ValleyGirlTori

Noralto, like its Old Sacramento neighborhood just to the south, has been hit hard by the Foreclosure Crisis. Foreclosures, many at rock bottom prices, make up a full 80% of all the homes being sold here at the time of this writing.

Unfortunately, these homes are not fantastic residences to begin with. A full half of the homes here were built before 1950. There are some newer homes, but even these are not doing particularly well. Most homes sell for around $100K around here (a little better than its neighbor to the south), but still no homes break the $300K mark (or rarely even $250K).

There are two public elementary schools (and a private one) serving Noralto. One is Harmon Johnson Elementary and it is below average in terms of test scores. The other, Noralto Elementary on the northern end of the neighborhood, however, fairs a little bit better managing to rate average overall in terms of test scores. This actually makes Noralto Elementary one of the best elementary schools in this area of northern Sacramento.

On the far northeastern end of the neighborhood you also get a number of boxy 1970’s style apartment complexes which in part accounts for the high density of Noralto.

Over all, this is not a great neighborhood where to live. Most people would choose somewhere else if given half the chance. That said, it is better than Old North Sac just to the south.

Erickson Industrial Park?

Warehouses, Loading Docks and Big Rigs… Warehouses, Loading Docks, and Big Rigs… Warehouses, Loading Docks and Big Rigs..

That’s it. That’s all.

Ellis and Ellis Signs. McHenry Drapes. American Medical. Floral Supply Syndicate. Sears Auto Parts. Magnolia Upholstery.

Warehouses…

Loading Docks…

Big Rigs…

Period

Old North Sacramento is one of those older Sacramento neighborhoods that is definitely showing signs of age. Especially on the western end where there are some ramshackle shacks with cracked, oil stained driveways, discolored lawns and dilapidated roofs with broken shingles and drooping eves.

The vast majority of the homes here date from before 1950 many having been built in the 1920’s. Unlike in the Land Park neighborhood, however, there is little that is quaint about the structures you find here. They simply look old and ready to be torn down.

As to home prices, they are pretty much rock bottom with more than half of all homes going for under $100K (many near the $50K mark, actually). 80% of homes currently for sale are due to foreclosure.

On the eastern end of the neighborhood, the residential area gives way to an even uglier industrial park which is home to a number of parts suppliers and repair businesses. Not very appealing unless your are into rusted metal and scrap part hunting.

There are some diner like establishments in this neighborhood and the usual set of bland fast food places, but truly there is little to bring anyone in from the outside for a visit.

As far as nightlife, you do have a handful of bars including a dive by the name of Nite Hawk Tavern and a gay bar, “The Bolt.” Other than that, the pickings are slim indeed. It’s basically the kind of place you would find in a movie with soundtrack by Tom Waits

Woodlake, Sacramento is a tale two neighborhoods. On the western end of Woodlake, you have a trailer park, North Sacramento Motor Home Park—scrunched right up where the light rail and North Sac Freeway fork. The older rickety homes in this western half of the neighborhood have a distinctly run down look to them, matched by the large 70’s style gas guzzlers parked in their driveways.

The flimsy 50’s style Ranch homes in this section of the neighborhood typically go for under $200K. As to rents, you can find apartments here for around $600/month.

Dividing the eastern and the western ends of the neighborhood however is a creek. On the eastern end of Woodlake, the neighborhood takes on a distinctly southern feel, somewhat resembling Savannah, Georgia perhaps. The leafy streets and irregular sized blocks give the area a certain small town feel I spots.

The homes in this area of Woodlake are much larger than their west end counterparts and the lawns are well kept. Dating from the 40’s and 50’s, the homes are fairly attractive in a classic sort of way.

On this end of the neighborhood home prices of non-foreclosed homes climb to $200K to $300K, though about half of the homes for sale are in foreclosure. They will typically go for half that amount.

Despite the nice homes on this end of the neighborhood, however, Woodlake Elementary consistently underperforms being below average in terms of test scores across the board.

Woodlake Sacramento is not just a residential neighborhood, however. Woodlake is also home to the Canterbury Inn and to KSTV, both nestled away on the southern edge of the neighborhood.

Overall, a neighborhood with definite potential if they improved the schools.

Johnston Business Park is, as the name indicates, a commercial office park. This is not one of those newer looking office parks with the perfectly manicured lawns and glossy, tinted glass offices. This is more of an older style office park where things have a distinctly worn down look to them—more of a big rig and car repair sort of an area than a computer headquarters sort of an area.

A typical company in the area is Capitol Plywood—a lumber disturber for Sac. There are also a handful of Tech companies in the “park” as well, including Software Pacware (a medical billing software designer, I believe) and similar companies.
The two most notable companies here are Bowler’s Paradise (your number one choice in bowling balls and equipment!) and KYMX 96.1—a fairly bland soft rock radio station (basically elevator music with a DJ).

On the eastern end of the “neighborhood” there is a Radisson Hotel, an REI and a CostCo.

Put simply, this is one of those areas necessary to business and commerce in an area, but really pretty uninteresting otherwise.

Oh yeah. They have an Extreme Pizza there too. So if you want some extremely average pizza, you have found Heaven: Johnston Business Park.

The Northgate and Gardenland neighborhood are much like the rest of the South Natomas area—filled with older homes. The neighborhoods were hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, with a full three quarters of homes for sale due to foreclosure.

This is one of those California neighborhoods, like so many others, that is filled with Ranch style homes. In the case of this neighborhood, the homes are from the two previous building booms in the 1950’s and 1970’s. You can definitely see this in the style of the homes here, with the slightly smaller 1950’s style Ranch homes really beginning to show their wear.

Northgate and Gardenland mostly have the feel of a neighborhood that has seen better days. The homes feel a bit worn down, many of the lawns are un-kept and the trees seem to droop wildly across the lawns. Many of the older homes also have a particularly flimsy look to them.

The schools also show some signs of neglect with test stores indicating slightly below average performance overall.

The restaurant selection in this area is also fairly limited with taquerias ruling the day. If you are not into Mexican food, it will mostly be pizza or Thai food here—though none of them are the kinds of places you would drive here for as far as I can tell.

Nightlife and gyms are pretty much non-existent here, though.

River Gardens is located on the south eastern end of South Natomas, and like the other parts of the South Natomas neighborhood, it is made up of older style ranch homes and has the feel of the kind of neighborhood your grandparents might live in rather than the kind of neighborhood where young couples would choose to live.

Homes here are on the lower range of prices with most of these older homes being currently priced under $200K. As with the nearby areas, River Gardens has been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, which in large part explains the rock bottom prices in the neighborhood.

The neighborhood does have a rundown 70’s era strip mall with a drug store, a 99 cent store and giant parking lot.

River Gardens also borders Discovery Park on its southern end, so there is lots to do in terms of outdoor recreation.

The other thing that makes this neighborhood a little bit different is the presence of the Jehovah’s Witness Temple.

Other than that though, there is nothing else to write home about when it comes to River Gardens.

South Natomas is a sprawling, mostly residential neighborhood.

Home prices in this neighborhood are rock bottom. Given that most homes were built during the Reagan Era, the reasons might not be that obvious at first. But a closer look gives us a bit of a clue. Perhaps driven by White Flight, many people started to move out in the early 2000’s as the neighborhood, with its moderate home prices, began to diversify. Unfortunately, this new wave of homeowners moved in just as the conditions for the real estate crisis were being set. If you look at the market today—3 of 4 homes in South Natomas are being sold due to foreclosure. It’s a sad statistic.

The oldest part of South Natomas is in the southeast by Northgate Park. You will find a plethora of 1970’s style ranch homes here (and even a few from the 50’s and 60’s back when Natomas was a much small corner of Sac than it is today). This is the pick-up trucks and picket fences part of town, where lawns are a touch unkept and older trees have reached their shady maturity. The kind of place that you might expect your grandparents to live. Homes in this section of town hover around a very reasonable $100K.

In the late 70’s homes and apartments spread out across the top of West El Camino bringing with them even more 1970’s style ranch homes, with their perfectly symmetrical front lawns and shady front lawns. You can walk many of these street and feel like you are in the middle of the San Fernando Valley and that Jimmy Carter is still president. Except for the cars, of course, which here are mix of economy cars and muscle cars.

The western sections of South Natomas started filling up in the early 80’s and by the late 80’s the northeast section of Natomas started picking up its pace of constructions. About 2/3 of all homes in Natomas were built while the Big Gipper was prez and so during that other big real estate boom associated with the Savings and Loan debacle. These are those nice Contemporary style homes with shingled roofs, lots of windows, high ceilings and a feeling of luxury even in the more modest varieties.

After that last debacle, it was a good decade before any new homes were built in Natomas. You will be hard pressed to find a home built in the Clinton administration in Natomas.

As to schools, the Natomas High School is not really a draw, being average or maybe even slightly below average in terms of test scores as are the majority of the schools in Natomas. The heavy turn-over of homes has not helped in terms of creating a sense of community either with people moving out virtually overnight in some cases.

Restaurant choices are mediocre at best with a few Chinese food places and Mexican joints to bring a bit of flavor to what is basically fast food culture.

Nightlife is just as unsatisfying.

Despite all this, I still think this might not be an altogether bad place to raise a family if you are say a single mom on limited income. Things aren’t great, but they are affordable and far enough away from the more severe problems of urban life.

As the name indicates, Natomas Corporate Center is largely an office park located just to the north of Discovery Park, with I-5 just to the west. You will find the HQ for RCB Corporation, a financial industry leader in the area (River City Bank is a subsidiary) and Informatix, a tech consulting firm.

The office park is also home to schools for both young and old. For the little ones you have Merryhill private school, which serves pre-schools through 5th grade, and nearby is Childtime Daycare Center. In the middle of Natomas Corporate is Kindercare Learning Center, another curriculum based daycare. So in terms of daycare, the Natomas Corporate definitely has you covered.

As to older students, you have two main offerings: Alliant International and New Horizons Computer Learning. Alliant in Sacramento offers mainly psychology and education classes. New Horizons offers IT training in everything from the basics (like Windows 7) to more complicated networks (Cisco Training).

There are also a few very inexpensive 80's style apartment buildings in the area. One bedrooms go for $700 and two for about $800.

My favorite part of this area, however, is the Natomas Racquetball Club with its nearly two dozen tennis courts and Olympic sized swimming pool.

Located just to the north of Discovery Park, Natomas Corporate has something for everyone.

Okay so it is Ranch house city around here—mostly of the run down variety. On average the southern part of the neighborhood, the median price of the homes is around $325K. These homes are not ugly or terribly small, but the neighborhood feels a little out of the mainstream of Napa somehow.

