Why I Chose Downtown Los Angeles
I’m sure it seems strange that I could live in Hermosa/Manhattan Beach for 20 years and then pick up and move to downtown Los Angeles. The simple facts are:
- My credit sucks right now- and downtown has a large inventory of rentals compared to beach cities, where demand far exceeds supply
- I needed a rental that was “dog friendly”- Isis is my “best friend” and I was fighting to not give her back to breeder
- I had a lot of furniture / computers / home theaters and I wanted to hold on to as much as I could (turns out that was a mistake…) but every rental I looked at in South Bay was cramped, poorly layed-out, and I was paying a premium for parking I would not need, at least until I found a girlfriend
- For my career, I may need to go see a client, and mass transit is easy (or so I thought) from downtown. A driver/taxi was out of the question for anywhere further than Torrance/El Segundo
I guess downtown also seemed interesting- I had from time-to-time considered a move to New York City for a one-year software contract, and had always thought about living in the high-rise apartments and walking/riding the subway everywhere, so the idea was not too far-fetched. And all things considered, I would rather be sweating in shorts than freezing in an overcoat and slipping on ice.
So downtown LA was included in my housing search. Other “strange’ areas for me included Hollywood and Santa Monica, but the dog and the bad credit were issues, and frankly, I could not pay someone to drive me around to view properties that were not grouped together.
Hey, and I would be in good compnay- David Beckham and “Posh” Spice just bought a loft (a little $ 4.9 million, 4 story example - see story, paragraph 7). This must be David’s “Batchelor Pad” as they also bought a $ 22 millioo estate in Beverly Hills.