Best Places to Live - Forbes and Inc Report question...

Hello,
I have an employment offer from Paradise Valley Hospital in National City, San Diego area.
Could anyone give an opinion on the hospital itself, the area, and the cost of living?
We are a young family of 3 including a 10-month-old.
Thank you.

I lived in Bakersfield from August 2003 to November 2005. It is a mid-sized city that has grown to nearly 400,000 people and has 6 major hospitals.

I bought a nice two-story house in Bakersfield in the summer of 2003 for $145,000, and in late 2005 it appraised for $320,000. I purchased another two-story home in Bakersfield in the spring of 2004 for $153,000 and sold in the summer of 2005 for $259,000. I took my profits to Texas where I bought a brand-new cash home.

You'll need about $800 per month to rent a decent apartment, and about $300,000 to buy a decent house in a desirable neighborhood. The decent parts of town are the Northwest, the Southwest, Westchester, and the East Hills. Stay away from the Southeast (Cottonwood neighborhood) or Oildale. I apologize for not being able to tell you more about nursing salaries or working conditions. However, I know that the average RN earns $31 hourly and the average LVN earns $17.

Riverside is in southern CA while the other cities are more central/northern...many originally farm country and in some areas, still very much so....lots of beautiful country nearby such as Sequioa & Yosemite National Parks. Riverside is a more populated, busy place and the freeways are a disaster.

I grew up and lived in So. CA all my life until a move to the midwest 13 years ago. I just spent 6 weeks in Hemet after my mother passed away recently (very close to Riverside where a friend lives). I could NOT believe what a nightmare it has gotten to get across the city, never mind the county. What should be a 45-minute drive can take 2 1/2 - 3 hours depending on what's happening on the highways -- and that's ANY day of the week or time of the day.

The more central/northern cities you have listed are less congested, but as was alluded to earlier, are among the fastest-growing areas of the state.

Best wishes!

This is what I would recommend: pick the best job you can find, rent an apartment and/or house nearby, and go check out these places first hand on weekend road trips. That's what my husband and I did for two years before settled on an area we liked and bought a house. I think we covered just about every town in Southern California and then some. We wanted to be really careful and pick the right area for us before we invested any money into it.

California is HUGE and every town has it's plusses and minuses. Cheap towns are not always better if there's limited job opportunities and no grocery stores nearby. You won't really know what's best for you until you check out these areas first hand.

We eventually settled on the Victor Valley area because it was within reasonable commuting distance of lots of good paying jobs, we could buy a house with a pool on a large lot, and the air quality was decent. We looked at Bakersfield for a long time but, decided against it for various reasons: the air quality isn't always great with the farm industry there, you get the farm industry smells, oil pipelines can run through your backyard in some of the better neighborhoods, and the lot sizes didn't give you a lot of room with your neighbors, which was a big thing for us. And, there wasn't a lot of job opportunities that you could easily commute to outside of the area if you wanted more choices.

Traffic is always a problem in California but, I work in Upland and it only takes me 40 minutes to get there because I work the 7-7 AM shift where I beat the traffic. At those hours, I can get over to Riverside, Colton, etc. relatively quickly also, because the 215 isn't as busy as other freeways in the area. In California, some commutes are better than others, depending on what freeways you're talking about. For example, the 91 is almost always a more difficult commute but not all freeways are as bad.

You really can't make informed decisions about this until you live here for awhile and check out these places first hand. The Riverside area is really big, for example, and one part of that area may be more advantageous than the other side, etc. Everything changes within 30 miles ... job opportunities, pay, commutes, housing prices etc. So, that's why I recommend renting and doing a bunch of weekend trips to check everything out first hand.

By California standards, these cities are 'affordable'. However, you are not going to find a decent house that costs under $300,000 in any one of these cities. Remember that $300,000 is considered 'affordable' in California.

I live in NorCal and work in SoCal. I use to "live" in the Inland Empire which comprises the San Bernardino-Riverside areas. I wouldn't consider Riverside in the "affordable" listing because housing has gotten out of control. The list you have probably has only one that might be considered affordable and that would be Visalia because of it's location in the Valley. Remember just a few years ago Visalia was considered one of the most air polluted areas in the country, even worse than LA. Want to know why? Methane gases produced by all of the cattle in the area! I thought this was crazy but true. Modesto isn't too bad but still expensive, Fresno and Stockton is still ridiculous. As one poster stated, there isn't really too many places that are affordable. I got lucky and moved North 9 years ago and bought when prices were still low. My home on 5 acres in the middle of nowhere cost $140,000. It was appraised just last year at close to $400,000! I still work south but have no regrets about commuting to work.

"Affordable" is often just exactly that. You can afford to live there but you won't be happy doing it.
This is not a question you can ask on a board, you have to do the soul searching as to what you want, traveling,and research.

you told her/him about oildale, but you forgot to tell about the "ku klux klan" in oildale.