5 Things I Hate About San Diego
What are the Top 5 things that I hate about San Diego? We’re going to get after that right now.
These are not going to be a big deal to everyone, but as a local, these are the things we think about and the things that we maybe don’t like so much about it. Some people may not think they’re a big deal, so let’s get after it right now. The top five things that you need to know before moving to San Diego, that I might not like so much about it.
#5: Traffic
We’ll start with number 5 and that absolutely has to be the Traffic. Traffic’s bad here in San Diego. Let’s face it. I mean, fortunately it’s not as bad as say Los Angeles, but it is certainly heavy traffic at certain times of the day when people are trying to get home from work or go to work in the morning, there’s very heavy traffic on certain freeway. Some are worse than others. Some aren’t so bad. The worst freeways are the 805 coming out of the South Bay.
A lot of folks from either Mexico or Chula Vista or National City coming up into the City of San Diego to work. Also traffic, I mean from North County into San Diego. So kind of the coastal 5 freeway or the 15 freeway, those can back up the 5 gets worse than the 15 freeway but a lot of people live up in those areas and say, Oceanside, San Marcos, Vista, Escondido. And they’re coming south to work in the City of San Diego for the traffic backs up in the morning.
And then also an East County, folks that live out in Santee, Lakeside, Alpine, El Cajon, they’re coming west into the City of San Diego. The 52 freeway and the 8 freeway can really back up as well. Now again, on the flip side in the afternoon, people are going back home and the freeways can back up going that way as well. Weekends coming from Los Angeles, there are a lot of people that love to visit San Diego on the weekends.
So traffic can get really, really gnarly on Saturday morning. Sunday evenings when people are going back on specifically the 5 freeway because even though it’s a 4 lane highway, it’s just not enough to handle all the traffic from people coming from Orange County and Los Angeles. Traffic is definitely one of the biggest downsides to living here in San Diego. Fortunately, the traffic patterns are somewhat predictable. Like I just described it’s that morning rush hour, that evening rush hour as well, unless there’s a traffic accident in the middle of the day, you’re probably not going to get stuck on other cities like Los Angeles. I lived in Los Angeles for over a year and enjoyed my time, but was glad to come back to San Diego. And man, the traffic was terrible there.
You never know when the traffic’s going to be. They got rush hour; morning, and afternoon, but really any time during the day, it could be terrible. You just never know. It’s hard to make plans for how long does it take you to get anywhere? San Diego is a lot better about that. No matter what you want to plug your destination into your Google maps or your apple maps, whatever you use, you can calculate that traffic pattern and see how long it’s going to take you. It’s always a good idea to do that and plan ahead. You can also maybe avoid some of the traffic as well.
#4: Weather
The number four thing that I hate about San Diego is the weather. That sounds crazy to say right? San Diego supposedly has some of the best weather in the nation and around the world. “It’s always 70° and sunny.” That’s actually the average temperature in the city of San Diego itself is about 70°.
Now that being said, the City of San Diego is pretty temperate. It stays pretty stable, but we certainly have our hot months and we have our cold months. In the summertime, especially maybe July a little bit, but really August and September and really October as well. Those are the hottest months in both the City and the County of San Diego.
The county of San Diego is huge. It’s a huge land area and it covers a huge range of geography. Everywhere from the ocean, all the way to the mountains and to the desert as well. It can get insanely hot in the desert. I mean, we’re talking 110°, 120° routinely during the summer. The desert is kind of off limits in the summertime, you don’t really want to go out there.
You’re not going to be doing the dune buggy, the motorcycling and the camping that you might want to do during Desert Season. Desert Season is really from about maybe October, but really November through the early part of April. April gets a little bit, but in the City of San Diego, in the more immediate surrounding counties like Santee, El Cajon, Alpine or North County in Escondido, San Marcos; it can get really hot during the summertime into the 100s°, the low 100s°, high 90s°, low 100s°, it gets hot.
Some of these homes that were built, they were built in the 1970s or before. And a lot of them don’t have air conditioning because not that it wasn’t really around per se, it’s just that it wasn’t really needed. It was a little bit cooler environment than it is now. And so a lot of homes don’t have air conditioning. If you’re buying a home, you definitely want to make sure that it has air conditioning or that you can easily retrofit it because a lot of homes may not have air conditioning. So keep in mind, it can get super hot here. Even in the City of San Diego, we can have some really hot months where it gets into the 80s° and 90s°. That’s hot for us when you’re not used to it. You’re used to be more 70° when it spikes to 95° in the city, it feels really hot.
On the flip side, it can get rather cold, both in the city and in the counties as well. Again, we got the mountains, there’s its snows in the mountains, definitely during the winter time. You’re definitely going to be in the 30s°, the 20s° routinely at night, but back in the more of the city and kind of more immediate surrounding areas of the city, it can get really cold as well, routinely into the 30s° at night. You just don’t realize it. And in the city, it’s really kind of a wet cold because we have the marine layer that comes in from the ocean.
It’s this heavy kind of wet cold. It might only be 60°. That doesn’t sound that cold to most people, but it actually feels really cold because it’s damp. People that come from drier climates, where they’re used to it being kind of cold, you know, and it’s snowing and it’s in the 10s° or 20s° or whatever sometimes, they come here and they’re actually surprised that it can be kind of cold. That’s really like January. That’s probably the coldest month and a little bit into February. That’s where it can be a bit colder.
