'Dawg at the Crossroads

[jough]

Isn't the cost of living in Hawaii just insane?

I mean, I know it's expensive to live in or around LA too, but isn't LA cheaper than Hawaii?

And think of what you'll save on the price of goods and services that do not need to be imported.

[Pedro Picasso]

Trouble!

I'm sorry about your trouble.  I pray your family gets through it well and comes out stronger at the other end.  I'm sorry I don't have any helpful information for you.  I'm even sorrier that I'm going to provide uninformed and unasked-for opinions about the place.

WARNING: What follows are the impressions of a East Coaster / Southerner who never left the town he grew up in.  This guy hasn't even met that many people from California.  The following paragraph probably won't be helpful to anyone.  You sound like you really don't want to move there anyway.  I recommend you skip over the rest of this post.  

Dude, Los Angeles is a hole.  Don't freaking move there.  The people are fake.  The traffic is ungodly.  The cost of living rivals that of living in space.  People say, "Oh but the weather's nice."  It's not nice.  It's the desert.  If you stopped pumping water in from and thus destroying neighboring communities, LA would dry up like vacuum sealed prune ashes.  It's unnatural.  All living with people who think they're going to be great actors and people who think they're already great because they know computers.  Terrible place.  Really.  And two more words for you: race, riots.  Who needs that action?  Not this guy.  No sir.  And sure that doesn't happen often, but you know what does happen often?  Earthquakes.  LA: an expensive pain-in-the-ass place full of fake-ass people and earthquakes.  The city is such a pain, people can't even take the time to say its full name.  The best part of LA is the shoe company LA Gear, and that's pretty low.  So really, take the pay cut.  I'm not sure how expensive Hawaii is, but moving from most parts of the world to Los Angeles is pretty much like taking a pay cut anyway.  LA == a hole worse than Courney Love's band.  When friends of mine say they want to move to LA, I ask them if they've considered less expensive ways of ruining their lives.  Like cocaine addictions.  Man.  I hate that place.  I don't even know where all this anger comes from.

This has been a self-serving announcement from a guy who probably doesn't know what he's talking about.

[wombat]

No, no, no!

Pedro is adorable and sexy and brilliant and charming but he is WRONG.

And yeah, I had the same thought as Jough - isn't it really expensive to live in Hawaii too?  

Limmo, I want to read your answer too...  I was in Venice with Kogepan, I would not let him go by himself like the garden gnome.  I have been there for a couple of weeks a couple of times, a couple of years ago.  My friend in Orange County - the one I visited the time we didn't have the West Coast Ache-con - used to live there when she was in law school.  The picture of Kogepan eating a taco on the Venice boardwalk is central to my fantasy, it's in front of a little half-empty office complex that faces the ocean.  I dream of having a little office there where I sit and write my third series of murder mysteries, which would be set in Venice, of course, and eating wonderful green chile tacos for lunch - wonderful tacos, AD, it's a culinary paradise - and getting a foot massage once in a while from the strange Chinese massage place on the first floor. With the windows wide open to the sea breeze and the pugs asleep at my feet. And watching the sun set and then walking home to my odd little house on the Venice walk streets.

This doesn't help AD though... unless it helps to make him believe what a wonderful fantasyland LA is.

[slink]

That's right folks, a total of 14% tax on all purchases!  

17.5.
On anything not bought in this fuck*ng country now too.

So basically, at least LA is cheap to live in.

[Limmo]

Slink?  Shut the fuck up.   Pedro?  Double shut the fuck up.

Wombat?  I understand your fantasy regarding Venice Beach.   It is a neato place full of great restaurants and artists.  It also has plenty of  bullet-spraying gang activity.  So it’s kind of a trade-off.

Aloha?  First of all, according to salary.com, the cost of living in L.A. would be 4.6% lower than living and working in Honolulu.  Which would give you an extra $2500 in income per year.  Yippee.

Alright, you’re going to be working in downtown Los Angeles.  You will not be living there, because the only people who live downtown are artists and other avant single people.  

You have kids.  You will need to put them in school.  As someone in a post above said, the L.A Unified School District is hit-or miss at best.   The quality of schools is much better here in the South Bay – El Segundo and the beach communities ( Redondo, Manhattan, Hermosa, Seal…Torrance is good too ).  But if you move down here…

Your home and job will be nowhere near each other, so you will have to get a car you really like.  Because your ass will be sitting in it for at least an hour every weekday.

I don’t know if you own your home or you rent.  The housing market here in Los Angeles is ABSOLUTELY fuck*ng ABSURD.  You’re looking at $400,000 for a house here, bare minimum.  Renting is less steep, but still not cheap.

