I can’t speak to L.A. area, but aren’t the straight male/straight female ratios of both San Diego (due to military) and SFBA (due to techies) skewed to have more men than women?

I can’t find it now, but there was a study that showed that even a small skew in gender ratio towards more men caused dating to become MUCH harder for men, more than could be surmised from the numbers alone.