truth about norther cali?

[Number87]

i am a senior in high school and will be graduating in may, me and a few friends are planning on moving to norther california to live and get out of michigan. we all plan on working and gaining residency to go to college. i want to know all there is to know about everything there so any info you could pass along would be awesome. we are open to anywhere and dont have a set area to live, so suggestions as to were the best places are would be helpful. anything will help.

thank you.

[Swoshmn]

first, why the fuck would you pick northern california as the one place you would want to move from the entire world/county?

second, get ready for some of the highest cost of living in the US, and a plethora of qualified individuals competing for jobs.

maybe I'm just skewed becuase i grew up there.

good luck on the move

but i really don't care

[whosnervous]

I'm a college student in the Bay Area and let me tell you....

It's not all that bad.

I have grown up here my whole life but I've also done alot of travelling around the country and with the possible exceptions of New York or Boston, I can't think of another area that I would want to live. LA is fun but not my cup of tea exactly. I think what Steve Coogan said in Coffee And Cigarettes sums up my feelings about SoCal in general.

Anyway, you'll probably end up living in Oakland. It's cheap and it has one of the largest burgeoning hipster/art scenes in the country. It's near Berkeley so you'll have a steady influx of smart people coming and going and there's a real eclectic community, tons of record stores, great places to eat, etc etc.

The rest of the Bay Area is pretty whatever.

I really like Palo Alto actually (think Stanford). It's quite ritzy but it's small and for what it has, it is a fairly cool place.

Bonito Perdido.

Edited by whosnervous on Mar 16, 2005 at 12:43 AM

[jargolara]

I've lived in the Bay Area for about 5 years while going to college, and I plan to move back soon.

So yeah, like whosnervous said Oakland is a cool place to live, some areas are really sketchy though, so you'll want to be sure you're in one of the nicer areas. Berkeley is nice too, but around the campus housing is expensive and hard to find, but the farther you move out the more reasonable it is. Also there's this little tiny city called Emeryville that's kind of in between Oakland and Berkeley that's not much on its own, but the rents are cheap.

If you want to actually live in SF, the average rents for the city center is about 1000-1200 for a small studio apartment. So yeah most young (not-rich) people who live in SF live in the "Sunset" and "Inner Richmond" neighborhoods. Since SF is such a small city, you're only a short drive from the action of the city and rents are a little more reasonable.

I'm sure you've hread of this already, but craigslist.org is the place to look for anything you need in the Bay Area (apts., roommates, jobs, buy/sell furniture). They cover a bunch of other cities too, but since it was started in SF, its particularly useful for the Bay Area.

[url=" http://www.jargol.com"] <a href="http://www.jargol.com" target="_blank">http://www.jargol.com</a>