Asherdan’s points are right on the money.  On the other hand,  Wombat’s fantasy vision of L.A. is not as rose-tinted as other posters here seem to think it is.  The only place in America that Southern California suffers in comparison to is, well, Hawaii.  And there’s a hell of a lot more going on here than there.  L.A. is great, especially in comparison to, I dunno, Houston or Scotland or ( rolling eyes ) North Carolina.  

However, all this is fairly moot, owing to the third paragraph of your post.  Your wife, you say, is not about to move to Los Angeles.  If that’s really the case, then guess what?  You’re staying in Hawaii.

A blog about life here.

A very helpful page for finding decent schools out here.  

[pmcd9]

Limmo is Mean.

~Paul

[Limmo]

Limmo is Mean.

~Paul

Only to people who talk shit about where I live.  Especially people who have never been here.  I would have been nicer, but Pedro's boilerplate bullshit about how horrible everything/everyone is out here kinda got me cranky a bit.

[wombat]

Well, as someone who was just offered a job in Baltimore, I say, doesn't anyplace worth going have a little bullet-spraying gang activity?

It's true about the cost of houses.  My friend's little two-bedroom house in Orange County was about 500,000.  But even though it's small, it's wonderful.  And your house doesn't need to be as big when you can spend time outside in the yard twelve months of the year.  

And as for the commute - I seem to recall, AD, that you've sometimes talked about getting a job in DC someday?  Most people's commutes here are just as long, and sometimes they have to make them in the SNOW.

[V-Adore]

Judging by the other responses in this thread, it really sounds like LA is livable but not a huge step up from your lifestyle now. This means that the real question is what your family has to say about it. When you say that your wife is "not about to move to Los Angeles" -- how firm in that is she? (In other words, how many problems will it cause if you decide to move?) And what's the root of her objections? The kids are also a factor -- the baby, maybe not so much, but your other daughter is certainly old enough to have a voice (not a deciding vote, but a voice).

Honestly, the best advice I can give is to make sure your family can get entirely behind whatever decision you end up making. Moving a fairly long distance is hard enough even with the full support of a family, but if your loved ones are going to be miserable in LA, there really isn't enough money in the world to make that a good decision.

[Asherdan]

Limmo is right.

And he's confirmed my memory on the nicer South Bay areas too.

But honestly 'Dawg, I don't know if staying with the same employer is worth a move to LA, a move in which the benefits and deficits of that move will at best balance out neutral.

So I'll throw a tie-breaker at you: If you come out the first round of barbeque is at my humble abode.  I'll even clean the hot tub for you.

[arkabee]

'dawg- that is the suck.  sorry to hear it.

why has noone talked about smog?  isn't smog the fundemental backbone of L.A.?

in a weird sort of synchronicity, i read this today:
http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/election_day.html
which is about the current L.A. mayoral elections etc.  i thought it was interesting.

i was not aware the housing market in the L.A. area was so bad, i thought that was localized to the Bay Area.  it saddens me.  Be Very Afraid of the Housing Bubble.  I would not want to be moving to Cali at this point in time.  Maybe in 5 years you could pick up some cheap foreclosed properties, but right now it's frightening.

Isn't L.A. the simplest example to show what "Sprawl" is?  I'd assume that would be the single greatest difference between Hawaii and it.

[Limmo]

So I'll throw a tie-breaker at you: If you come out the first round of barbeque is at my humble abode.  I'll even clean the hot tub for you.

And if you're coming here to check the place out, I volunteer to act as your tour guide / Cub Scout Leader.

[jough]

They say the fuckin' smog is the fuckin' reason you have such beautiful fuckin' sunsets.

I don't know squat about LA but if it would hurt your family to move there (or worse, separate you from your family for an extended period) than even if they pay you double it ain't worth it, Dawg.

Unless you *want* to get away from your family, in which case go for it.

[miles]

Some of my most memorable vacations are in Southern California, the best being a small trip last year when I attended the Coachella festival.  Afterwards, I stayed in the Hilton on Sunset, where I got LAID.  It was kickass.  It's a beautiful place to visit.  I love walking around Sunset, hanging out on the beach, Disneyland, all that shit, but I don't know if I would ever live there.  The goal is to have enough money to visit there often, and live somewhere more laid back (probably somewhere else in the Southwest, or possibly back up to the Pacific Northwest).  The traffic is way too much, and earthquakes freak me out (growing up in Seattle, I guess you get that way, because they big one's always coming).  Although, Venice is one of the most charming places in the US, and one day, it may be worth it.

[Asherdan]

Point of order:

Disneyland is in Anaheim, which is in Orange County, which is NOT part of LA regardless of what that lackluster bastard of a baseball team owner would have the rest of the world think.