On the northern end and up in the hilly areas of the neighborhood there are several larger newer homes, some still being constructed. (Some which came to a fairly abrupt halt when the financial crisis hit.) On average the prices in the hills are closer to $650K and they seem much newer.

I can only guess, but it seems as if much of the newer construction here was hit fairly hard by the Recession and that may explain the partially built homes I saw in the area.

Silverado Middle School is the central school in the neighborhood. It is a middling school with so-so test scores—neither impressive nor horrible. Phillips Elementary in the neighborhood, however, is even worse, with tests scores indicating a school that is below average and that perhaps is not fully able to deal with the diversity of its students.

Overall this looks like a neighborhood that may do well in the future, but that currently feels rather stalled out.

This swath of land by the river is mostly just known as the home of Home Depot and Target. Those two big stores and a couple of satellite stores like Starbucks are basically all that is here.

On the northern end of this area there are a number of auto dealerships—Chevy, Nissan, Suburu; and some auto repair and smog shops.

As far as places to live, the only that I know of in this area is a trailer park named Valley Estates. It’s up on the northern end as well and looks about as decrepit as you can imagine.

Basically, this is a purely functional area where you only go if you have car needs or want to buy something for your home.

This southeastern area of Napa is all about three things: the college, the golf course, and the industrial area.

Although you may think of Napa as being wine growing 24/7, the 75,000 residents of Napa do have lives that are occasionally independent of the whole grape culture thing. One such sign of this is Napa Valley College. Napa Valley College is the local community college; it offers a variety of preparatory classes and two year programs for students.

Just south of the campus is one of the many Napa golf courses. There are so many golf courses in the area that this one is noteworthy only for being named after the city itself, although it is a perfectly passable golf course as far as I can tell.

To the south of the golf course is an industrial area filled with warehouses and non-touristy sorts of businesses like a granite supplier and a dental equipment supplier for the local area. There is also a large lot where refuse is piled, the local DMV, and even some non-descript wineries.

On the far southern end of the “neighborhood” (if we can even call this grab bag a “neighborhood”) is the Meritage Resort and Spa and another smaller college—Boston Reed College a career training institution.

Put simply, this is one of those areas that no one comes to visit on a wine tour (for the most part anyway) but that is necessary to keep the city going. It is the unseen gears of the machine which is Napa.

Central Napa is big enough that you could practically consider it to be three neighborhoods rather than one. For the most part Central Napa is a middle class neighborhood filled with older ranch style homes dating to the 1950’s. This gives the neighborhood somewhat of a rundown feel in spots.

At the same time this feels like the heart of the Napa. There are, for example at least a half dozen holy institutions here, from the Lutheran Church, Catholic parish and Jewish Temple.

There are also a number of schools here, including the very high rated New Technical High School and some private schools as well.

A number of businesses are also located in this neighborhood, including everything from mechanics to a pilates joint.

This is the place to go if you want to eat out in Napa whether you decide to go with super classy (and expensive) French restaurant like La Toque or just for some tacos at Tacos Michocan. There are a number of ethnic food restaurants here from Chinese to sushi to Italian (Oenotri). So you do not have to get out of Napa to find some quality dinner spots.

Napa is not particularly known for its nightlife, but there are some bars here beyond the wine bars that you might expect. You have Henry’s Cocktail Lounge here for example, Stone’s Sports Bar and Silo’s Wine and Jazz Club.

The neighborhood also exhibits a bit of variety on its southern end where homes have docks on the back and where home owners keep their motorboats.

And of course, one cannot leave this neighborhood without mentioning the Wine Train that has its station here. Overall, this is the active heart of Napa. Although catering mainly to tourists, the area does have a number of offerings for locals as well.

Slightly run down looking and very suburban, this neighborhood looks like it jumped out of 70’s movie. In terms of homes it is just about all 70s/80s style Ranch homes and tract housing of various kinds and qualities from those that look virtually identical to the trailer park style homes. You have nicely kept sidewalks throughout and the favorite automobile here is, without a doubt, the pick-up truck in all its larger manifestations.

The main drag is Jefferson and between it and the Trancas that forms the northern border of the neighborhood, you can find virtually all the amenities you expect from the suburbs—including just about every fast food place imaginable. KFC, Jack-In-the-Box, Sizzler, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell—they are all represented here.

Napa High School is in this area. Napa is a solid school serving a diverse community of students from multiple ethnic and economic backgrounds and doing a good job of it. Although not spectacular, Napa HS’s test scores are above average. They offer a full slate of AP courses, extracurricular activities and sports and they have good facilities. McPherson Elementary is also in this neighborhood.

Home prices in the area are on the lower end of the scale with the median around $350K and the high end around $550K. Very affordable though, as previously mentioned, the homes here are mostly uninspiring.

There is nothing particularly spectacular about this neighborhood. It is mostly just a lower middle-class suburban neighborhood like a thousand others in California. Most of the restaurants are chains that you can find anywhere else (except for Trancas Steakhouse which is okay) and the entertainment are about what you would expect in this kind of neighborhood. In other words, it’s just okay.

I suppose what gives it a rural feel is the picket fences that row some of the leafy streets and the windblown quality of the streets. It’s very quiet on a weekday here, though I’m sure you hear the kids playing in the yards during the weekends. There are also some newer houses sprinkled in here and there, but mostly it feels like the classic California neighborhood.

The southern end of the neighborhood is bordered by Tulocay Cemetery—which is as old as Napa itself, I think. The northern end of the neighborhood by the East Reservoir is considerably more woody and has the best views of the entire neighborhood and probably some of the best in Napa. Here and to the east as you head into the hills is where you are most likely to find the multi-million dollar homes. There is a beautiful Tuscan Villa up there, for example, which makes you feel as if you have been transported to Italy.

The average home price in the rest of the are--where homes are far more modest--seem to hover around the $600K range though occasionally one or two will drop down to ~$300K. On this part of the neighborhood near the cemetery few homes rise beyond the $1 Mil mark.

The central school here is Alta Heights Elementary, right in the middle of the neighborhood. It is an above average school according to test scores and seems to have strong community involvement as far as I can tell. There are a few churches in the neighborhood as well, including the Napa Korean Seventh Day Adventist Church and on the far northern border of the neighborhood, the Creekside Community Church.

Overall, this area has kind of classic California semi-suburban neighborhood feel of the kind those of us who are Gen-Xers remember from our childhoods. Basically it is the kind of middle class neighborhood you would like to raise kids in.

There are few places more beautiful along the California coastline than Morro Bay. The long, half-moon bay with the long strip of beach mostly walling it off is stunningly beautiful—so much so, that you might expect this to be the province of the fabulously rich. Morro Bay is protected from such intrusions however by its relatively remote location in Central California. This location does a fair amount to restrain the rise of property prices. In addition, because so many of the residents who live here are older and have settled roots in the area, the rise in property prices does not reflect the price at which they bought their homes. So even though the home they occupy may be currently valued at $600,000, back when they bought their homes they signed for not even a third as much.

That said, there is really no such thing as an inexpensive coastal town in California that doesn’t have something substantially off about it. Morro Bay doesn’t have a lot of renters—its mostly a tourist spot in the summer. People come here for the outdoors. But the residents are really more in the senior citizen range than anything else. Put simply, this place is nice for a visit, but year round this is a pretty dead location. Very foggy and sometimes just down right cold.

You could perhaps rent a place and go into San Luis Obispo, but then you might as well go farther south towards Santa Maria.

As far as things to do, there are some fairly bland seaside restaurants. The kind of places that serve fairly standard fare and don’t worry too much about wowing anyone with much more than the amazing seaside views. There is a sprawling golf course, kayak rentals and well-located natural history museum in an interesting building surrounded by Monterey cypresses.

Unfortunately, the northern end of the bay by Morro Bay State Park with its almost iconic stone mound, is marred by the stacks of some kind of power plant.

Morro Bay is made up of mix of hotels, older beach style homes and the occasional mobile home park. The hotels vary from beachside resort to the more traditional roadside motel. Many people end up here when tiring from Pacific Coast Highway on their way between SF and LA. (This is roughly the halfway point.) Some people also stop here before heading over to see William Randolph Heart’s Castle, San Simeon right off Cambria—this is just forty to fifty miles north of here.

The homes here all face towards the sea, of course, and the rising slope of Morro Bay makes it ideal for this kind of tiered setup. You can somewhat tell that some of the occupants are indeed wealthy by the luxury cars parked out front. This is not however the predominant level of income for most residents of Morro Bay. This is a fairly middle class area—although given the high number of retirees, statistics are more than a little bit misleading.

A portion of the residents live in pretty old looking mobile homes. They very much remind me of some of those 1970’s movies where old people retired to back in the day.

Overall, this is the kind of sleepy community that would be perfect for someone who wanted to get away from it all—say you wanted to write the next great American novel and while not being bothered.

Despite having become way too touristy, Solvang is still one of my favorite places to stop off when I am in this neck of the woods—which is usually only when I am headed up to the Bay Area. Solvang was founded as a Danish Colony and has capitalized on this European heritage by making their little town into a replica of the kind of place you might find on the outskirts of Copenhagen.

The main drag has everything made up as if you had just stepped into a Brueghel painting—lots of half timbering like you usually see on Tudor homes, those thatched, tiled roofs shaped like milk-made hats and, of course, purely decorative windmills. It is all, of course, more like Disneyland than Denmark, but it is at once wonderfully charming even as it is super-kitschy.

The theme is carried through everything from the parks—“Hans Christian Anderson Park”—to the theater, “Hamlet Theater.” There are a number of restaurants, bakeries and stores here as well. My favorite of these is the Cabernet Bistro. (Though for lunch you should head over to nearby Buellton and go to Anderson’s Pea Soup—it is our ritual to always stop off there whenever we go to SF.)

The time to go is in September when they have Danish Days. For a couple of weeks they give you as much Danish Culture—from stuffing your face contests, to milkmaids hoofing it in wooden clogs. It’s completely silly and ridiculous—kind of like a family friendly Oktoberfest (I know, I know! Oktoberfest is German).

The other attraction that often gets overshadowed is the Santa Ynez Mission, one of California’s 27 Mission Museums. If you are a fan of Spanish California, it is definitely worth checking out. And if growling hogs are more your speed, try the Classic Motorcycle Museum that is also in town.

So what is it like living it this little slice of Denmark by the Pacific? Solvang is a tiny town of barely 5,000 residents. It’s an older town, with the average resident being in their forties. These are mostly store owners and operators looking to capitalize on visiting tourists. When you get beyond the main drag, you leave the windmills and dormer windows behind, and you get a pretty straightforward So Cal town. In other words, its Ranch House city. Except for the occasional street name, this could be Chatsworth or Reseda in terms of appearance. On the western end of town you have Rancho Santa Ynez Estates—which is a pleasant, leafy mobile home park. (It is about as nice looking as a mobile home park gets but it is still a mobile home park nevertheless.) The nicest residential section of Solvang is on the northern hillside. It is still Ranch House city, but these are the larger Brady Bunch style Ranch Homes (though not split-level) with big yards, prairie fences and wide lanes.

