Yes, California is breathtaking, no doubt about it. But in my opinion, there’s absolutely no point to living there if you don’t have money, and I mean lots of it. If you can’t afford a beautiful home on or near the beach, the awesome restaurants, the swinging nightlife, and the overall lifestyle that is California, then you’re really just living your life on the outside, peeping into the window at everybody else enjoying California. All you’ve got is nice weather. But if you DO have money, San Diego is definitely worth consideration. Especially if you’re not into the sprawling, megalopolis lifestyle that comes with living in places like New York, Chicago or L.A. where it’s 40 minutes or more to everywhere…assuming traffic is light. San Diego comes with all the glamour of the big cities, but it’s not nearly as far flung. In Chicago, I drove 40 miles to work every day and 40 miles back…and I never left the Chicago metropolitan area. It’s that big. You can get used to anything. But where Chicago is enormous, dirty and industrial (God, I love it!), San Diego is just, well…luscious! It’s big enough to be a major city, but small enough to feel manageable. And it’s so freakishly beautiful and there’s so eye candy everywhere you look that if you’re not from there, you probably wouldn’t even mind the traffic. At least you’re sitting in traffic in beautiful San Diego.

California is enormous. It’s not like Europe, where cities were built long before there were cars. Think about California’s history. If Columbus first set foot in the Americas in 1492, it took fully 300 years for explorers to map their way from the first colonies on the East Coast to find California on the West Coast, or to even realize that there was a West Coast. Nobody other than the Native Americans really knew what was between Missouri and California until after the Louisiana Purchase, and the new Americans were more interested in exterminating them and stealing their land than learning from them. America bought all that land from Spain when they realized that with most of Central and South America in their possession, it wasn’t realistic to think that we weren’t gonna eventually take it from them at some point, so they might as well take the money. Besides, it was dangerous and unexplored. And way too many Europeans would disappear out in the bush, never to be seen again. Consequently, even after the Louisiana Purchase, it took another 60 or 70 years to find a reliably traversable route to the west. And I say “reliable” because many tried to reach the West and were never heard from again. Google “Donner Party” and you’ll see what I mean. 

Just getting to California was a long and arduous slog across 2,000 miles of the Great Plains (emphasis on “plain”, as in a thousand miles of nothing but flat grassland as far as the eye could see), then climbing the Rocky Mountains, then working through the maze of the Grand Canyon, then crossing the Mojave desert, to finally reach the Pacific Ocean. Nobody felt like city planning once they got there. They started a simple town with a Post Office, a jail, a store, and a bunch of saloons, and just kinda built out from there. That’s why California’s cities aren’t really walkable. They weren’t planned. They just kinda sprouted. As towns became cities, the solution was to build walkable areas like San Diego’s Gaslamp District. Actually, that’s America in general. It’s why most American cities have Little Italys, and Chinatowns and other trendy little walkable hotspots in an otherwise city. But you have to drive there so you can walk there. It might not make sense if you’re from other places on the planet. But if you’re American, it makes perfect sense. It’s the polar opposite of Europe, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.