Gdcox,
San Diego city? San Diego county? San Diego the city center? San Diego the tourest attractions? There are alot of facets to San Diego, and no one area speaks for them all.
I was neither born nor raised in San Diego. Moved here in May o6. I have lived in Clarimont and Mira Mesa. I can say that the have a very similar make up and similar feel. They have nice areas, and not so nice areas. Were built well before any bubble, and are mostly made up of SFR’s with a decient mix of condo’s mixed in. You can follow both with relative ease and they march to nearly the same drummer.

Having said that, comparing these to anything on the ocean is like comparing Paris with London. Sure, both are capitol cities and major metroplitan areas. Other than that, you know the difference. Point loma may have been built in the 60’s with clairmont, but they are not the same beast. Newer is better, closer to the coast is better, views are a wild card.

I dated a girl from London for a while. The thing that kept blowing her mind was that the UK, all of it, is roughly 2/3 the size of California. There are about 30 million people in CA, what 60+ in the UK? We are so much more spread out than most in London (where she was from) ever understand.

Basic rules of thumb. North is better than South, West is better than East, Newer is better than older, and higher is better than lower. Get a good map of SD, apply that rule of thumb in that order, (maybe blue is good, red is bad) and you will find that the coast is almost all blue, the east all red, and the purple makes a near perfect line from Orange County to Mexico down the middle. That purple are is your average. Anything else is just too small an area to be significant.