#3: Only So Much You Can Do
The third thing that I hate about San Diego is there’s only so much you can do here. I know people come here and they think: I’m just going to go to the beach every day and I’m going to surf every day. It kind of wears off after a while, unless you’re just a really avid surfer. You’re probably not going to go to the beach every single day and surf every day. It gets old after a while.
There’s other things you can do like hiking, but again, some of those hikes might become kind of routine. We’ve got Cowles Mountain, Iron Mountain, Potato Chip Rock and other trails around in Mission Trails. But how many times do you want to do these? It can get kind of routine. But on the other hand, it’s kind of nice to have a routine and know that like, “Hey, I’m going to do this hike. I know how long it takes me. I know how hard it is and you can plan accordingly”.
There’s only so much that you can do that. We do have 1 professional sports team now, as far as Padres. We have a soccer team as well.. But as far as like football, baseball, basketball, we only have the Padres. Baseball team used to have the Chargers, but they decided to ditched down and, and leave us all behind and moved up to Los Angeles. A lot of San Diegans are still pretty bitter about that. And they’re not that great usually. Every year people get excited at Spring Training and everyone’s like, “this is the year”. And then every year they end up sucking just like usual. Padres have never won a championship, that’s kind of disappointing, but you know, it’s fun to go to nonetheless.
Petco Park, it’s a really fun experience for the family. Bringing a date, whatever it might be. How many times can you go to the Padres game? So that’s something to keep in mind just that sometimes things might come become routine. You think you’re moving to a new city, you’re going to all these different things. And then you may settle into a routine. You really gotta make an effort to actually keep finding new themes to do.
#2: Fires
We do have fires in the County of San Diego, not really in the city, but we do have a very rural area here in the San Diego County. As I said, it covers a wide range of land and geography. We’ll have fires out in the countryside. We had a big fire in 2003 called the Cedar Fire, the Witch Fire believe in 2007. And fortunately I haven’t had a major fire recently, but fires do still pop up. And because so many homes have been built in rural areas, they do threaten people’s homes, their lives, their animals, their livestock, and it creates a ton of anxiety and of course, property damage for people when it happens. That can happen, especially if you’re moving to a more rural area.
What’s happening now is that anyone that lives in a rural area has to have a 100 foot defensible space around their house to help keep the fire from actually threatening their home if it gets too close. Also everyone has to have fire insurance if they’re in a high fire hazard area, and that can be really expensive. Oftentimes you have to go through a state fund in order to get it. And that can be $3,000 to $4,000 per year for that extra insurance if you’re in a high fire hazard zone.
#2: Cost of Living
And the #1 thing I hate about San Diego is the cost of living. It is very, very expensive to live here. In fact, there was recently a report that came out that says “San Diego is the least affordable city in the entire country, even worse than Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City”. I mean, it’s really actually kind of hard to believe, but the way that they’re looking at it is because the median price of homes and the median income that people are actually making here.
Folks that live in San Diego tend to make a little bit less money as compared to San Francisco and Los Angeles or New York. And so therefore the cost of living for home buying is higher. If you’re moving here and you’re trying to buy a home, most likely you’re going to need dual income in order to do it right now. The median price is approaching a $1M in the County of San Diego, and it seems to be continuing to rise.
You have to be prepared for a high cost of living. As far as home affordability, probably going to have to have 2 incomes in order to buy a home here. If you’re buying a condo, maybe not, maybe you can get away with 1 income. But that’s certainly a really high cost here you have to factor in. We also have high utility costs. Our gas prices are very high. There’s a lot of state income taxes on our gas.
Gas can be really expensive. I mean, right now when I’m recording this, high inflation, so gas prices are right around $6 a gallon. They should go down soon, but you never know. We’re usually about $2 higher than anywhere else in the nation. That’s always high. And then San Diego has one of the highest utility bills, as far as our gas and electric provider, San Diego gas and electric, they’re owned by Sempra energy and they’re the most profitable company in their portfolio. And it’s because they charge us so much money.
So depending on the size of your house, I mean, you’re going to be paying probably anywhere from $150 on up to probably $400-$500 a month, depending on how large your home is, how much your heating and cooling, where you’re located. If you’re in a hot area, you’re going to be spending more, pretty expensive for gas and electric here. And the water’s a little expensive too. It’s not as bad, but it’s certainly expensive as well. Cost of living is pretty high here. You got to keep all those things in mind when you’re looking to move to San Diego.
One great factor though, about San Diego and about California is our property taxes are actually relatively low. They’re capped at 1% of the purchase price. If you bought a home for $1 million, the purchase price or the property taxes on that are going to be 1% or $10,000 per year, they can go up at 2% of that $10,000 every single year. This is a result of Proposition 13 that was passed quite a while ago now, about 40 or 50 years ago. And so it caps the property taxes.
There’s a lot of folks in the legislature that are trying to undermine that and get rid of that. But it really helps provide a lot of affordability for people, through their property taxes, to stay in their homes. And now there’s a new proposition that came out that allows senior citizens over 55 to actually sell their home and then move that tax base over to their new home. If you have a home that you’re paying $3,000 a year on, but you sold out for a million dollars and you want to go buy another home, that’s a $1 million, you can actually pay that $3,000 still instead of that 10,000. That’s actually a cool feature about California and our property taxes.
Those are the 5 things that I hate about San Diego.
Curtis Chism, Realtor
858-281-2568 | Mobile
mailto:info@sandiegohomes.io
Chism Team | DRE #02105113
brokered by eXp Realty | DRE #01878277
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