Crime in Solvang is virtually non-existent. There has not been a murder here in more than a decade, rapes and violent crimes are about as rare as they get, and even petty theft is low. Rarely does the crime index break into the triple digits.

There is a hospital on the northern end of town (often a concern for country living) and supermarkets and auto repair shops. In other words, you have all of the basic amenities you need for suburban living in the 21st Century.

The local high school is Santa Ynez Union High in neighboring Santa Ynez. If test scores are a good indication, the school is ranked as high as any school around, getting an 850 API rank and having the majority of its students testing proficient on standardized tests.

Put simply, if you can find work in the area, this is a great place to live and raise kids (though I suspect the whole Danish thing probably gets old pretty fast).

West Beach in Santa Barbara is home to Santa Barbara City College—the local community colleg--and to the moderately well-known West Beach Music Festival. Santa Barbara City College, to begin, is more than just your regular community college. It really doesn’t have the feel of a community college at all. From its beach side location to the active nature of the students, you feel more like you are at a regular four year college than just your average 2-year. (There is definitely nothing “junior” about this college.)

The West Beach Music Festival is also a pretty good event. Happening right at the end of summer as people are just getting into the swing of things at school. Last year’s festival featured Rebelution, UB 40 and Bright Lights among others. It is a very Santa Barbara event.

Homes to the west of campus are pretty standard California fair: Ranch houses dating from the 1950’s for the most part. The streets are leafy and nice in a modest sort of way. It’s a good mix of students, young families and some older residents around here. With the beach so close, it should be prime territory for developers but the proximity of the college keeps them from rebuilding the whole place.

Overall, it is a pretty cool place to live and a great location for beach lovers.

Even today, when people here the name “Watts” they still think of the 1960’s riots that set the city ablaze. Even the 1990’s Rodney King riots have not wiped away the shadow of those events. But is Watts today still an urban ghetto?

Unfortunately, Watts is now not much different than it was fifty years ago—not in terms of socio-economic status, anyway. Though now this is a predominantly Latino neighborhood. This is the forth poorest neighborhood in all of LA, with only Chinatown, Downtown and University Park coming in lower. It is a densely packed neighborhood as well, with about 17,000 people per square mile.

Homes of this flat grid of a neighborhood take on the typical look of urban poverty, Los Angeles style: small homes on small lots, fenced yards and barred windows, trash strewn streets bordering unkept lawns.

Even worse is the fact the fact that more than a quarter of the population growing up in these conditions is under the age of 10—that’s more than 10,000 kids born into a world of high crime and limited opportunity.

Crime is just as bad now as it ever was. If you just look at the last six months, you find that there have been close to 400 violent crimes, including 8 murders. That puts it in the top ten most violent neighborhoods in all of LA. Since 2007, Watts has been the site of some 65 murders—mostly having to do with gang violence. When you take into account that one in four residents is under 10 years of age and that the vast majority of murder victims are at least in their teen years if not older—that means that the average Watts resident of adult years has a 1 in 1500 chance of being murdered on any given year. Pretty scary.

With the exception of King Drew Medical High School and a few others, the educational system also offers little chance of escape from a cycle of poverty. I say King Drew because although it is far from a great school it does offer some glimmers of hope. Though it missed 7 of its No Child Left Behind standards last year, it did manage to get half of its students to pass the STAR test in English and the SAT scores for its graduates are only about 100 points below the state average. That said, it has long way to go in terms of math where only 1 in 5 test proficient.

Overall, however, this is definitely not where anyone would choose to raise a family if given another option.

This is among the top ten safest neighborhoods/cities in the greater LA area. East of Monrovia and north of Duarte, on the far inland reaches of the greater LA area, Bradbury is among the top ten safest cities in all of LA—certainly in terms of violent crime. (Curious what the other nine are? Here they are: West San Dimas, Val Verde, San Pasqual, Rolling Hills, Ramona, Leona Valley, Hidden Hills, Hasley Canyon, and Green Valley).

How safe is it in Bradbury? Well there has not been a murder here in at least five years, possible longer. And in the last six months, there has not been a violent crime reported of any kind: no assaults, no robberies, no rapes. What about property crime? It barely registers. Just a handful of thefts and auto break ins. Basically, this is as safe as it gets.

But what is Bradbury like otherwise? HOT! This is one of those inland areas where you no longer get the cooling influence from the Pacific—so you might as well be in Arizona. Summers are pretty unbearable here.

People here however can definitely afford to blast their air conditioners to cool their mammoth dwellings. Bradbury is among LA’s most affluent communities, with the average household earning well into the six-figures. It really is about on the same level as Bel-Air but without the cooling ocean breezes and the prestige.

The homes here are not Ranch homes—they are actual ranches. Well sort of, anyway. These are basically mansions set up on a ranch model. Think giant horse choral with immaculate white fencing and beautiful greens and you get the idea. Of course, you will also find perfectly sculpted French gardens, tennis courts and long entry ways meant to make you feel like you are approaching Versailles. (So Cal ranch versions of Versailles.)

Given what I’ve told you, you might expect the local schools to be outstanding, but this is not exactly the case. The local high school, Duarte High is below average by objective standards. It actually missed 4 No Child Left Behind Standards last year. SAT scores are about a hundred points below the state average, and its API is only about average. The really big deficit seems to be in Math where, on the STAR test only about 1 in 5 students manage to pass—pretty dismal given the local resources.

I guess the poor schools should not come as a total surprise. The average age of Bradbury residents is 46. Only about 250 of Duartes’ 1500 residents are under the age of 18. So this is really more your grandparents community, than a young family community. Besides which, with the amount of money the average Bradbury resident brings in, they can afford to have their children tutored by Nobel laureates if they would like. (I only slightly exaggerate.)

That said, it’s a bit too hot for me or my pocket book, but if you are in the whole Ronald Reagan Hollywood cowboy lifestyle—this is the place for you.

The San Fernando Valley is the northwest section of Los Angeles County. It is separated from most of the rest of Los Angeles by the mountain range that moves inland from Malibu and ends in Griffith Park.

“The Valley,” as everyone from the LA area calls it, has been my home for most of my life and like most of the 1.5 million people who live here I am more than a little ambivalent about it. On the one hand, it is very much a part of me, and I have grown comfortable here. On the other, I’ve always thought of the Valley as a Wasteland with nothing particularly unique or interesting about it.

Most of the Valley is a giant strip mall, with the usual set of 7/11’s and Target stores. Just about every neighborhood in the Valley is dominated by 1950’s style Ranch homes. For those who don’t know the Valley that well, you could be dropped into virtually any of the 34 “neighborhoods” and you would have a hard time telling the difference between it and anywhere else in the Valley.

Once you live here for a while, you start to notice subtle and not so subtle differences between the different neighborhoods. The not so subtle differences have to do with income and opportunity. If you think of the Valley as a bowl, what you find is that those in the middle of the bowl are poorer than those along the rising hills at the edge of the Valley.

I certainly know this first hand. I have lived in four neighborhoods in the Valley: Northridge, Reseda, Van Nuys and Woodland Hills. Except perhaps for Woodland Hills all of these neighborhoods have been in steady decline for most of my life, with incomes in steady decline.

Which is not to say that Woodland Hills and similar places have thrived, exactly. Woodland Hills is fairly typical. I moved here in the 80’s and went to Taft High School. Back then, the hill behind the school was empty grassland. By the time I graduated there were office buildings being built. When I came back from college at UCLA, Woodland Hills was crowded and you could even come across occasional homeless types wandering around. You no longer had the feeling that you were at the edge of the county. It was as if the tide of the city had swept up and swallowed the neighborhood.

Woodland Hills, however, has taken some steps to hold off some of this tide and to keep the suburban feel that it once had. We’ve had mixed success, but I still think that this is a pretty good place to live, mostly without the major urban problems you come across as you head south towards downtown.

Not only is there a big difference between the interior Valley and the hills at the edge, but there is also a big difference between the eastern side of the Valley and the west where I live. Burbank, for example, where my mom lives should be considered as its own entity and would be if it were not so close to Los Angeles. Like Pasadena and Glendale, it has more than 100,000 people in population and really is self-sufficient. North Hollywood and Studio City both have more of an urban feel than the west Valley.

You could also make a distinction between the north Valley (especially the northeastern Valley) and the southern Valley. On the north, things get considerably dustier and more western looking than in the southern Valley. Places like San Fernando (city not valley) and Sylmar with their dirt sidewalks and flat look against the stark, chaparral filled hillside, just feel very Southwestern. While on the southern valley, tucked away against the leafy mountains, there is much more of a Californian feel—if that makes any sense.

Of course, whenever you are talking about anywhere near LA, the influence of the entertainment industry will be felt. So, it was that the name “Valley Girl” arose out of the Sherman Oaks Galleria and the funny, suburban girl culture that came out of the early 80’s. (I know, I was one of those girls once—my hair still suffers from the damage of too much hairspray and too many perms.)

The most affluent neighborhood in the Valley, Porter Ranch, also has been immortalized by being the setting for Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Valley is the kind of place where you are never too far from the celebrities, from Britney Spears and Kristen Stewart living in Calabasas and Hidden Hills to friends coming into contact with the odd luminary. I have personally met Howie Mandel (he really doesn’t like physical contact), gone to school with minor celebrities and had friends who dated the likes of Marcus Allen. It is just a part of life living here. It doesn’t happen every day, but if you live here long enough, you will inevitably have a star cross your path.

The Valley has also been immortalized in movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Boogie Nights and is the porn capital of the world. If you have watched a porn movie in the last 20 years, the home it took place in was probably here in the Valley. (Though I doubt the background architecture was the center of your attention if you are in that crowd.)

As to issues like crime, it is pretty much as you might expect it. In interior neighborhoods it can be pretty bad. A place like Pacoima gets close to 9 or 10 murders per year, while Woodland Hills gets only one. Even adjusting for Pacoima doubly large population, you can still see that living on the edge of the Valley is a lot safer than in the interior neighborhoods. Hidden Hills is, in fact, tied for the safest neighborhood in all of Los Angeles.

The schools in the Valley follow a similar pattern with the strongest schools being on the hills and the ones with the most problems being in the interior neighborhoods. This is not to say that all the schools in the hills are great. My own alma mater, Taft High for example, only gets mediocre ratings these days.

