I have lived here half my life so I think I have some authority about what it is about.  But, where to start???

AK Weather

Let me say this.  Moving to Anchorage or anywhere in Alaska has to be well thought out.  This is an extreme place.  Not as much as people think, and I know its beautiful up here, but its an extreme place to live.

You are going to spend 6-7 month living in winter.  And darkness.  In the middle of winter the sun barely pops his head out at 10:30 and by 4 PM its back down.  Last year in 2008 as soon as October hit the weather dropped.  We were between 5-10 degrees in Anchorage that whole month.  So you need to know what you are getting into.

Anchorage is really not a bad city.  I have to disclose that I am preferential to warmer climates so I have to make a concerted effort to make sure I point out all the good points I can about cities in colder climates.

The city is in a bowl.  The Pacific Ocean is to the west of it and to the east lies the Chugach Mountains.  This is what makes Anchorage one of the prime areas in Alaska.  Why?  Like I said earlier because it is right off the ocean it routinely gets a lot of warm air coming up from the Pacific.  They are refereed to as “chinooks,” and they can blow in during the middle of February turning the weather from 0 degrees to 40 degrees in a matter of one day.  On the other spectrum theChugach Mountains protect from most of the cold arctic winds that come in from the northeast.  So I am not saying it does not get cold in Anchorage, as I write this its 20 degrees, but I am saying that for an Alaskan city its fairly moderate.  It could be a lot worse!

If you live in the southern part of the country you really need to think about it.  If you have kids than forget about it.  They will have a difficult time adjusting!   I have lived in Anchorage since I was 14, make great money here, and I still have a hard time with it.

Population and Anchorage Economy

This city has a little under 300,000 people living in it.  Most people have no idea that there is actually a big city in Alaska but there is.  And with a big city comes all the problems of your typical big city.

Here is another economic and population breakdown of Anchorage.

Anchorage is dealing with problems relating to crime, gangs, traffic, taxes, and rising costs of living.  Now I will say this.  These problems are nothing in comparison to what one would see in your typical city in the “lower 48.”  Whatever problems Anchorage is having is small compared to another city the same size in California or Texas.

The economy in here is better than most places.  If you have a brain on your shoulders and can stand the winters you will have no problems making money.  The only people who cannot make it monetarily up here are people who are lazy or stupid.  We get paid to live here at least one month out of the year.  The Alaska Permanent Fund was $1,300 this year in October and last year it was $3,200.  So at least everyone has money one month out of the year.  The cost of living is higher than most places int the US.  Anchorage is actually 18% higher than the national average.  Having said that the wages are a lot higher as well so I have found that if you can find a good job the pros will far outweigh the cons from a dollars and cents point of view.

There is no sales taxes here.  They have been talking about making one for years and every year it gets voted down.

There is however a high property tax in Anchorage.  Most find it to be outrageous.  And the property taxes here seem to go up every year.

Anchorage is split into several areas: North, West, East, and South.

• North and East Anchorage

This is known by many to be the worst part of Anchorage.  Keep in mind that “bad” from a person living in Anchorage is going to be different than bad from a person living in Las Angelas.   I would call it the “ghetto” but there are some bad neighborhoods like Mountain View, Fairview, and Muldoon.  Drugs are a problem in those neighborhoods.  Most of East and North Anchorage is working class though and if you want to find the cheapest rents this is the area.

• West Anchorage

The Spenard area of Anchorage is known to be drug infested but most of this area, also known as Turnagain, is middle to upper class.  This is where a lot of the politicians, lawyers, doctors, and highly skilled liberal professionals live.

• South Anchorage

This is the newest and best side of town.  This is where the newer and expensive subdivisions are.  This is where the Anchorage Hillside is also located.  There are several well to do neighborhoods in Anchorage but the Hillside is the most well known and biggest.  They have incredible views here, particularly the winter sunrises and sunsets, it feels like you’re outside of Anchorage but everything is a short drive away, buts it very expensive, gets very windy (sometimes past MPH), and the roads get very slippery in the winter.

