Lopez: Leaving for Las Vegas to find the middle-class life
LAS VEGAS
The rent steals so much of your paycheck, you might have to move back in with your parents, and half your life is spent staring at the rear end of the car in front of you.
You'd like to think it will get better, but when? All around you, young and old alike are saying goodbye to California.
“Best thing I could have done,” said retiree Michael J. Van Essen, who was paying $1,160 for a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles until a year and a half ago. Then he bought a house with a creek behind it for $165,000 in Mason City, Iowa and now pays $500 a month less on his mortgage than he did on his rent in Los Angeles.
Van Essen was one of the many readers who responded in October when I reached out to people who got sick and tired of the high cost of living in California. I heard from someone in Idaho and others who moved to Arizona and Nevada.
Solid recent data is hard to come by, but 2016 census figures showed an uptick in the number of people who fled Los Angeles and Orange counties for less expensive California locales, or they left the state altogether.
“If housing costs continue to rise, we should expect to see more people leaving high-cost areas,” said Jed Kolko, an economist with UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation.
Las Vegas is one of the most popular destinations for those who leave California. It's close, it's a job center, and the cost of living is much cheaper, with plenty of brand-new houses going for between $200,000 and $300,000.
So I went to Sin City to see whether, when you add up all the pluses and minuses, there is life after California.
Cyndy Hernandez, a 30-year-old USC grad who grew up in Fontana, says the answer is yes, absolutely.
“It's easier to live here and have a comfortable lifestyle,” said Hernandez, a community organizer with NARAL Pro-Choice Nevada.
I visited Hernandez in the two-bedroom, mountain-view “apartment-home” she shares with a roommate. Each pays $650 a month in a gated development with free Wi-Fi, a swimming pool and cabana-shaded deck, fitness center, media room and complimentary beverages. It's like living at a resort.
Like other transplants I spoke to in Nevada, Hernandez didn't want to leave California. It's home. It's where she went to school and where her parents still live in the house she grew up in. But unless you choose a career that will pay you a small fortune to manage costs driven higher by a stubborn shortage of new housing, California is not a dream, it's a mirage.
Moving to get a better job or move up the workplace chain is nothing new. But what's going on here seems different - people leaving not for better jobs or pay, but because housing elsewhere is so much cheaper they can live the middle-class life that eludes them in California.
After college, Hernandez worked as a congressional staffer in Washington and then went to Chicago for a few years. But the West drew her back. Not California, but Nevada, where she worked on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in Las Vegas and then joined the staff of a state legislator in the state capital.
“I started looking at the bigger picture in Carson City, where I was able to pay the rent, have a car and a comfortable life and put some money into a 401(k),” Hernandez said. “Would I be able to do that in California? Probably not.”
She moved to Las Vegas in June, enjoyed exploring the city beyond the Strip and made new friends, and her financial stress melted away in the desert sun. Now she's saving up for a house, which she doesn't think she would ever have been able to do in California.
Hernandez connected me with Arlene Angulo, 23, who grew up in Riverside, worked as a cast member at Disneyland, loved the L.A. culture and got her teaching credential at UC Riverside. She had her pick of two teaching jobs - one in the Los Angeles area and one in Las Vegas.
“L.A. would have been my first choice, and I didn't want to have to leave California,” said Angulo, an English teacher who understands basic math. She knew that on a starting teacher's salary, “I couldn't afford to stay there.”
In Summerlin, a Las Vegas suburb, Angulo and a roommate each pays $600 for a big three-bedroom apartment. Angulo is in graduate school at the University of Nevada Las Vegas while teaching by day, and said she's going to start saving up to buy a house in the area.
Jonas Peterson enjoyed the California lifestyle and trips to the beach while living in Valencia with his wife, a nurse, and their two young kids. But in 2013, he answered a call to head the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, and the family moved to Henderson, Nevada.
“We doubled the size of our house and lowered our mortgage payment,” said Peterson, whose wife is focusing on the kids now instead of her career.
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