Well, since you don t say which college you ll be going to I don t know which neighborhoods would be the best for commuting. While you can certainly find many 1 bedroom apartments for 2000 and up in LA you can also find decent ones for 1000, sometimes less depending on where you want to live. I m not as familiar as others here are with neighborhoods in other parts of LA. For an example of what some of the rents in Long Beach you can go here and look. I m sure there are comparable prices in some other cities in the county.http://www.ernstandhaas.com/properties/i��http://www.ernstandhaas.com/properties/d��http://www.pabstkinney.com/rentals.cfm?r��
Since you KNOW it s expensive but what I m assuming that you don t know is that LA county is actually cheaper than Santa Clara County. You can get a 1bd apartment for $1200/mo. over here if you wanted to.Plus, you didn t say what school you re going to which may make the rental price I mention obsolete.
for a decent/safe part of LA county, a one bed will start around 900$ a month in areas like Torrance/Long Beach/and other areas and can go up to 2000$ if you lived in beverly hills/westwood, one of those wealthy areas. good luck!
if your coming from the bay area -- you probably wont like so cali as most of the people that move up to san francisco from Los Angeles hate it up there.
It s expensive and there s traffic.
The housing prices in LA are slightly lower than SF, so it shouldn t be too much of a shock for you. It all depends on the location.
I lived in LA for 20 years, and I can tell you I would MUCH rather have lived in SF.LA has horrible public transportation. SF has amongst the best in the world. It is essential to have one car per adult in LA, whereas an adult doesn t even need a car in SF, or even most of the surrounding areas.There is no living wage or universal healthcare in LA, unlike SF. Unemployment is so high that even getting a job in the low-paying fast-food industry just about requires a bachelor s degree.LA is vast, and covers more than 500 sq. mi. SF is small geographically and has more to do per square mile than LA. It s hard to make friends when so much distance is involved. We call it geographical impossibility .The bad neighborhoods in LA are not as contained as they are in SF. There are pockets of them around the city, so it s really easy to end up right in the middle of one if you don t know your way around. Maps don t tell you where the bad places are, so if you aren t familiar with the streets, you could find yourself in a spot you don t want to be.If I were you, I d stay in SF.
I think the Bay Area and Los Angeles are close in cost of living. There is a world of difference, like two planets. Los Angeles has 85 cities in 450 square miles. San Francisco proper is only 44 square miles and the bay area has 3 million people where L.A. has 8 million. Wherever you go to school in L.A. you pretty much should live near by or in the same town. There is a wild difference in price from one location to another, just like from San Francisco to Napa would be a gap, so it all depends which city you go to. There isn t one built up city like San Francisco and you wouldnt live downtown or hang out there. Every town in Los Angeles has its centers for meeting and school, etc. You definitely cannot make it without a car.