 1988.
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Old 10-10-2012, 08:14 AM
 
2,986 posts, read 4,566,202 times
Reputation: 1664
Quote:
Originally Posted by moved View Post
It was cheap when I lived there, but I left in 1988.
yea it started getting crazy about 10-12 years later. Over the past decade or so prices have been rising continuously
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Old 10-10-2012, 10:45 AM
 
Location: Hookerville, formerly in Tweakerville
15,117 posts, read 32,224,737 times
Reputation: 9699
I have a friend who bought a condo (Park Fairfax) for 20K in 1986. She put her name on a list for a 1br, and got one. She said that she could probably sell it for $200K now. I don't remember how much she paid every month, but compared to now, it wasn't much, and she paid it off fairly quickly.
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Old 04-05-2013, 05:55 PM
 
26 posts, read 32,388 times
Reputation: 17
Default Housing costs

I think most big cities on the West Coast have low supply and high housing costs. I've lived in Seattle, Portland, and San Fran (well, really slightly north of SF, but I commuted 1 hour to the city every day). What I pay now, in Portland, is the same or close to it for a 2 bedroom in SD. Not in La Jolla, mind you, but from recent research on Craigslist, I'm not shocked. Actually kind of comforted. And gas is higher here (seriously!). And I pay not 1, but 2, arts taxes, on top of normal taxes. So go figure. Of all the places I've lived, SF (area) was the most expensive.
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