Overall, however, the Valley is still a relatively affordable option for those who live near LA.

If you want to have a hilly rural feel right by the action of Downtown LA, then the closest you can come is Mount Washington, a hillside neighborhood just to south of Glassell Park and west of Highland Park. The homes in this middle class neighborhood are mostly of the Ranch home variety dating to the Fifties and this gives the neighborhood a sort of a western feel—a lot like Chatsworth for those that know the San Fernando Valley like I do.

On the Highland Park side of the Mount Washington, the narrow lanes that force SUV’s to squeeze by their neighbors take on much more of a Hollywood Hills kind of feel, with homes perched hillside and garages left curbside in the usual walk up (or down) arrangement that you get on such uneven terrain.

Despite bordering the high crime area of Cypress Park, Mount Washington doesn’t get a lot of spillover. It is actually statistically safer than average for Los Angeles neighborhoods—quite an accomplishment its location. In fact, since 2007 there have only been two murders in Mount Washington—both right on the border with Cypress Park.

Unfortunately, there are no high schools in Mount Washington, so residents have to send their kids to Franklin High in Highland Park. Franklin, despite having a strong staff of veteran teachers with years of experience, really doesn’t hold up in terms of academics, falling a good 100 points below average in terms of API scores. In terms of the STAR test, only 1 of 10 Franklin students pass the math portion and only a third pass the English and the college bound students score 200 points beneath the California average on the SAT. There is a Magnet program at the school where 1 in 5 pass the math portion and 2/3 pass the English, but this is still fairly weak overall.

So, this is probably the kind of neighborhood that is best for singles or older couples. The lack of sidewalks also makes having kids who love the outdoors a problem as well.

Although, there are certainly no lack of parks within Mt. Washington. You have Elyria Canyon Park on the west, Carlin Recreation on the south, Moon Canyon on the north and Sycamore Grove on the east. Not to mention that Mount Washington feels like a park all over and that you are just to the east of Elysian Park and to the south of Griffith Park. In other words, if you like urban parks, you will certainly have a number of options.

In terms of entertainment and fun, you are also not far from Silver Lake, Echo Park and all the excitement of the LA area. You will have to leave Mount Washington of course, but it is probably better to keep that kind of excitement at a little distance from where you live in my opinion.

Squeezed between leafy Elysian Park and Mt. Washington, at the point where the 5 and the 110 meet, bordered by both aqueduct and rail, Cypress Park might seem like a shoe-in to be one of those cool neighborhoods where yuppies build their lofts or where hipsters and artist flock to create a little artistic community just slightly away from the city. Echo Park and Silver Lake are just a hop skip and a jump away after all.

But Cypress Park is none of these things. Instead, Cypress Park has become a fairly typical low income area where violence is high and an oppressive sense of futility hangs in the air. It is quite tragic actually, because the area is actually quite beautiful and has all the basics on which to build a strong, interesting community.

One of the attractive aspects of this neighborhood are the California bungalows that make up the vast majority of the housing in the area. These older homes with their low roofs and shady walk-up terraced entrances evoke pre-WWII Los Angeles. Despite the below average incomes here, the homes are well-kept, with leafy front lawns and along wide laned of streets of the kind developers looking to pack more homes into smaller spaces don’t design anymore. The neighborhood actually does not feel particularly danger.

Looks can be a bit deceiving however, as this community of 10,000 experiences about 2.5 murders every year and has one of the higher violent crime rates in Los Angeles. (I believe there is even a gang that goes by the moniker, Cypress Park.)

The nearest high school is Lincoln, I believe, Cypress itself doesn’t have anything higher than a junior high, Florence Nightingale Middle School. Florence Nightingale is below average, but not terrible. On the STAR tests, for example, Florence Nightingale students pass at about a 1 in 3 rate in both math and English. This is good for math but bad for English—though both are beneath the state average by a bit.

One thing that Cypress Park has managed to pick up from its hipster western neighbors is a bit of nightlife. I am referring to a cool dive bar, Footsies, that makes its home here. If you want to play some pool and get drunk cheap, it is definitely the place to hang out in Cypress Park. If the tables are taken, you can also head across the street to El Recreo, a seedy pool hall. And if you get the munchies, try El Ataqor down the street on Figueroa—the tastiest potato tacos you will ever taste. (Of course, given the 1970’s Tijuana décor and mariachi music, they had better be great.)

You will also find the usual sorts of fast food places and automobile repair shops that seem to be omnipresent wherever you go.

Overall, this is a neighborhood with a lot of unrealized potential that seems to be headed in the wrong direction. If only some hipsters would move here, colonize this place, and drive the gangs out, you might have something going.

Lincoln Heights definitely has a kind of southwestern feel to it. This is largely an immigrant area with the majority of residents here being born south of the border. Three quarters of those who live here also rent rather than own their dwellings. Both of these are testaments to the ever-changing face of this neighborhood.

Despite this every changing cast of residents, Lincoln Heights has a fairly strong sense of of place. People from here, generally have a strong sense of having been from an unusual place. In part, it is the look of the place. Despite being near the heart of Los Angeles, Lincoln Heights also has a certain amount of open space to it where you see undeveloped hills behind main drags. There are spots where it feels like you are deep in a rural area or in a cowboy sort of a town. Of course, most of the neighborhood is the usual set of older style Ranch homes, but even there, you have a feeling of being away from truly urban areas.

One way that you see this sense of place is in the relatively mild crime rates in this area. Despite the fact that the average income in the area is a very low $30K (usually a correlate for high crime in an area), Lincoln Heights is just about average in terms of violent crime. It has a relatively high number of murders compared to say the suburbs, but not so bad compared to many of its nearby neighbors. I don’t want to overstate it, I would definitely feel unsafe living here, but if I were low income and had to find somewhere to live, I would much rather live here than say Avalon Gardens, West Adams or Watts.

Unfortunately this doesn’t really translate to the local high school’s general student body. Lincoln High gets very poor ratings. It has consistently missed about 10 of its No Child Left Behind standards and is about 150 beneath the norm in terms of its API scores. In terms of the STAR test that all California students take only about one in 10 student test proficient in math, and, given the high number of non-native English speakers, less than 1/3 pass the English portion. SAT scores, on the other hand are only about 200 below the state average which isn’t as bad as many other schools with similar challenges.

Lincoln, however, does also have a Magnet devoted to science and technology and it does much better. In terms of math, the one of three students who pass places Lincoln only 10% beneath the state average, and in terms of English—surprisingly given that 4 of 5 students come from Latino families they actually beat the state average, with 2/3 passing that portion of the test.

This is kind of the wrap on this neighborhood, then. It is sort of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there are the usual crime and poverty problems you might expect, but on the other, there is also enough pride in community and sense of place that gives students a chance to escape the traps of poverty. In some ways, you might think of this as a positive model for a neighborhood with enough support that it can give us hope for the future.

Firestone Park is the neighborhood just adjacent to Avalon Gardens, and like it, also has a pretty bad crime problem. In fact, 67 people have been murdered in this neighborhood in the past four years. Given that that is about equal to the population of this neighborhood, that means that you have roughly a one in 4000 chance of being murdered here on any given year.

It is, in fact, among the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in all of Los Angeles with a high number of assaults and burglaries as a commonplace in this area.

Of course, when you drive through you might not actually feel the danger and the menace. The neighborhood looks much like Reseda or Van Nuys (which are dangerous in their own rights but not quite on this level). There are lots of older Ranch homes here on tiny lots—often with fences. There is, of course, a Latin flavor to the neighborhood as 90% of the residents are Latino and half of those were born south of the border.

The schools in the area are pretty awful as well. The students at South East High for example, fall a good 300 points below the California average on the SAT, and only 5% pass the math portion of their STAR test. They do a little better in English (like at most schools) but still end up passing only about a quarter of the time. The school has shown some dubious signs of progress, however if you take into consideration the No Child Left Behind standards. After an all time bad year in which they missed 13 of 19 standards, they bounced back this previous year missing only 6 of the standards. Of course, getting close is not really the goal here—it is passing all of them without difficulty like most ordinary schools do.

Despite these problems, there is a positive attitude among residents who live here. I know a couple of people from here and they both say they see signs of improvement in the area. Things are being better taken care of and some businesses have been brought in thanks to Magic Johnson—the Lakers great who has turned into a sort of entrepreneur and advocate for the poor.

Let me begin by saying that I have only driven through this neighborhood. I have never actually gotten out of my car here. So take that into your evaluation of my review.

As you would expect for a neighborhood just to the northwest of Watts, this is a high crime area. In fact, the 28,000 residents of this neighborhood experience about 13 murders per year. That’s about a one in 2000 chance of being murdered here every year. Pretty terrible! It is one of the top ten most dangerous neighborhoods in all of LA. In the last six months there have been 5 murders, 5 rapes and over 300 robberies and aggravated assaults. There have been more than 400 thefts of other kinds (burglaries, automobile thefts etc.) In other words, it doesn’t really matter what else I have to say about this neighborhood, it is simply too dangerous to live in. If you can avoid it, do.

All the other things you might expect about a neighborhood like this are basically bourn out by looking at any other statistics about this neighborhood. It is a very poor neighborhood where most of the residents have not completed even high school. The unemployment rate is high here and it is densely packed. The streets have that dingy worn out look to them, and it is not unusual to see garbage strewn about in parts (though I hasten to mention not everywhere—I assume that even in a crime plagued area like this there are a substantial number of residents fighting to have a decent way of life).

I would like to say that there is some hope in terms of the local schools, but unfortunately that is not really the case. Fremont High, one of the main local high schools is exemplary of the kind of problems here. Fremont ranks at the very bottom of standards. It ranks a good 200 points below the California average in terms of it API. Its STAR testing is even worse. Despite supposedly having 40% of its students in advanced math, only 2.5% of students pass the math portion of the STAR test. (How can that be with 40% in advanced math?) English is little better with only about 15% passing that portion of the test. SAT scores are just as bad with students barely breaking 1000—a good five hundred below the state average. Needless to say, Fremont has missed virtually all of its No Child Left Behind standards.

All of this suggests a school and a neighborhood where things are just not functioning properly by any standard.

Park Mesa Heights is a neighborhood just slightly north of Inglewood (adjacent to Park View). Often considered a part of Hyde Park, Park Mesa is a working class community made up largely of small plotted 1950’s style Ranch homes. It is a high density neighborhood where homes are often divided between separate tenants and where driveways are often placed where the front yard would be—partly as a prevention against auto break-ins.

Crime rates in the area are twice the national average and murder rates are three times the national average, making it, sadly, a pretty typical South Central neighborhood. Even worse is automobile theft rates at nearly five times the national average. The intersections of Crenshaw and Slauson, and 54th and 2nd are especially dangerous with 3 murders occurring at each during the last four years.

