Los Angeles is actually a pretty amazing place to live. Most of the people I hear talking about it as though it’s not are people who’ve never lived there and really only understand the city as a pop culture reference.
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I’d cast a second vote for Philly. It really has evolved as a creative and culturally vibrant city, with multiple universities, maker spaces and a booming street food culture, but I still see the daily signs that the same patterns you see in London and NYC are creeping into place here… My brother is paying over 3 thousand a month for an apartment half the size of my rented house in the suburbs… Small commuting communities are being over run with condo blocks like mushrooms after the rain.
Welcome, Cory.
Bring Water!
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You are exactly right. At least in New England towns like Portsmouth, NH or Portland, ME offer pretty much all the cultural needs of a big city, and often the music and art scenes are more welcoming. Unfortunately property valuations in the nicer medium size US cities are getting out of control as well.
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I used this as source:
Aww sheesh make some room for me!
Forget that, it’s enough to have spent two years studying at the opposite end of the lake. Too much steel industry there, though.
I passed through Kingston a couple of times, though. It sure is a nice town.
If for some reason I was faced with the choice of moving there or moving to LA, I definitely wouldn’t pick LA.
As an Austrian coming to Canada for studying, I was actually surprised that these parts of Canada weren’t “at about the same latitude as Austria”, but rather at about the latitude of the sunny Southern places in Italy and Croatia were Austrians traditionally go for summer vacation. Winter was still cold enough to impress my friends back home, though.
Live where you want, Cory! But since you are moving from London, which is currently UTC+1, and LA is UTC-7, who is going to make sure Boing Boing has around the clock postings? I want to wake up to fresh Boing Boing every morning! Folks in Europe need fresh Boing Boing throughout the day!
Get your priorities straight, people!
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Who knew? It turns out that your weather has a lot more to do with warm ocean currents than your latitude…
I remember flying to Helsinki at 60’ and being amazed by the weather. I’ve spent some time at 60’ in Canada and I’ll tell you it is NOT as nice as Finland…
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I can’t blame you for leaving the UK @doctorow. If it wasn’t for the surveillance the UK would be well on its way to being a Lib-Cap utopia, and a dystopia for everyone else.
I’m a disabled person in Oxford (London prices, Midlands wages) getting disability benefits that are above the average wage¹, and I have emergency plans in place to make sure I don’t end up homeless. Not everyone is that lucky, I live less than 100 metres from people reliant on foodbanks. £1000 a month is pretty much the low end rent now, and the local housing benefit will only pay £830 of that.
If anyone else can get out of the UK then I suggest you do it. I’m stuck here though. Emigrating when you are too disabled to work just isn’t going to happen.
Why did Scotland have to vote no to independence?
¹ If anyone needs to ask, being disabled is expensive. The loss of Independent Living Fund tomorrow is going to hit a lot of people hard.
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another big factor that is going to effect housing in the UK, especially london is the right to buy scheme.
this will force councils to sell their best properties and the funds go to CENTRAL GOVERNMENT not
to the council. This is coming soon and the councils only response is to start the sale now so they can
get the money before central government steals it from them.
Whats even more stupid about this is that these impoverished councils will have to pay to house the
people who lived in those houses under emergency means because … drum roll… there isn’t enough
private housing.
Whilst owning a house is a good thing it should not be done at the expense of maintaining existing
council housing stock . its a fire sale thats what it is.
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Man, I’ve never been more than a “few” to the ocean - would take 20 minutes to get to Santa Cruz when I lived in the Bay Area and it’s way closer for me now…
Being landlocked would seem super weird to me.
And there’s no where that is that I’d want to live save maybe for somewhere in CO.
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the trickle-down theory of gentrification
Except back then poor people stayed & arty types moved in. where as now poor people are haunted out & the middle classes just give up & we get lots of lovely gated communities, except in London they don’t spread horizontally but vertically http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/feb/12/shard-kingdom-tower-vertical-villages-skyscrapers-bad-cities.
Have you looked at prices in Highland Park lately? It’s starting to
gentrify over there. A better reference might be Boyle Heights.
That’s my point. Highland Park is obvious, but to someone from London, (or the west side) it looks like an ‘undiscovered’ gem. Untouched by real estate interests, and over development. I mean, hey, Marc Maron lives in HP, so it must be cool for self employed artsy types, right?
You’re absolutely right about Boyle Heights, but the guy from London, with the family to think about? He’s not going Boyle Heights just yet. I’d give Boyle Heights two years before white families start moving in there. It’s still on the hipster bubble. Lincoln Heights is in play now too.
But it’s all academic. For all we know, all they can afford is Riverside County.
My wife is from Sonoma county. She misses California, she would love to live in California near her family. However, she won’t go back because here in the Houston area we can own our own home and drive nice cars and live a nice lifestyle.
In Cali we’d have to choose between an apartment and doing stuff occasionally or being house-poor and never doing anything and driving a beater Kia or Hyundai for an hour to the BART station so we could finish off our two-hour each way commute. (I mean, Hell, last time we went to California we drove out to Long Beach to take a cruise and what struck me is that almost nobody has a genuine luxury car. Driving to the Wal-Mart (with a parking garage, heh) and parking got some very discomforting stares – I thought we were going to get jacked for her Lincoln SUV. Here it’s about half trucks, one-third luxury vehicles and the rest are… well, some Texans like to keep cars a long time.)
As an Albertan, my Alberta-centric mind immediately went to “Since when is Red Deer a university town?”
[quote=“LDoBe, post:109, topic:60707”]
Much like how a lot of people say LA when they’re actually located in Lakewood, or Anaheim, or Santa Monica.
[/quote]For Santa Monica and Lakewood, that makes some sense since they’re both on the LA Coastal Plain in LA County, and Santa Monica is surrounded by LA on all sides that aren’t ocean.
But Anaheim is Orange County. Different county, different watershed, different aquifer, different politics.
It’s not LA no matter how many confused tourists think Disneyland is in LA. It’s no closer to LA than Pennsylvania is to Manhattan.
Orange County is separated from LA County by Coyote Creek. The LA metro area is separated from the Riverside/San Bernardino ‘Inland Empire’ by the San Jose Hills.
Just because you’re not familiar with the local geography doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
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My wife is friends with a recent immigrant (to Canada) from London… She and her husband are both doctors, they left London because they couldn’t afford it, and moved to Oakville and bought what has to be (we don’t know for sure, but based on the other houses for sale in their area) at least a million dollar (Canadian) house. And at that price, they can afford for the mom to be a stay at home mom. That’s how insanely expensive London is, that this family who can afford a million+ dollar house on a single income can’t afford to live in London with TWO incomes. Or rather, I guess that they can’t afford to live in London with the same sort of lifestyle that they want here (4000+ square foot house that backs onto a forest in a great school district).
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Cory, at the risk of encouraging even more people to come here, save yourself the LA leg of the trip and just come straight to Austin.
