Reviews & Comments
Santa Rosa, CA
Santa Rosa, CA living: My 2nd year of living here -
4/7/2007I am originally from New England and lived there all of my life until 2 years ago when I moved to Santa Rosa, CA for my job.
The best thing about this area: Climate. Spring just takes my breath away with just how beautiful the weather is. Green foothills and wine grapes growing on farms. Summer is dry, but a very comfortable 80 degrees with a mild breeze. Little to no humidity. No mosquitos. The kind of days you might experience a few times a year back east, you experience for several months.
Winters are tolerable. Dubbed out here as the "rainy season" - it truly is that. Temperatures are roughly in the 60's. Cool enough to need to wear a coat, but certainly not freezing cold. Locals out here have never heard of the term "wind chill factor".
Now the bad: The housing prices are out of this world for a medium sized house on a postage sized lot. People who say that living on the east is more expensive, have never lived on the east and then moved out here. The worst thing is, is that housing prices here have only recently (less than 5 years) exploded. So, what I have experienced, is that the socio-economic status of the area is not necessarily that of what newcomers who can afford to live out here can identify with. There are certain pockets of Santa Rosa that are poor, and some that are affluent. I'm not a snob - I just want to be able to identify with my neighbors and have my children play well with my neighbor's children. The neighborhood we are in is perfect for us, because it is mixed racially, with professional working parents and stay at home moms. But that is rare. The majority of Santa Rosa is segregated into pockets of either poor (The area around Steele Lane) or affluent (Fountaingrove).
Cost of living: Fuel, heating/cooling costs, groceries: Outrageous. We pay more to heat/cool our house (2000 sq. ft) for a very moderate climate as I described earlier, than we did to heat/cool our home in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. We easily pay double for what we did for groceries back east. We actually thought there was something wrong with our furance, until we had it inspected, and found out we have a 90% energy efficient furance. Scratching our heads, we started asking our neighbors how much they were paying for utilities. The average per month (for natural gas/electricity): $300 per month. No joke - and this is on par with our neighbors.
Education: I hate the system out here in this area. The biggest claim to fame is th