The main college in Anchorage is UAA.  This is the main college in the whole state of Alaska.  Its not a bad college and totally affordable compared with other major universities in the country.  For a resident the total tuition would be approximately $5,000 a year without books. That’s not even half of what I paid going to to the University of Houston and its no more prestigious.

My Findings About Anchorage

I was originally from Houston, Tx.  My grandfather being an army officer was a big reason for my being up here.

My  grandfather was stationed at Fort Richardson in the 70s and this was his last post before he retired.  My grandmother and grandfather hated one another but agreed that their last station is where they would retire.  Well, little did he know it would be Alaska.  So when he retired him and my grandfather got into a huge fight with my grandmother and he moved back to Louisiana where he was originally from (you can tell he really did not like the cold).  They probably would have gotten a divorce anyway but they now they both found a convenient excuse to get out of their loveless marriage.

Anyway my grandmother and uncles and aunts stayed up here.  Half of my families side live in Anchorage.  She never did, they lived in Maryland when she left home, a year before they moved up here, but in 1997 she decided that she hated the heat of Texas and wanted to move to Alaska to make more money and live in a safer area.

I begged her not to.  I loved Anchorage for a summer vacation, which we took every June or July for the past five years, but not that much!  I pleaded and begged her not to come up here but she did (as you can tell).

Fast forward to 2009.  I have a great mobile oil change business, the economy is great up here when you compare it to the rest of the states, I have learned how to ski, and I still hate it up here.  The cold weather and darkness just turns my mood south.

So know what you are getting into.  Anchorage is a great place for some and for others it will be hell.  Depends on your personality types.  I have seen both sides.

The city itself has grown a lot in the last decade.  I cannot believe it has 740,000 people in it and lots more in the metropolitan area.  This was just a small college town several decades ago and now the city has over a million people in the area.  It sure does not feel like it though.  That is what I love about Austin.  It still has a small time feel to it.

The party and music has and will always be strong here.  With no shortage of college party goers this city is always poppin’ with fun and excitement.  You never have a reason to be bored here.  There are tons of good high paying jobs in the area and the cost of living is really low when you compare it to other parts of the country, especially Orange County.

As I stated this city reminds me a lot of Portland but its located in Texas.  Even their downtowns look a lot alike.  Both have that small time feel though they are anything but a small city any longer.  Both are overwhelmingly white as Austin stands at 65.5% Caucasian in the city.  The grassroots and activism scene is big here.  And their is definitely no shortage of smart college graduates.

The climate here is still hot but a lot drier and comfortable than other cities.  Amarillo and Lubbock to the West are way too dry.  Houston and Dallas to the East are really humid and muggy.  Austin is somewhere in the middle.

These are the cities that make up Orange County:  Anaheim, Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, Laguna, Tustin, and Irvine.  There are several other cities that I left out but they do not have the importance as the main ones I just named.  Those seven cities make up the heart of this famous county and comprise, at least in my biased opinion,  one of the best places to live in the country.

I am going to tell you right now that Orange County is a great place to live.  The weather is always nice and the people in Orange County are beautiful.  If you are a guy the first thing you are going to notice is all the attractive and tanned blonds.  They are all over Orange County.  If you are a woman than you are going to notice all the handsome very fit guys.  This place has a high concentration of attractive people.  But this is California, so that should not be a problem for you.

Weather in this place is great.  I know that the whole state in general has some of the best weather on the planet (Mediterranean climate and only three places in the world have it) but Orange County is a notch better than anyplace else.  This is due to it being right by the beach and getting nice cooling winds from the ocean.  The wind is not exceptionally strong but forceful enough to turn a hot summer day into a pleasant warm feeling.  The weather here is always between 40 and 85 degrees.  You will have a few days a little less than 40 degrees and some days over 85 degrees but its rare.  Unlike Portland and Seattle to the northwest it never rains. You will love the weather here.  I have never spoken to anyone who came here and did not absolutely love the weather in Orange County.

There is literally tons of things to do here.  You can go to the IMAX, Disneyland, or Knotts Bery Farm.  There are tons of attractions in LA and the surrounding areas for you to visit.  Universal Studios and Six Flags Magic Mountain are just two out of many.  The surfing at Huntington Beach is awesome.  There are numerous surf competitions there during the summer.

