Good move jstoesz! The main reason I’m in San Diego is the weather, I think it’s average or below average for many other areas. SD pro’s and con’s:
pro’s
1. climate
2. mountains and close hiking
3. beaches (easy to get to, downside water too cold to swim – personally far prefer caribbean/hawaii type water/sand)
con’s
1. architecture SUCKS here – very few homes/buildings with character and the type of leafy beautiful neighborhoods you find east of the Rockies
2. it’s hard to find a cool neighborhood you actually WANT to live in – that inspires you. Most of affordable San Diego is GHETTO with no character & shitty schools & shitty litte strip centers for downtowns (east county, south county, vista, o-side, escondidio) & the better parts & better school districts (PQ, RB, Scripps, 4s, Carlsbad, etc..) are cookie cutter, big box strip center, sterile car culture – with no character shitty architecture
3. No sense of community
4. I just find SD to have a very “low mentality” & “low IQ” overall in so many areas – it’s a very kind of get rich quick scammer environment, throw cheap shit buildings up quick to make developers rich and get out, and very transient. It just has a feeling of cheapness (in the architecture and neighborhood design) here. Very commercialized and mainstream culturally here. It just has an emptiness culturally here. Has more in common with say Phoenix, Dallas or Vegas. It’s just not a very intellectual place. They should have a big statue in PB that represents the whole of SD mentality with a “dude” covered in tatt’s drinking a 40 out of bag with a Chargers tee.
5. So much of SD just has a “ghetto” feel and trash thrown everywhere. Just makes me sick all the trash I see off the highway exits…it’s like people just don’t give a shit.
6. It gets soooo dry & brown here after say May until Dec…the hills are so dead and brown. When I fly back east to New England in the summer, I feel like I’m flying into a rain forest.
7. There is no change of seasons (ok maybe a little rain in the winter)…it can get kind of grounhog-day-ish really boring…the falls are gorgeous in many parts of the county – I was just back in Vermont in late Sept..WOW.
There are a lot of great places like Minnesota out there with green leafy neighborhoods with handsome stately afforable homes, nice parks, good schools, rivers, forests, natural lakes, nice communities, grass, trees, good schools and affordability. But yes you have winter and some gray skies.
The only reason I’m here and not in a place like say Seattle is the weather. I always ask myself WTF I’m here…it always comes back to weather. That is the only reason. And I will probably still eventually move out of here despite the weather. The people on go on about how great SD is make me sick…come on folks, it’s just the weather that makes it a good place to live.
