Having just moved back down here from Ventura Cty., we have recently gone through the job search/offers. San Diego jobs definitely DO NOT pay the high salaries as other areas. The employers call it the ‘sunshine factor’. Yeah great, so I get sunshine but pay the same cost of living. This is the reason the housing prices started slipping here first in ’05 when the rest of So Cal hadn’t seen much impact….yet.
The pricing is overpriced here, or you can look at it in the reverse, the employees are underpayed!
Also there was some discussion before on various industries here in SD. We are still believers in the Biotech world. There are companies that provide drugs that can greatly increase a patients quality of life. Hopefully more of the SD start ups will hit on something big to bring more jobs here. With UCSD research as a center to all of this, it is still very likely that over the next 10 years SD will develop some strong home grown Biotech firms. Also, I don’t believe this work will be farmed out so easily to the Asian countries. This avenue has been looked at by the major biotechs and it was deemed NOT favorable. The only slight possibility is that Singapore may be able to come up to the standards that are necessary to manufacture. Other than that, not going to happen. There are many other places that offer enough tax shelters that would offset risks of going to someplace like China where quality is not even in the vocabulary.
