jm, if you are planning to relocate here and you will be commuting to S.D., don’t do it, gas prices and traffic make Temecula a non option. If you are like dharma and work locally or like others who work from home mostly and don’t depend on local dollars to support your business, it is an ideal location with a nice variety of of activities and people for a bedroom community. It is primarily designed for families but I have three generations of my family living in the valley and they love it.
With regards to paramount, he and I disagree on a lot of things but I am not an out of towner or a transplant and have lived here longer than most anyone on the boards, 17+ years. Without posting my resume, let’s just say I know far more about demographics and civil planning than I do about real estate. Temecula is actually almost at build out, every piece of dirt is either built, planned and definately zoned. It has the luxury of being designed in the last two decades so there is almost no mixed use areas (houses next to businesses), something Escondido has a lot of. There are only a few apartment buildings in the city, confined to a few locations, multi housing is the key to urban decay. The city also has no debt and runs a budget surplus every year, it also has healthy reserves. If revenue went down 20%, they wouldn’t have to cut a thing. Temecula was designed to have no downtown, no place to live and be a pedestrian, something in existence in almost every ghetto. Go to escondido and you will find thousands of people living within walking distance to the 99 cent store or the mexican markets, they dont have cars and they can walk to the store, it is actually what makes those apartments attractive, the proximity to what they need, in temecula, you need a car or you will die. The city also purposely has a weak transit system, until recently it was completely cut off from it’s neighbors and still you cant get to elsinore, fallbrook, escondido or hemet without taking greyhound, in Esco you can take a bus or train almost anywhere and to the other cities. It was designed to be that way. Temecula also is routinely fined or threatened because they have so little section 8 housing or rental assistance, they get out of that by purchasing some of the existing apartments and converting them to 55+ complexes and providing the elderly with rental assistance, they do everything to avoid poor people under 55 so to meet the minimum they recruit the over 55. Escondido is more than half Spanish speaking, the environment fit their needs and they were attracted to the area, Temecula has a B/P checkpoint in it and is designed to not meet their needs so even though a house in Temecula is cheaper than Escondido, it never became an Escondido. The hospital thing is irrelevent, esco has a big hospital, the Temecula Valley has two small ones but more are needed since the region grew and the two are both on the North side of the Valley. The one that is planned in the South is being held up because it is being placed next to million dollar homes so there is a little tussle but it will come there or on another lot because there is money to be made, most of the citizens are insured.
Temecula doubled in size during the bubble so it took the brunt of the meltdown, but this too shall pass and on the other side of this we will be fine, I’m going to bet my money on it and buy in the next 12 months. Some will counter with anectdotal tales of some crime or some poor person they saw, make them bring the actual crime rates. The number of foreclosures wont bring masses of poor people buying them, actually those that couldn’t really afford them are the ones being kicked out, there will be no downgrade in demographics because a repo costs half what it sold for new, the buyer now needs to prove they can afford it so there may actually be the opposite affect. And the repos all wont be turned into rental stock, they are being sold quite qickly right now and it’s to fence sitting families from everything I have seen, there isn’t a rental market big enough to support thousands of 3k sq ft houses and those same rentals are already available in other towns more suitable to poor people for the reasons stated above, if anything the demographics will improve.