The schools in the area are similarly atrocious, Crenshaw being the local high school. The dismal ratings move right on through the entire education cycle however, even to the lower levels. Horace Mann Junior High in the area is typical. Its API scores are 200 points below the state average and has failed to meet 13 of 25 No Child Left Behind standards for each of the last four years. In addition, only 19% of students test proficient in on the English portion of the STAR test and 15% on the math. Put simply, this is a pretty terrible learning environment.

Overall, this is not the kind of place you would want to live.

Vermont Harbor, or Vermont Square as it is sometimes known, is a fairly poor neighborhood a bit to the south of the USC campus. The average household brings in only $30K per year. The homes here are tiny bungalows with tiny front and back yards. Homes almost all date back to WWII.

The neighborhood is in many ways a poster child for urban problems of South Central. Violence and crime ravage the area. Since 2007, there have been 40 murders here, one for every thousand citizens. Aggravated assaults and other mayhem are also a common feature of the area. In the last six months, for example, there have been 4 murders, 15 rapes, 139 assaults and 209 burglaries reported in the neighborhood. That is almost enough to have one incident for every hundred people living here.

Except for a few small charters, schools are dismal across the board as well. Test scores are low and teachers are charged with spending the majority of their time maintaining discipline.

Residents also complain about the area being dirty, with many residents leaving heaps of refuse outside their homes. I have heard these complaints but the few occasions when I have been in the neighborhood, I have not seen it. Homes look relatively clean, though the barred windows and doors were a bit of a downer. The dingy looking stores along the main arteries also looked fairly uninviting.

Along the streets however, you always see people walking around. On the occasions that I have passed by there were some that looked rather scary, playing the gang-banger role to the hilt. But most people seemed to be just going about their days, walking kids home from school, that sort of thing. In fact, there seems to be a lot more foot traffic here than in a lot of neighborhoods, which is a good thing for the environment, I think.

That said, this is a fairly depressing neighborhood. About a third of those that live here are under 18. I imagine that as they get older, those who can manage it, will find a better place to live. I know I certainly would.

Located just to north of Inglewood and adjacent to View Park with which it is often paired, Windsor Hills is an affluent African American neighborhood that in many ways resembles nearby Ladera Heights.

The homes in Windsor Hills are not quite as large and stately as those in View Park. There are a lot more large split-level Ranch homes here. These are not the tiny rundown looking Ranch homes that you find throughout much of Southern California, but the larger, 1970’s styles Ranches like the kind found on TV shows like The Brady Bunch. Many homes here however are more unusual than this, and it is not uncommon to find an odd boxy looking modernist type home with tall front windows or unusual terraced front lawns highlighted by bushes sculpted into geometric shapes.

The neighborhood is on a hillside so many of the homes also include a pretty good inland view of South LA (much better than the oil fields that make up much of the view of Ladera Heights). Up atop the neighborhood is one of the major arteries—Stocker--which is bordered by a green space where there is a trail many residents like to hike or jog along because of its greenery and views.

Past Stocker there is yet another slice of residential Windsor Hills where many of the older homes are located. You can even find some fairly old apartment buildings here. The streets up on this section have a bit of a Spanish theme with names like Don Miguel, Don Lorenzo, Don Valdez and my personal favorite as a lit geek, Don Quixote. Though the homes are not as large and the streets are much narrower here than below Stocker, there is something very attractive about this neighborhood. The tightly packed homes and yards make the neighborhood feel somewhat like a Florida vacation home area for some reason. Unfortunately, there are also some reminders that that this is not the safest of neighborhoods: many of the homes have bars across the windows and doors.

Following the green space next to Stocker you come to Norman O Houston Park which is a nice grassy park with a basketball court, well-maintained exercise stations and a sandbox with play area for the kiddies. Unfortunately, local gangs will also hold parties here as well.

On the far western corner of the neighborhood is Windsor Hills Elementary. It is an interesting story. It used to be well liked by the surrounding community, but starting in about 2007, the combination of budget cuts and an off putting principal have diminished parental support. Some parents have gone so far as to pull their children out of the school. Among the complaints is the fact that the students are left relatively unsupervised during recess and lunch and that overall discipline is lacking.

Unfortunately many of the upper levels schools—middle schools and high school are equally bad if not worse.

Overall, this is a good neighborhood to live, but it would be better if schools were better and the gangs not so prevalent.

Located in the hills northwest of Inglewood, View Park is one of the hidden gems of the LA area. Although it is widely overlooked by LA residents, View Park is an affluent, predominantly African American neighborhood filled with large classic manors. It is one of the few places in LA where you can find large Georgian homes painted White House white and highlighted with redbrick front walks, two and half story high Corinthian columns and decorative period lamps. The neighborhood also has the occasional modernized Cape Cod, complete with gambrel roof.

Residents consider the neighborhood to be safe and claim they have no problem walking their dogs at night. Murder stats would seem to bear them out—with no murders in the neighborhood since at least 2006 (perhaps earlier, I just don’t have any stats before then). Other stats point to a different picture however. Looking at the last six months, for example, there have been 11 aggravated assaults and 15 robberies thus putting into the category of one of the more dangerous than average neighborhoods. In terms of property crimes it is even more of a target with 57 burglaries, 23 autothefts, 54 thefts from vehicles.

This is not to overstate matters and imply that this is one of the most dangerous areas in LA—it certainly is not. But, it is also not completely insulated from the nearby crime problems.

Another problem with living here is that the local schools are also not as strong as one would like. The public high schools in the area, in fact, rank as some of the worst in LA. Take nearby Crenshaw High whose API is 200 points below the state average and only manages to get one of five of its student to test proficient in English (according to 2010 STAR tests). Even worse is the math proficiency where only one in forty test proficient. As you would expect Crenshaw students taking the SAT fall 500 below the state average and the high school has missed at least 14 No Child Left Behind milestones four years in a row. (In 2008, they missed all 25.) Put simply, mediocrity would be a positive accomplishment for this school.

Given how beautiful this neighborhood is, it is a shame that crime and education are not stronger in the area. I doubt it would remain a “hidden gem” if they were.

Located just to the south of Downtown LA, Central Alameda is low income majority Latino neighborhood. The neighborhood is named after the north-south arteries that function as its borders.

This is a densely packed neighborhood, one of the most densely packed of all the neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Most adults here are married. This is mostly a family area, with households averaging 4. More than half of the residents are foreign born, and 4/5 of these come from Mexico. The neighborhood skews young with the median resident being in his or her early twenties.

On the eastern side of the neighborhood there is the edge of a vast commercial area filled with non-descript factory buildings—many of the classic redbrick variety, though the majority in pastel creams.

Homes in the area are mostly of the circa WWII era bungalow and Ranch home variety with tiny square yards (often bordered by metal fencing) and old style squarish apartment buildings.

Unfortunately this neighborhood has most of the problems that we associate with densely packed, low income neighborhoods. Crime is, first of all, a huge problem here. Since 2007 there have been 42 murders in the area. The crime rate for the area is among the cities worst in terms of violent crime. Assaults are high and murders also. If you take it in terms of overall population, you find that your chances of being murdered in this neighborhood on any given year are one in 4,000. Given however that a quarter of the population is under 10, and that few such victims are in this age group, you chances increase precipitously.

Schools offer little hope as well. Schools here are, as you would expect given the density, overcrowded with your typical middle-school having 2,000 students. High schools are just as bad by all objective standards. Take Santee Education Complex (technically in South Central, though it gets many of the students on the northern end of the neighborhood). Santee’s Academic Performance Index scores (a general rating of the overall school’s performance) show that it is among LA’s worst lagging a good 200 points behind the state average. STAR test scores are even worse with only 15% testing proficient in English and barely 1.5% doing so in math. Santee, not surprisingly, has failed on 18 of 22 No Child Left Behind standards and students here average about 1000 on their SATs—500 points behind the state average. Truly dismal.

Despite this, there are some mild reasons for hope. One is the fact that these families are largely intact. Another is that there does seem to be a growing sense of community in the neighborhood (despite the fact that 70% or residents are renters). Recently for example, when a local representative decided to sell public lands that had been planned for a large urban garden, locals organized protests and raised objections. The plan went through any way, I think, but the fact that people cared enough to make a stink is a good sign for the future.

I’m not sure why this only designates one section of Palos Verdes, really it should be an overview of all of Palos Verdes which it seems to me occupies the entire Peninsula. As it is designated however, Palos Verdes Peninsula designates a particular residential section of Palos Verdes.

Like all the rest of Palos Verdes, this is strictly the province of the filthy rich. Not that there is anything filthy about this or any other neighborhood in Palos Verdes. In fact, if anything, Palos Verdes is probably too clean and immaculate. There is actually something rather off-putting about such sunny perfection. It is kind of like the teacher’s pet in class, who knows every question and raises their hands at every opportunity. (Not even the teacher likes that busy body.)

Living here just feels a bit like living on a sitcom version of life. The streets are just wide enough to allow comfortable driving; the lawns are uniformly green, the hedges are perfectly trimmed into cubes with each lawn has its own tree—often a palm—to give homes their own individual flare. Thankfully, this is not one of those planned communities where all the homes are in the same architectural style. The majority of homes here are of the flat variety. Quite a few are of the split level Ranch variety, but there are also some that resemble the main home in the film American Beauty. I am not sure what that is called but their some attractive boxy versions of that here. Some of the homes here actually resemble variations on Eichler homes with flat roofs that rise at the center where there is a recessed central entrance way. It is actually a really attractive neighborhood that manages to avoid looking overly planned.

The neighborhood also has a little restaurant, a multi-screen movie theater and a bit of a shopping area—so you get all of the pleasures of suburbia almost within walking distance. There are also sidewalks which make this a great neighborhood for kids and families in general so that they can stay healthy.

There are also some really great schools here. Palos Verdes Peninsula High School is the main high school for Palos Verdes and, as you would expect, continues the trend of great seaside schools. Palos Verdes High always ranks at least a hundred points higher than the state average on API scores and 250 higher on the SAT. 2/3 of PVH students test proficient on the Math portion of the STAR test and 4/5 do so in English. Put simply this is one of the great schools around.

Overall, however, there is definitely a bit of conservative streak here and it does feel a little bit like Orange County. A bit too conservative for my taste.

Rancho Palos Verdes is the seaside city along the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Palos Verdes Drive, the shoreline drag, takes the place of the Pacific Coast Highway through Palos Verdes, offering up the ocean views that the PCH claims on most other sections of the Pacific coast.

This is a highly affluent city though it skews just slightly younger than the hillside residents inland.

