Nine Days to Closing

People move to Southern California for all sorts of reasons. They come for the industry or the weather or simply because it’s the last place to go before running into the ocean. Other people, like me, just end up here.

My first impression of the LA basin was from an airplane. It was a brown day and the marine layer was so thick that the first buildings visible on the approach to LAX were just past the 405. I looked down upon the industrial muck, compared it to my beloved San Francisco, to the lush Midwest, the idyllic Northwest, to my compass New York, to London, Istanbul, Rome, and wondered how anyone could possibly call it home. I turned to my flying partner and exclaimed in a voice as sure as youth that I would never live in such a place. Never is a cursed word.

More than a decade has passed since I moved here. Blame it on a boy; ahh love. Southern California does have good weather, and the ocean. I like the ocean. My husband is a beach kind of guy, a sports kind of guy, an engineer; a South Bay kind of person. So, despite my hope that we could pick up and head a smidgen north to Pasadena or Silver Lake or any other more 'cultured' locale we have remained south of the airport. It's not bad.  We have good friends. We’re near the beach. My daughter’s school is awesome. We’re close to the freeway. All in all it’s actually pretty good. But, it’s not me. So ten years on, we’ve sold our dubplex, the one he bought before we met, and are moving to a new neighborhood, still south of the airport, but one with a little more art and a lot more trees.

Our new house is a fixer. Even with the steep decline in the housing market, this is still SoCal. If you want to leverage yourself into a good neighborhood you’re going to start with a fixer and you’re probably going to pay enough for it to make your EKG abnormal. But our (crazy expensive) fixer has potential. It’s a nice family house. Tricked out, it will be down right bucolic. But more importantly, with some creativity, it could possibly be home.