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The Price of Paradise |
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By Kevin Cox
(page 1 of 3)
Just ask them. They’ll tell you.They’ll tell you about eating Christmas dinner on the patio, wearing shorts and a golf shirt—and calling friends back East to rub it in. Or sitting on the front porch, having a glass of wine, watching the balloons off Del Mar and a perfect sunset of pink, blue and gold.
Seems like everybody’s got a magic moment, some image of San Diego that says it all. Living here is just another day at the beach. Never mind the sewage spilling onto the sand from the city’s outdated sanitation system.
They call it paradise, but is it paradise lost? Sure, there’s the surf, but traffic is crazy, and there’s no place to park anyway. The weather’s great, but tract houses are going for a half-million. The backyard is a handful of dirt.
And it doesn’t stop with the mortgage payment, or the rent. There are the utility bills and the credit-card statements. Everybody knows it costs more to live here, but how much more? To find out, just follow the money. Or in the Internet Age, follow the links to Web sites that
compare costs of living among American cities. At bankrate.com, enter San Diego and another city—from Abilene to Yuma —along with your salary.
Even if you’re already sitting down, you might want to hold on to something. Assuming a $60,000 annual salary, it costs 32 percent to 36 percent more to live in San Diego than other American cities such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City and Seattle.
The San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce breaks it down even further, with U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics from 1999 and 2000. The chamber says San Diegans spent approximately 36 percent of their income on housing—and that was before the big run-up in prices in the last two years. The average cost for housing nationally was only 27.5 percent, according to the chamber. San Diegans spend a greater percentage of their income on housing than anybody else does, statistics show.
And it doesn’t stop there. San Diegans spend more than anyone else in the United States on transportation-related expenses —21 percent of their total outlay. Gas and motor oil account for 15 percent more of local incomes than the national average. San Diegans spend 21 percent more of their money on personal-care products and services, and 52 percent more on entertainment.
It’s enough to drive you to drink—but that costs more, too. San Diegans spend 18 percent more of their incomes on alcohol than the rest of the United States.
Many wonder if it’s all worth it. But there are plenty of people who say it is, even as they send out their checks with the monthly bills. It’s just so much more money down the commode.
“It’s one of the things you don’t think about when you hit that silver handle,” says Michael Scahill, the supervising public information officer at the Metropolitan Wastewater Department. “It’s our job to think about it. It’s not everybody’s favorite subject.”
Especially when the bills come. Water and sewer charges are combined in San Diego, and the city acknowledges both tend to be more expensive here than in other parts of the country. And Scahill says sewer problems, which often result in contaminated beaches, are only going to get more expensive to fix. So the city is doing it now.
“Over the past two years, we’re down just about 40 percent in the number of sewer spills,” Scahill says. “It costs money, but we think it’s worth it.”
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