Many of the communities in Rancho Palos Verdes are joined together into seaside enclaves of layered streets with similar looking homes. There are lots of Mediterranean style homes packed together into planned communities—al very cleaned and well-organized, but lacking any real feeling of individuality to my mind. Like most things in Palos Verdes, everything is immaculate and beautifully maintained. And, of course, everything will cost you an arm and a leg.

There is no lack of entertainments for the residents who live in Rancho Palos Verdes. There are a number of very expensive restaurants that take advantage of the view to keep prices inflated and portions small. Mar’sel a Donald Trump restaurant, is a typical example. (Like all things Donald is a lot more about phony baloney image than actual value.) Actually, you are much better off heading up to Redondo Beach for food than sticking around in Palos Verdes.

One of the major features of this affluent area is the Los Verdes Golf Course. This sprawling facility offers amazing greens that overlook the ocean. Amazingly, for Palos Verdes, it’s a public course. Golf purists will find the course a touch beaten down from over use, but if you love a good view while you making your way to the next hole, then you will love this golf course.

For those looking for an amazing wedding venue, you might try the Wayfarer’s Chapel. The chapel is made of glass with redwood beams and is nestled in a woodland groove and garden right at the edge of the ocean. It is a stunningly beautiful spot to get married. The chapel is sponsored by the Swedenborgian Church and focuses on creating harmony between nature and spirituality. Another interesting footnote is that it was designed by the son of the famous architect Frank Llyod Wright.

On a personal note, I remember coming here as a child, and being amazed by its beauty. In fact, it was so beautiful that as an adult I thought that I must have just dreamt such a location. But a few years ago I went to a friend’s wedding here and rediscovered these beautiful grounds all over again.

A beautiful location but way overpriced.

Like all of Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills (not to be confused with Rolling Hills Estates) is extremely wealthy. The name for this area is in fact perfect given the hilly terrain. The homes run the gamut of styles from long flat Ranch homes to Mediterranean styles. All, however, share perfectly manicured lawns that form the edges of wide gently curving lanes.

The majority of people who live here are older than average—in fact, you might call this one of the richest retirement communities in the country. More than two thirds are married and nine of ten own their own homes. So, as you might imagine, this is a highly stable area that is perhaps more than a little bit on the conservative side.

One of the draws of the area is the great education system. From kindergarten through high school, there are no shortcomings in the schools here—they always rank at the top of the charts.

You are close enough to the ocean (Portuguese Bend will take your right down the beach of the same name) that the town has the feel of a kind of sleepy beach town. The cooling fog often rolls in during the summer offering some welcome relief from heat waves. On clear days the hills also offer views not only out to the pacific, but south to the harbor and north to the famous beaches leading up to LAX.

My entire life, Palos Verdes has always had the feel of a hyper-exclusive country club where you never quite feel as if you are wealthy or well-connected enough to make the membership. It is still that today. It also resembles a country club in the high prevalence of pools and tennis courts. Rolling Hills brings this point home with virtually every home having a swimming pool and every other one seeming to have a tennis court. Not that you need an individual court for yourself, the parks and green spaces also have hard courts. In fact, what you have trouble finding here is a basketball court.

Overall, if you have money to burn and you like to get away from all the hustle and bustle of LA, Rolling Hills is definitely the place for you.

Unfortunately as you get into this area of LA, the first thing that you really have to address when it comes to the neighborhoods is violent crime. Willowbrook is, simply put, a high crime area. The LA Times ranks it as one of the top twenty most violent neighborhoods in LA. The murders in this neighborhood back this up. Since 2007, there have been a whopping 48 murders here. Given that the population is about 40,000, that means that you have a roughly one in 3,000 chance of being murdered here every year. Pretty bad. There are also a high number of assaults and burglaries here as well.

The schools in Willowbrook are just as bad, with most all of them carrying the worst possible ratings in the LA area. Alain Leroy Locke High is a prime example. It’s near three thousand students consistently score a few hundred points below the state average on the Academic Peformance Test year after year. In addition, ita scores on the STAR test are similarly atrocious with less than 3% passing the math portion while less than 10% pass the English language section.

The neighborhood itself has that older California look to it with a number of old Ranch homes. It is not dirty but it does look worn out. The cars in the area are older model as well giving the whole area a sort stuck in time feel.

Put simply, this is not where anyone would choose to live.

Lomita is one of the most densely packed neighborhoods in this area of Los Angeles. In less than two miles you have about 20,000 people. How do they fit them all in? In the usual ways that you would expect. There are, of course, a number of the boxy apartment complexes that you come to expect in this kind of a neighborhood. In the northeastern part of Lomita you will also find a couple of immense walled-in trailer parks.

This, of course, does not make Lomita very inviting. There are some nice residential neighborhoods on the northern end of the Lomita however. The modest ranch homes here are on flat surface streets with sidewalks—perfect for walking and biking—and front lawns are generally tidy and well kept.

Right around the middle of Lomita, the neighborhood feels a bit run down. The homes here mostly date back to the Fifties and are largely showing their age. Mostly things just feel overcrowded in this section.

On the southern end of Lomita, things pick up again a bit with more nicely kept ranch homes and lots of trees as come to the southern border and the uninhabited area to the south of Lomita.

You can definitely find some nice places to live here. Unfortunately, the schools around here are not great either. Narbonne High is a pretty lousy school by most standards. SAT scores at Narbonne average a good 200 points below the state average. STAR tests are even worse. Only one in ten Narbonne students test proficient in math and only one in three pass the English portion. On the bright side, Narbonne does have a magnet section which fairs a little better with 2 of 5 testing proficient in math while 2/3 do so in the English portion. (Unfortunately, this still puts them below average in Math which is supposed to be the focus of the magnet.) Students from the school also complain of racial tensions and fighting on campus and a general environment of complacency from the teaching staff (though this is subjective of course). Narbonne does have a substantial number of AP classes which suggests things may not be completely bleak for those students who are motivated to succeed.

As to that other humbug of crowded areas, crime, Lomita is actually not that bad. Generally speaking, crime is relatively low in Lomita. In the past four years, five murders have happened here. That is a ratio of roughly one in ten thousand per year, which is an okay ratio compared to some of Lomita’s more gang ridden neighbors. If you look even farther into the numbers you find that only 3 of the these recent murders are attributable to gang violence (one incident involved two deaths, so really we are talking about one incident per year roughly). The others fall into different categories—one was an abused 2 year old accidentally killed, another a was an older woman murdered by her son because, it seems, he thought his mother had had his father killed. These ghastly events mostly do not fit into the usual gang and property related violence we find most concerning. Another odd fact about these events is that all the gang violence type events occurred on the same street—Narbonne. Put simply this is not that violent an area overall.

Also, around the Pacific Coast Highway there are few good places to eat.

Overall, however, I would not really want to live here.

If you follow Calle Mayor down to the ocean, you find the small stretch of beach that makes up Torrance’s one connection to the Pacific. The beaches are very nice sandy stretches, nowhere near as crowded as their more famous northern neighbors—here it really is more about the sand and surf than the other entertainments that sometimes accompany California breakers. There are ample parking spaces as well, making this a convenient spots for those outsiders who decide to venture this far.

On the northern end of the beach you will also find Miramar Park—basically a green space right by the ocean. There is not much to it, not even a swing set. It is just some statues of a dolphin and frog and nice views all the way down to the bluffs of Palos Verdes and up to Redondo Beach.

The smaller two story homes just beyond the lots stare out onto the blue of the ocean from second story balconies. There are also a number of older, somewhat scruffy-looking apartment buildings and attractive palms interspersed here and there. Overall, you do not get the overwhelming feeling of wealth that you get from Manhattan Beach or Hermosa, this feels more organic and less planned to attract those with the means for seaside living. There is a feeling of authenticity here—a bit of an overlooked spot, perhaps.

Overall it is as close as you can come to an affordable beach area in this part of So Cal.

In many ways, this Torrance neighborhood can be described much like many of the others—quiet, leafy streets and Ranch homes. But Seaside is just a touch different. The homes here are a little bit larger and better kept than many of those in other sections of Torrance. The streets are a little bit leafier than those in other sections. And the sea air is just a little bit stronger around here.

Another thing about this area is that although you do get your fair share of larger Ranch homes, you also get quite a bit more variety than in other Torrance neighborhoods. Mission Revival and Prairies styles are not uncommon here. In addition, these homes are larger than normal, often incorporating a second story in order to make the most of space. There are also a number of modernist reinterpretations of traditional homes. For example, along some lanes you will find what look somewhat like bungalow style homes, but they have clearly been refashioned with newer materials to create an odd mix of traditional and contemporary. Some homes here take on the look of office buildings or even firehouses even though they are just residences. Very unusual and difficult to describe.

The residents here also have a taste for the unusual. It is not uncommon to see vintage cars around town. There is a bit of the seaside hippy town in Seaside.

The schools here like in the rest of Torrance are also quite good. Seaside Elementary receives top marks across the board.

There is also a little bit of choice when it comes to eating out and shopping. There are a number of restaurants and stores for example along the strip malls on Lomita Blvd. You can get Chili and Indian food there. You can also go there for dance lessons, to get the dogs groomed or to buy cookware. The affluence of the local population draws a lot of businesses to this area.

Overall this is a good high end place to live.

Southwood is yet another one of those bland 60’s style neighborhoods filled with flat, leafy streets and Ranch homes—kind of the signature of Torrance neighborhoods. This is good neighborhood for kids because it offers them sidewalks and calm peaceful streets where parents can feel somewhat assured their kids won’t get run-over or shot while they are out front playing. The streets create this peaceful insulated effect by curling the surface streets in on themselves and by having a series of interior cul-de-sacs. It’s actually a very simple but ingenious set-up for creating a calm, safe feeling.

The elementary school, Anza Elementary, has the highest rankings around and there is also a private high school at the far western end, Bishop Montgomery which is well regarded, though of course, since it is a private school, finding objective standards for evaluation is difficult.

Just north of the elementary school is Paradise Park, a good little green space with a play area and tennis courts. There is an even better park on the western end of the neighborhood, Hopkins Wilderness Park. There are lots of trees and squirrels and you can even feed the ducks (be sure to buy their food not give them human food that is bad for them).

The other nice thing about this neighborhood is that you are close enough to the beach to smell the sea in the air and get a refreshing cooling in the summer. A definite plus for an otherwise rather dull neighborhood with only the most run of the mill restaurants and businesses to offer as enticement for new residents.