Orange County has a stigma that was made by Hollywood.  The television shows of Laguna Beach, the Hills, OC, and Real Housewives of Orange County have made people believe that this place is something its not.  Not everyone is rich.  Not everyone drives BMW and Escalades.  You have a lot of people who do.    A lot of rich people live here.  But every city has a rich side of town.  Not everyone is snobby and stuck up.  That’s what people have in their mind but its simply not true.

Having said that the cost of living in Orange County is very high.  This is one of the most sought after places in the US and everyone wants to live here.  Great weather year round and great people combined with being by the beach has property values outrageous.  I was at a friend’s house in Huntington Beach and his neighbor’s house, which is averge by any standard, was selling for 1.5 million dollars.  And that was discounted.  You almost have to be rich to live nice here.  I know that I just said that most people who live here are not but many of these people have been living here for a long time and bought their property before OC became “the place” to live.

You are going to have to have a plan and have a fantastic job to live in Orange County.  I would say the minimum is 70,000 is most places.  You may be able to live in Santa Anna or Anneheim for a little less.  Not much though and especially if you have a family.

The crime here is low.  This county is nothing like Los Angeles to the north.  LA is riddled with gang violence, poor schools, and immigration problems.  Orange County has some good schools and still has a suburban feel to it.

The total population is 3 million.  Its mostly white.  The other two groups are hispanic and asian.  You will not be running into a lot of blacks here.  I see more blacks in Anchorage where I am from.  The hispanics that live in Orange County usually are pleasant, speak English, and are nice hard working people.  Many of them have good businesses or jobs.  I have seen some spanish comunities in Tustin where the houses were huge and the neighborhoods were extremely nice.  I say this to contrasts the “barrios” you might think about when you think some mexican neighborhoods in Southern California.

Overall if you can afford it I say live here.  Traffic is going to be horrible but everything else is good.  I love this place.  Cannot say enough about it.

Portland as well as Oregon in general gets a lot of spill over from California.  I would say that 30-40% of the people currently living there are from California.  A lot of people living in Southern California got tired of the urban sprawl, immigration problems, crime, pollution, traffic, and high cost of living starting in the mid 90s so they decided to move.  Most of them went to three places: Pheonix, Las Vegas, and Portland.  If you look at the population growth charts those three cities have seen dramatic growth in the last 15 years and many of those people came from California.

Portland is a semi big city with itself having 500,000 people and the whole metro having a little over 2 million people.  Honestly, the city still has a small time feel to it.  2 million people is a lot but when you compare it to other similar cities it definitely does not have that “concrete block” feel to it.

Portland is extremely white.  Its one of the whitest big cities in the country.  While you can go to some areas like Gresham, Woodburn, and Forest Grove and find some small areas totally Hispanic it does not compare at all to other cities.  The Northwest part of town is supposed to be Portland’s black side of town, and it WAS historically, but developers have come in and transformed that whole neighborhood into expensive bungalows glutted with yuppies.

Portland is a liberal city.  Very liberal.  It takes after the two major cities its sandwiched between San Francisco and Seattle.  I might go as far as to say its just as or more liberal than those two.  Its very accepting for the most part of homosexual lifestyles or any other alternative lifestyle you can think of.  In fact the current major,  Sam Adams, is openly gay and he won with 58% of the vote.  This city would be a huge culture shocker for anyone coming from the south or a more conservative state like Texas or Georgia.  I can speak with first hand experience being from Houston, TX.

For the most part Portland has become a “white collar” town.  It definitely did not start out that way but gone are the days when many of the people worked at the shipping docks, mills, or lumber yards.  Now the city’s economy is based off high-tech industries like microcomputers.  Nike would be one of the only major non high tech company they have.  If you are thinking about moving here I would recommend you have some sort of degree that specializes in that field.  I have found that you do not need a degree to make it in some cities.  If you have lived in Portland for a long time and are already established than you would not need it either.  But if you not you need a degree to live here otherwise it will be extremely hard to make a good living.

