I was born and raised in Encinitas, a surf town in North County. Encinitas is to San Diego what San Diego is to the rest of the world. I'll explain what I mean, and along the way I will provide you all the reasons you should not come. 1) We hate stupid tourist barney-ass kook transplant fucks. And by that I mean people from more than 15 minutes from the ocean. So most of the rest of San Diego. Do not come to our beaches, do not come to our bars, we will kick sand on your towel and call you names. For real though, very hostile to visitors, especially people that move there. And merlin's beard, never call it "Cali" or even say "cali" except in reference to the burrito or the Notorious B.I.G song. It's California or SoCal, or nothing. Mostly nothing, because it's the only place in the world that matters so why would you have a word to distinguish it? (more on the insularity later)
2) Meager public transportation. There's a beautiful train track that runs through town, and scofflaw locals love to make a point of crossing them at undesignated points, and I think there are busses, but nobody uses the train except to pregame Padres games, and nobody has seen a bus before.
3) Crazy religious Republicans and bourgeois transplant Republicans. Not as bad as Orange County, but still bad. Fuck tons of Mormons (still bitter about the Prop 8 saga, not sure if it's still okay to hate on mormons anymore as I haven't lived in CA six years). For instance, while everywhere in CA rejoiced at medical marijuana in the post-Bush years, San Diego rapidly shut down all the dispensaries within a couple years. 3a) Cops are big assholes in San Diego. There's definitely a current of military-style hardassness combined with bro bravado exemplified by the police force that I do not see in DC or NY (places I've lived since)
4) Very insular. Northern California is a different country. I went to college in Washington DC, and lots of my friends would call me to ask if they could swing by on their road trip to Oregon. This will sound silly, as I've traveled to most of the cool cities in America, but I've never been to San Francisco. Tried once, but never made it past the Santa Cruz purp. Fuck it.
4) People are saying it's super expensive, but compared to DC and NY and SF it's really not at all. I've never had a real job in San Diego though, so I don't know what the average salary is like. And those places are egregious. So yeah, it's expensive as hell.
As you can tell, I don't want anybody to move to San Diego because I obviously need to be able to move back eventually, get fat on craft beer, wear loose fitting button up shirts, get a sunglasses tan, and wear flip flops all day.
For anybody that does live there now (tourists go home), please drive your car down to the street to the nearest ____berto's taco shop and enjoy a California burrito for me (add guac) and an Orange Band for me!
(PS sorry about the shitshow of a post, first time Redditor here. Once I found something I cared about enough to start typing I couldn't stop!!)