Let’s start with one of the standouts of the neighborhood, the high school. South High, like many of the schools in Torrance is really outstanding. To begin, the objective measures are great. South High has not only a really high Academic Performance rating (8 of 10) but also very good SAT scores (1600 on average). South High students also do remarkably well on the STAR test, with about a third testing proficient in Math and two thirds in the English. It’s not all about academics for the South High Spartans, however. The school offers more than a dozen individual sports, many of which have done well in the past—as the girls soccer team did this last year, for example. The marching band is also quite strong. Finally, it was also the location shoot site for one of my favorite films: American Beauty.

As to the Southwood Riviera neighborhood, it is also like much of the rest of Torrance. This is a neighborhood that had its big growth boom during the Fifties and Sixties. This means, of course, lots of split-level Ranch homes. It is also the kind of place that still has a 1970’s feel to it. On the far south of the neighborhood, there is a park without a name as far as I can tell. The Riviera Little League uses the baseball courts here and there are also a pair of basketball courts.

The very south end of the neighborhood is also a bit of an apartment city. These are largely some of those somewhat nicer 1960’s style apartments with a center court that stretches like a long wide aisle to the back with the two tiers of apartments staring in at it from both sides.

The Pacific Coast Highway forms the southern border of the neighborhood. Along it, a number of businesses can be found inside of bland looking strip malls. Eateries here are largely parts of chain restaurants like Subway and Fusion Sushi. The businesses are of a similarly forgettable variety. Nothing that is really unique to this area.

On the north side of the neighborhood, you find Star View Adolescent Center. This is a psychiatric treatment center that caters to teens in crisis. This is an accredited hospital and most of the patients here are in-patients trying to find a resolution to their problems. They also run a private high school, South Bay High, especially designed to help their trouble teens.

Overall, this is a solid though unremarkable neighborhood. Exactly the sort of place that is good for raising kids.

This tiny neighborhood on the southern portion of Torrance is a fairly typical middle-class neighborhood, filled with Ranch homes and pleasant leafy streets of the kind you might have found in the Valley some 30 years ago. I’ve not spent much time in this neighborhood, but it looks like a pretty standard So Cal neighborhood—pretty much like a million other places.

As far as the offerings that Hawthorne and Sepulveda might offer to potential residents, they too are largely of the mediocre variety. You can find all the usual things you would like out of a middle-class suburban area—a See’s Candy, a place to fix your car, a supermarket, the whole boring shebang. Even Torrance Heights’ attempts at breaking from this mold are middle of the road. For example, as far as nightlife in this neighborhood, all you will find pretty much is National Sports Grill—a very run-of-the-mill bar-n-grill that depends on its many screens to attract a clientele. (Another tacky feature of this bar is that it requires its female wait-staff to wear referee uniforms.)

In my opinion, the only place I know of that somewhat breaks away from this bland mood is Sully’s on Hawthorne. It has a Hawaiian theme and can sometimes be fun.

Overall, however, I would not go out of my way to visit anywhere here.

I remember when I was a kid in the 1970’s my parents were always talking about how great Redondo Beach was. I don’t know if this was specific to my family but I don’t think so. Redondo Beach, I think, was one of those “it” places to live. Redondo Beach now has a crowded field to contend with—Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Huntington Beach. Those all seriously give Redondo Beach a run for its money. But Redondo more than holds its own.

There is, of course, the obvious thing that all of these neighborhoods have going for them: great beaches. Redondo is especially good because it has a little bit more going on than Manhattan or Hermosa. Not only does Redondo have great beaches where you can take an early morning jog or get a tan, it also has a marina to rival that of Marina Del Rey and a pier that is second to only Santa Monica. Redondo Beach is also a bit more affordable than Manhattan and Hermosa.

On the other hand, Redondo Beach is much more family friendly than most of its northern neighbors. Redondo is, first of all, safer than Santa Monica and much safer than Venice. Consider, for example the murder rate. Since 2007 there have only been two murders in Redondo Beach. Although one was a drive by, the other should not be considered in the same category with run-of-mill crime. It involved a former Redondo High School grad who didn’t realize she was pregnant, gave birth, killed her newborn, and dumped the body in a pier side garbage can. The body was found. Everyone who lived around here heard about this case on the nightly news. A truly horrifying occurrence on a number of levels, but the kind of outlier that should not really be counted in with regular forms of crime. Overall Redondo Beach has a much lower crime rate than the national average.

The other thing that makes Redondo Beach much more kid friendly are the schools. Redondo High, for example, regularly gets 33% of kids to pass the math portion of the STAR test and despite having a fairly ethnically mixed student body manages to have 2/3 pass the English portion. SAT scores are a good 100 points above the state average. It missed two No Child Left Behind Standards this last year but this is atypical—usually it passes all such standards.

Redondo Beach is a fairly densely packed place to live in the residential areas. Homes here run the gamut from boxy apartment buildings on the neighborhood’s northern end, to expensive condos nearer to the beach. Because much of Redondo Beach is on an incline, this produces many more opportunities for homes with a view. Some of the best of these are homes in the Mediterranean style with tile roofs and trimmings.

Redondo also gives up very little when it comes to nightlife. You can find everything here, from cool little bars to elegant seafood places to cool little seaside burger joints.

Overall, this is one of the best places in LA to live.

Pacific Colony is a gated community in the find the tradition of the OC. The simple idea is to create a little community behind protective walls and a security guard so that those within can feel safe. (You know like in Medieval times when the village would close its gates at night to avoid being sacked by marauders.) There is something about this set of arrangements that makes those of us of a more liberal persuasion more than a little nervous that the real reasons for wanting to hide behind these protective walls are more reprehensible. It is a no coincidence that gated communities should be so popular in the conservative OC to the south.

Before I continue, I should also admit that I have never actually been past the “guard house” of their little citadel so my review is purely based on what I could find out through other sources. Overall, the whole thing feels somewhat like a vacation resort from my perspective (at least when looking through binoculars from the trees across the way). They have a palm tree lined pool, for example, whose high back bushes could give you the impression that you are in any number of resorts south of the border. There is also a clubhouse (that can be rented, I’m sure they would like me to advertise). It has an exercise room and a little living room area with some of the ugliest furniture I have ever seen—I think they are going for a sort of safari theme and not quite getting there.

The condos here are very similar, but, you do get your driveway and dedicated palm tree. And each floor plan has slight variations so you can really feel like an individual once you enter your “home.” (Wait! Be sure to check the number so that you don’t end up in your neighbor’s house. Remember how embarrassing that was last time when you spent half the evening ignoring his wife instead of yours, before you both realized that you are Stan the stockbroker, not Dan the banker. Ohhhh! Good times... Good times...)

I’d love to tell you demographic information about this location or even sales prices, but they keep those locked up just like everything else.

When residents dare to venture forth into the dangers of Torrance (whose crime rate, by the way, is way lower than both the state’s and City of Los Angeles’ crime rate), they can cross the busy street to the high school, to grab a burger, or to play some tennis. Then they can hurry back to the safety of their walls and armed protection.

The high school across the street, Bishop Montgomery, residents will be happy to hear, is a private school so you can avoid the riff raff there as well.

If you love pristine streets and the feeling that you are living in completely artificial environment, then you have found home.

On the eastern end of the neighborhood, you have a pretty industrial looking section of Torrance (the heart of the city, actually) where you find factories and chemical plants including some place called Polypeptide Laboratories (which synthesize amino acids for various purposes) and the Panasonic Disc factory. It is not very attractive, but every city needs to have its economic base and this is Torrance’s.

The rest of Delthorne, is fairly typical middle class neighborhood. On the northern end you get a fair number of 1980’s style condos with the garages tucked underneath. Delthorne Park, for which the neighborhood is named perhaps, stretches along the eastern end, offering a nice green space as a buffer to the more commercial eastern portion of the neighborhood. It has a great sandy play area for the kids, a basketball court and nice pathway with quaint little bridge over a tiny little artificial pond.

The homes in Delthorne are in a mix of architectural styles. The most common type of home here is the split-level home—especially Raised Ranch homes as they are called. This was a popular style in the 50’s as a variation on the typical Ranch. The neighborhood here is designed around a series of cul-de-sacs which the split level makes good use of and which give residents an added feeling of safety and enclosure. No through traffic driving by, its just you and those dozen or so neighbors who you see virtually every day. Of course, like in most neighborhoods in the area, you will also find a number of very well-kept Ranch homes. All very nice. Very Brady Bunch.

There are also some strange flat looking homes that I’m not sure how to describe. They might be a form of 50’s style model homes, prefabed somewhere else and just plopped down on the lots here. They don’t look quite right somehow. More than a little ugly in my opinion.

Hawthorne and Torrance boulevards are basically strip mall city, offering an assortment of bland entertainments, from supermarket and “ethnic” restaurants to the usual set of banks and gyms. Over all it is like a million other suburban neighborhoods with their usual set of commercial offerings. Zzzzzzzz....

I don’t mean to down play it. If you work in the area, this is a solid neighborhood that would make for the perfect place to raise a family: great schools, low crime, boring in just the right way for parenting. But nothing to write home about.

If you have always wanted to live just a few yards from a gigantic chemical plant, big enough to be a neighborhood in itself, this is definitely where you want to move. Pueblo is not so much a neighborhood as it is one strangely located block right at the heart of the what most people would consider to be an industrial area. Now you don’t notice the huge vats when you are on Del Amo Blvd. You could convince yourself that you are just on a regular suburban street filled with 50’s style homes—kind of like when I lived right next to a freeway and would pretended that the constant on rush of traffic just outside my double paned window was actually the lap of ocean waves. I mean, think of all the family time you could have playing board games during the shelter-in-place warnings. However, if you worry a little bit about living so close to who knows what, you probably won’t like it here.

Of course, its not that way to the south. To south you have a giant office park. Pleasant but not very homey.

Quite frankly, I have no idea what to make of this set up. Perhaps these are the last hold-outs who didn’t want to sell their homes to the local chemical company? I don’t know, but its definitely not for me.

Stretching out on the western end of the Harbor Freeway, West Carson is a long stretch of a city that is home to some 21,000 residents. You can roughly divide the city into 7 areas:

At the far northeastern end is the Alpine Shopping Center.

Surrounding the shopping center from the west to the south are residential neighborhoods characterized largely by 1950’s style Ranch homes.

Just to south of this area there are more neighborhoods of the same kind except that on the western end of the city, you find factories and planned communities with model homes plopped down just a pair of feet from one another so as to maximize spatial use.

Busy West Carson Blvd. marks the border of the next area. West Carson Blvd. also has a number of establishments like a Pizza Hut and an Ihop, that give it a distinctly 1970’s feel to it.

This next section is focused around the medical facilities that operate here, including a satellite of the UCLA Medical Center. This generally means strong medicine though I have no first hand experience of this specific facility.

South of these, gated communities take over and you find a series of seemingly identical condominiums and tract homes all stacked together. These are most likely the buildings that this generation will be remembered for in the way that those boxy apartment buildings mark the 1970’s.