A great aspect of Portland that people may not realize is for the city of its size the traffic is not that bad.  I have argued with people who live there many times about this as they feel otherwise but I can tell you that there are many compatible cities in population that have traffic 3x as bad as Portland.  And the city started planning early building an extremely efficient light rail called the “MAX” that can get you to all major parts of the city.  While having a car is good you really do not need one.

Let me talk a little bit about the neighborhoods so you can have a starting point of where you want to live if you wanted to move to Portland.

Vancouver is Portland’s huge suburb.  What was a small town on the other side of the Columbia River is now a city of 140,000.  Its just like Portland except the housing prices are a lot lower.  When people starting flooding into Portland the properties went way up and the people who could not afford it or didn’t want to afford it moved to Vancouver.  Its also a more conservative part of the area.  Portland was not always as conservative as it is now and when the city started changing several decades ago the people that didn’t like it moved here.

The northwest side used to be what is known as the black side of town but its strategically location attracted developers over a decade ago and now there is only remnants of that.  There you will find one run down house bordered by a nice renovated half million dollar house.

The whole downtown area is the hip “noveau” part of town where you will find college students, artists, and young hip liberal professionals making 100,000 per year but pretending to goes against “the man.”  Tons of shops, book stores, and cafes in the area.

As the city grew and became more expensive your middle class residents got pushed further east.  The east side of town is probabely the worst as far as crime goes.  The problems start getting close to 205 and extend all the way into Portland’s east suburb Gresham.  Gresham is hard to explain.  One part of the city, the side bordering Portland is bad.  The further side is really nice.  When I first saw Gresham I thought that this was the rich part of town.  Its not.  They have some really good parts of Gresham bordering Fairview and Happy Valley but the other half is heavy with crime (by Portland’s standards).  Nevertheless the east part of town will probably be the cheapest part to live in.  And its not even close to really bad places like other big cities.  Hell, by Houston or LAs standards the east part of Portland is actually fairly good.

The west side of town served by highway 26 starting with the west mountains and going to Beaverton and Hillsboro is the best and most affluent. This is where the people with the most money live.  The west hills is Portland’s version of Hollywood.  Beaverton and Hillsborro are home to all the executives working at Nike, Heward Packard, and IBM.  Very nice neighborhood but getting crowded due to underdevelopment.  Highway 26 has the worst traffic of the area.

Overall I liked Portland.  Really fun place to live.  Has a real Northwest feel to it.  Be warned that it rains a lot.  Espcially in the winter.  The summers are fantastic though with barely any rain and nice warm weather.

So what type of person whould like Portland and want to call it home.  A young liberal minded college grad with a degree in some type of high tech industry.  Be warned though that when the ecconony goes south, like right now, Oregon always gets hit really hard.

Here is the insider information about the city:

City Make Up…

Atlanta is called the “Black Mecca” by some and I see now where they get it.  This city is really black and they do really well here.  This is the only city in America where a “black neighborhood” and “ghetto” have no connotation with each other.  I mean  the whole south side of Atlanta is 0ne big ghetto and most of it is actually black but the whole east side including the suburbs like Snellville and Conyers are mostly black and look fantastic.  They also have some older black neighborhoods are very well to do.  I am told that you can find this in some parts Washington, D.C. but not to this extent. 

Most of the whites live in the north side of town.  Buckhead is the “rich” neighborhood.  And real quick I want to go into detail of what I mean by that.  In  every city there are many well to do neighborhoods.  Many of them are in the surrounding cookie cutter McMansions that dot every town.  But there is always one and I do mean one neighborhood that was there first and that every prominent person of that city MUST live in if he wants to be in “the circle.”  In Houston its “River Oaks,” in Dallas its “Plano,” in Las Angelas its “Bevery Hills” in Seattle its “Queen Ann Hill.”

Atlanta sits on the bottom of the Appalachian mountains and is more hilly than most people realize.  This city literally sits on top of nothing but rolling hills.  Before I spent time here I thought it would be as flat as the rest of the southern part of the county.  Its not.  A nice change from the flat landscape that dominates Atlanta’s neighbors.