5 Reasons Why I’m So Over Living in Southern California
I love living in California, but I’m so tired of living here. I was born and raised in California and I can’t imagine living anywhere else in America. I love the weather. People say that California has 2 different types of weather; hot and super hot. Tony, Toni, Tone, taught us that it ‘Never Rains in Southern California’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp_5pQGTAtI. I love the fact that you can go to the beach and surf, and go to the mountains and ski, in the same day! Trust me, this is possible, I’ve done it. I love the way the summer sunsets look like a painted canvas in the sky, it’s almost majestic. If you’ve never seen a Southern California sunset, you don’t know what you’re missing. Southern California is the home to Disneyland, Hollywood, Santa Monica Pier, Venice Beach, palm trees, great food and great people. The richness in California is in its diversity of ethnicities and nationalities; it’s beautiful. I get to watch the Lakers, Dodgers, and Rams in person (pre-covid). How could a person have complaints about a place that sounds so perfect? Like any great thing, California has its flaws. And at this point in my life, I’m trying to contemplate on whether or not the pros still outweigh the cons. So what are those cons? I am going to list the 5 main reasons on why I’m tired of living in Socal.
- Rent Prices — The rent prices in Socal are at the point where it’s getting ridiculous. I listen to The Dave Ramsey Show regularly and he suggests that your mortgage/rent should be 25% of your total income in order to not be ‘house poor’. (What does it mean to be house poor? House poor is when a person spends a huge portion of their income on the house/property taxes/maitenance etc. to the point where you hardly have any other money left.) So there are two ways that this can happen in Socal; You’re either making a ridiculous amount of money or you’re making decent money but you living in a very low income area. The amount you pay for rent is obviously determined by:
- The area you live in
- The type of house/apartment you live in
I did some research and found that the average rent for a 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment in Los Angeles is $2100 per month. (If you’re single and don’t need much space, then this might work for you. But if you have a growing family, then you’ll obviously need some space).To give you some context, you can rent a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom (1,717 sqft.) house in Houston, Texas for $1,850 a month.
Over the past few months, we have been looking to rent a house in Los Angeles County and The Inland Empire and the average price for renting a house has been between $2400 and $2600 per month.This house, for example is in Pasadena, California. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1047-N-Rose-Ave-Pasadena-CA-91107/2078198575_zpid/ It’s a 1,050 sqft house with 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom renting for $2,895! If you look at the house, you can see that there’s defintely nothing special about it, it’s basic. According to Dave Ramsey, we would have to be making $12,000 per month to not be house poor.
I’ve also considered buying a house, but that market is pretty wild too. For the most part, a house (maybe 20 miles east of Los Angeles) goes for about $500k minimum. Most of these house need a lot of work. Now can you imagine spending $500k on a house and still having to do repairs. All of these things make in nearly impossible to have a nice house on an average salary in Southern California.
2. Overpopulation — A lot of studies are saying that California is experiencing the ‘Great Exodus’ with people leaving California by the hundreds. If you ask me, it feels like the total opposite. There are so many people in California, specifically Socal. The malls are always packed, the stores are always packed, the amusement park lines are long, anywhere you go, it’s crowded. This is of course pre-Covid. If you’re a person that loves lots and lots of people, then Socal is the perfect place for you. But, if you’re like me and too many people stir up your anxiety, then you would have a really hard time living here. People overpopulated mixed with being in the tech age is a perfect mix for frustration. People walk down streets with their heads down looking at their phones. They don’t care who or what they bump into. It makes it hard to enjoy your day at the local promenade. It feels like everyone lives in the same general area; Which leads me to my next point…
3. Traffic —Since there are so many people, extreme traffic is a byproduct of that. You can google search, ‘Worst Traffic in America’, and I can almost guarantee that Los Angeles will be on most top 5 lists. Rush ‘hour’ in the mornings ranges from 5am to almost 10am with bumper to bumper traffic. Then the ‘evening drive traffic’ usually starts around 2pm and can last all the way to 7pm in some cases (Depending on whether you drive with or against the grain of traffic). On Friday nights, everyone seems to be leaving out of town, usually to Vegas since it’s only about a 3–4 hour drive (depending on traffic), so you can forget getting anywhere in a hurry. All day Saturdays, you can pencil in being on the freeways for long periods of time. The one day of the week where there is virtually no traffic, is Sunday’s. That’s the day that most people stay home to either recover from Friday and Saturday or to prepare for Monday. On a normal day, it can take over an hour to drive 15 miles compared to a few minutes in those very rare times that there’s no traffic. We used to have carpool lanes where you could drive in as long as you have 2 or more people in the car with you. Now, those lanes turned into ‘FasTrack’ lanes where you have to pay to use them. Most people don’t want to pay the money for that. Lastly, it seems like every major freeway (405, 605, 10, 5 and 101) are constantly doing neverending road construction. For years, they have supposedly been adding lanes to alleviate some of the congestion, but for the time being, it only seems to make matters worse.
4. High Cost of Living— According to Wallethub.com, California ranks #13 out of 50 in overall highest taxes. Ranking #5 overall in personal income tax burden https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-burden/20494/. California also has the 5th highest income tax collections per capita according to USA Today. It seems as though the cost of everything in California is going up and at a rapid rate. As of August 18, 2020 the price of gas per gallon was $3.21 versus $1.90 in Georgia. It’s almost getting to the point where you have to be rich to live here. Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That’s no way to live. I heard on the radio the other day that most Americans couldn’t afford a $400 emergency, that’s scary.
5. Earthquakes — I remember the 1994 Northridge earthquake like it was yesterday. It was huge and it felt like it lasted forever and ever. I remember being so afraid as a kid, to the point where I couldn’t even eat for 2–3 days afterwards. I remember watching the news seeing freeways collapsing and buildings on fire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqoCmc1SbBg. Since then, we have had numerous amounts of sizable tremors and they’re no fun. In Southern California, we are on one of the biggest fault lines. Seismologists are constantly warning us about ‘the big one’. The “Big One” should supposedly have the ability to reach up to a 10 magnitude on the Richter scale. One of the scariest things about earthquakes is that they can’t really be effectively predicted like most other natural disasters (with the exception of a few).
Even though I’ve called Southern California home for all my life, I think it’s time to move.
