Best places to live in the Southwestern USA

while we stayed only five days in san diego last fall, we did enjoy the city very much - but i understand that housing is expensive. the weather seems to be fairly moderate most of the time - even now it's cooler in san diego than along the great lakes.
of course if i had the money, i'd stay at the hotel "del coronado" year-round. hbg ...the beach is only about 500 feet from the hotel. we had breakfast on the terrace looking out on the pacific ...

The Del Coronado hotel


It's amazing that this 115 year old hotel, built of wood, has not burned down. Most other wood buildings of that era disappeared in flames.

http://www.hoteldel.com/about/history.asp

Well, I took that quiz on that website, Stray Cat, and I didn't get ANY Portland OR Oregon cities. Could it be that these guys are getting it just because Portland is a damn nice place to live? I know someone who lives there, and they say the city itself is clean and beautiful, with a lot of fun things to do.

My top five:

Jacksonville, FL
Gainesville, FL
Charleston, SC
Biloxi-Gulfport, MS
Jackson, MS

After that it was another few in FL, some Texas places, and a few others I can't remember right now. Some of these places look real nice!

Thanks for the cool site, Stray Cat!

(climbing into your lap).....purrrr........

I tried that Web site before, and it kept coming up with Paris, TX. Very low cost of living, with a university nearby.

I checked on property in the area and it was very reasonable. Unbelievable.

But then I really started checking more deeply, and it turned out to have a huge crime rate. And they were mostly sex offenders. Went to that Web site and found page after page of pictures of sex offenders. Couldn't believe it!

Now I wonder if that city doesn't have some sort of release / re-entry program for sex offenders. ... ?

Hee! You know, I've always thought there was something weird happening in Texas. No offense to everyone in the state! I'm sure there are many fine people there.

But, they just seem to have some of the weirdest things happening. I mean there's crime everywhere, but whenever there's a serious crime in Texas, it's just unusually strange. Take John Wayne Gacy -- please! The guy dressed up in clown outfits, entertained at children's parties -- meanwhile he was molesting boys and young men, murdering them, and burying them in his basement or yard.

Then there was the news story several years ago, about some ranch, owned by some strange cult, where they were killing and burying people all over the place. (shudder!)

Did you ever see Texas Chainsaw Massacre? I read that that was based on a true story!!

I don't know. Just ...weeeeird.

Well, some neat a2kers live in Texas, and a good friend from another online site lives there. Texas is a big place, big cities in very big country, wide spectrum of people.

I think Edgarblythe, for one, is tired of hearing railings against Texans, and I am fairly weary of digs on Californians. This is all nothing of course compared to serious bias against whole ethnic groups, but still isn't useful. People are not all the same, or all of the same mind, in many places anyway.

Oh, I meant no offense to the people of Texas, osso. I've also met some wonderful people from there.

It's just that -- with the bad crime problem in the northeast, and the large population here -- you'd think that there'd be, say, five serial killers for every one that they have in the west -- or midwest.

Of course, there was the Boston Strangler, and Son of Sam, in New York -- but that was such a long time ago.

Seems like more recently, it's been people like Ted Bundy in Colorado, the BTK killer in Kansas, the Green River killer in Washington state, Jeffrey Dahmer in Minnesota, as well as John Wayne Gacy -- and several other strange cases -- in Texas.

I don't know. Maybe people can only look at a prairie for just so long -- before they go totally mad and start killing people!! (just kidding!) But it does make me wonder....? What's up with that? Just some late night ramblings from me.....

My wife's from Texas. She left the state years ago, the minute she graduated high school. Smart woman.

Yes I guess fear of inner city crime is another bugbear - not unrealistic, but not all there is to inner cities. Much more complex places than assumed.

Hey, Stray Cat. No offense taken here.

I'm sure there are weird people everywhere, but since I live in Texas, the only weird people I get to see, well, they're here, too.

Went back to FindYourSpot.com and put in the same criteria, and Paris, TX didn't even come up. Seems Beaumont is now the city in TX for cheap living according to them.

A lot of foreclosed houses, so I checked on job opportunities. As you would guess, not too many. Still a high crime rate, and then, well, there is that issue of hurricanes and weather-related crises.

Monster.com has a terrific link to demographics and you can compare cities on about 50 different items. Very interesting. I compared Beaumont's high crime to Paris's, and Paris is still the big winner there, but, well, fewer hurricanes.

I remember being taught in landarch class that it was so and so's point of view that you couldn't change human behavior by designing the environment - meaning that designing doesn't cause already inculcated human behavior. And the same may be true of landscape spaces, fields of wheat and so on. But.... surely both design and natural circumstance can trigger reactions..

I'm not sure about the validity of that statement, Osso. There is a phenomenon well known in law enforcement circles called the Broken Window Syndrome. Take two low-income neighborhoods. One has a lot of abandoned houses and factories with broken windows. The other has some abandoned property as well but it's kept in repair, at least to the extent that there are no broken windows. Statistics universally show that the crime rate will go up in the neighborhood with the broken windows. It's human nature to see something that's run down and run it down some more. They teach this stuff in advanced criminology courses.

Interesting, osso. I'd never considered the idea of design affecting human behavior! Yes, I guess it wouldn't change "inculcated" behavior, but I definately do think it can trigger reactions. Apparently this is why some employers (the good ones, anyway) spend considerable money on the design of an office building, or even the outside grounds.

dupre -- I didn't realize Texas had such a problem with hurricanes. I'd have thought the occasional tornado would be more of a problem.

Merry Andrew, about your wife -- Hee!

Yes, MA, I am not sure either. Forget which big name said all this, maybe..., well, never mind. But... the behavior pre-exists, is the point. or was the point.

I still think I like William Whyte's early work. From which I take it that people naturally respond in various observable ways. I don't know that all people would behave that way in that experiment, but it was pretty useful to see.

One can design to attempt to foster certain behavior. (I dunno about that... but a lot of folks are trying with healing environments and so on. Some of those might creep me out, but then I am inordinately picky and not a useful test person.)

I read all my books on design and human behaviour about twenty years ago and just a few months ago, in my cleaning out to move, tossed them. So... I'm a blank slate yet again.

I lived in La Jolla, CA right by the cove, the single most unhappy time of my life, albeit for a few months. Environment is certainly not key, from my own mere experience. But, concentration camps, say, are not wonderful for one. There is an effect, but it isn't all there is.

So ... what's the most beautiful, serene city?

Xanadu?

Stray Cat, yes, that's right, tornados. We do get a lot of them in Central Texas. But, Beaumont is on the Gulf Coast, so it probably gets some hurricanes, too.

About The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I have a friend who says he knew one of the directors, and that he kept the old grandmother, who was merely a dummy, in his living room in a chair.

Now that's creepy!