To the south of this is a nursing home with 1950’s style ranch homes hemming it in.

At the very south of the city is a gigantic trailer park.

Put simply West Carson runs the gamut. You can find everything from trailer parks to condos and Ranch homes. The neighborhood also runs the gamut in terms of races and ethnicities with no single group forming the majority.

Overall, this is a pretty average neighborhood. Unfortunately, it is not really all that family friendly for two main reasons. First, the schools here are simply terrible. Carson High, for example, has consistently terrible scores (despite only missing 6 of its No Child Left Behind standards). On the STAR test, less than 10% of the Carson’s students test proficient on the math, while a meager 1 of 3 pass the English portion. In addition, SAT scores average a good 200 beneath the California average.

The other problem is crime. There is simply put a bit of gang problem here. Now, I don’t want to exaggerate this. There are not that many murders in West Carson, for example. But violence is still more on the negative side than the positive.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable moving my family here.

Like many of the coastal communities in LA, Hermosa Beach is one of the really great places to live, if you can afford it. Of course, the beaches and weather are fantastic. Who doesn’t want to live close enough where within five minutes you can be running on the beach. And even when you’re not on the beach, you get that great coastal weather, where even at the height of summer you are cooled by the offshore breezes. Nothing beats that.

But it is not just the sand and surf. Lot’s of places have great sand and surf. Hermosa Beach also is great for family living because of its schools. There really is no bad school here. The two local high schools for example, Mira Costa in Manhattan Beach to the north, and Redondo High to the south, are some of the best in LA. Let’s take the slightly weaker of the two for a second. Redondo High has an API rank of 8 and its students regularly rank a 100 points above the state average on the SAT. The STAR tests are less impressive, only a third test proficient in math, while two thirds do so in English, but this is still above average.

Hermosa Beach, however, is more about apartment living than family friendly housing and it tends to be a fairly commercial area, with lots of businesses and restaurants near the breakers. As with other coastal cities rents are a good three to four hundred higher for similar apartments in less desirable areas.

As far as nightlife and restaurants go, Hermosa Beach is a great location. There are, first of all, a number of watering holes near the shore that cater to young professionals and laid back singles. Places like The Lighthouse offer not only drinks but music, with everything from Ska and Reggae (on Sundays) to Blues, Jazz and Rock. For those who prefer their drinks mixed with a bit of Irish brogue (or the closest approximation you can get in sunny So Cal) you might try Hennessy’s right on Pier 8. Another great place for a relatively cheap drink and some funky music, go to Café Bungaloo—its an eclectic mix that won’t give your pocketbook quite as much of a hangover. Bungaloo is also good for the morning after brunch. A couple of other watering holes worth mentioning are the Underground Pub (with its British theme) and the self-explanatory Comedy and Magic Club.

In terms of restaurants there also a number of good choices. Silvio’s Brazilian Barbecue is one of my favorites—if you have not had Brazilian barbecue it is well worth it. There are also a lot of cheap restaurants where you can get everything from a burger (Good Stuff) or pita (the Pita Pit) to Cajun (Ragin Cajun) or sushi (Oki Doki Sushi). I could go on and on like this. There are enough restaurants in Hermosa Beach where you could literally eat a different one each day for a year.

So what are the drawbacks of the area? Cost. Its pretty expensive to live here. The average resident makes a salary in the six digits. Like Manhattan Beach, this is more of a singles area really, because its mostly small apartments.

Another drawback is that it is really crowded, especially in the summer. The tiny streets can make parking a challenge and space in all its forms is definitely at a premium.

You are also a bit out of the way here. If you work north of LAX, this could become a bit of a commuting nightmare.

If you are willing to live with these things, however, there are few places more beautiful to live than this.

Like much of Torrance, Northwest Torrance is yet another conglomeration of 1950’s style Ranch homes. It reminds me of the Valley of my youth, circa 1980. It has that kind of slightly boring middle class feel to it.

Alondra Park is just to north, which means that much of the northern border is a sprawling golf course. El Camino College is also there, though it is not the kind of college that draws students to live close by. Being a community college, it just draws from the nearby populace.

One thing this area definitely does not lack is shopping malls. There are strips malls within its border and the Galleria Shopping mall to the west. (Not to be confused with the famous Sherman Oaks Galleria up in the Valley. This is not the one made famous in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.) In fact, this is a fairly uninspired mall with not much to it. (Unless you think TJ Maxx or Target are amazing stores.)

There are also a number of auto dealerships along the edges of this neighborhood.

On the south of the neighborhood is the behemoth Exxon Mobile Refinery. It stretches across the southern border like a city onto itself. Its proximity is part of what drives would-be residents away.

The 405 cuts diagonally across the neighborhood, packing with commuters twice a day.

North High is the local school. It’s pretty mediocre.

Overall, this is a pretty forgettable neighborhood, with nothing particularly great or terrible about it. If you like a sort of middle class existence of this kind, then you may have found home.

You can exactly divide the box which is this neighborhood into four smaller boxes with Van Ness and W 182nd Street being the bisectors. (The parameter is made up of Artesia on the north, Crenshaw on the west, 190th on the south, and Western Ave. on the east.)

The primarily residential area is on the northwestern section of the neighborhood. It is made up of fairly average looking Ranch homes and is for all intents the same as it was some fifty years ago when Torrance was finishing off its big population boom following WWII. The homes here are rather bland, with nothing particularly good or bad about them. There has been a murder here in the past few years—a case of gang violence spillover—but this area of Torrance, like most of Torrance itself, is pretty safe, with this occasion being the exception that proves the rule.

The homes in the north of this northwest section of Northeast Torrance, tend to have slightly newer Ranch homes, along more pleasantly planned areas. Along Artesia Blvd. there are more strip malls with rather bland selections.

Power lines also cut across the northern end of the neighborhood. Underneath theses are planted a number of what appear to be crop rows. They act like a physical barrier however between the slightly nicer homes on the far north and older homes to the south.

The Ranch homes on the northeastern end quickly give way to trailer parks on the far east of the neighborhood. The area is still technically middle class, although this is by far one of the least affluent areas in Torrance. In addition, with the high crime areas of Gardena, Compton and Carson right on the border here, this is also one of less safe areas of Torrance.

North High School is located in the southwest section of Northeast Torrance. It is a solid school, light years ahead of the Gardena High to the north which is atrocious, but still one of the worst schools in Torrance. Put simply, it is mediocre. SAT scores are almost exactly equal to statewide tests, about a third of students are proficient in math and despite the lack of ethnic diversity at this school, only 2/3 of students pass the English section. All of these are okay and would be great for some areas, but they are on the lower edge of expectations for Torrance as whole.

The Honeywell Aerospace company takes up the portion of this area that sits to the south of freeway. I believe they are the fourth largest employer based in Torrance, employing more than a thousand workers.

The southeastern portion of Northeast Torrance is largely made up of the same kinds of older Ranch homes that make up the rest except for the small section cut off by the 405 freeway. It is some kind of factory area—I believe it is the headquarters of Toyota America another big employer in Torrance.

Overall, this is not one of the better parts of Torrance, though a still a step up from its northern neighbors.

This small strip of a neighborhood located on the far west of Torrance on the border with Redondo Beach is one of the true hidden gems of little regarded Torrance. Consider just one cul-de-sac in the neighborhood:

The long flat homes are a mix of Ranch styles with even a couple of Eichler style homes thrown in for good measure. This is the kind of seventies style neighborhood with wide sidewalks and well-kept front yards that encourages kids to be outside enjoying the cool sea breezes and ample sunlight. On this particular cul-de-sac there is not one mounted basketball hoop, but three—yet another testament to the neighborhoods commitment to physical health (something sorely lacking in many of the neighborhoods around the US if you are to believe obesity rates).

The residents also express their individuality through the way they decorate their yards. Each home seems to have a different kind of tree shading in its front yard for example. Here and there, an occasional palm tree rises up, while some yards have hedges perfectly trimmed into cubes or rising up next to the front door like green fountains of shooting water. The luxury cars that sit parked on the front drives on weekends and weeknights are also a testament to the neighborhood’s affluence.

For the kids who live here, they hardly need the basketball hopes along the drives. Just to the east in West Torrance, Entradero Park with its half dozen baseball courts and just to the north in Redondo Beach is the center for Redondo Beach Little League association, so summer days are sure to be filled with SUVs shuttling white-uniformed shorties to fun in the sun. That is, when they are not in bathing suits heading for the nearby beaches. (The neighborhood also has a small park, Sunnyglen, where many mom’s take the really young kids during the week.)

Just to the west of the neighborhood is a shopping center with a supermarket, gym and a few Asian food restaurants so that you could practically leave the car at home to get everything that you need done. Also located in this same area are a series of doctors’ and dental offices. Basically, you have just about everything you need within walking distance.

As to nightlife, residents look to the west towards the beach side restaurants or farther south into the rest of Torrance.

With the great local schools, outstanding weather and relative proximity to LAX, Pacific South Bay is a perfect little residential pocket for families whose main provider must often fly off on business (well to do pilots for example—this area LA is big aviation and aerospace hub).

Given the high crime, high density neighborhoods to its north, little regarded Torrance is a welcome break from the area’s troubles. West Torrance, right by Redondo Beach, is a solid residential area.

This is an affluent neighborhood that really had its boom in the 1950’s. This is partly reflected in the homes you will find in West Torrance. Many are 1950’s style Ranch homes—as you would expect. They have nicely kept lawns and well place topiary. This is not really a big renter neighborhood. Two thirds of those who live here own the homes in which they live. So the streets are well-kept and people are here to stay.

Another big attraction of West Torrance is the schools. West High School, which serves the neighborhood, for example, has an API rank of 9 and an average student SAT score of 1,500—a good 200 above the California average. This performance also carries through to the STAR test on which half of the students test proficient on the math and more than two thirds on the English (both are way above average, especially given that West’s student population is a fairly diverse mix).

The other thing you will not find wanting in Torrance are baseball fields. Not only do the schools provide them but two local parks also provide a number of these for local leagues.

As far as restaurants and nightlife the offerings are fairly mediocre within West Torrance itself. Along 190th Street on the northern border of the neighborhood however, you will find Belecan Grill, a Malaysian bistro with really good variety (though I am a fan of the Tamarind Shrimp, myself). Unfortunately if you want something more than pizza or burgers, you will have to go further down into Torrance or west into Redondo Beach. The North Torrance Mall (little more than a glorified strip mall really) is not terrible but it lacks imagination. It is the kind of mall that is like a million other malls.

Overall, however, though a bit on the boring side, West Torrance is a good, relatively quiet place, perfect for raising kids.