COLUMN ONE : Pitting Career vs. Lifestyle : As financial clout shifts from the Bay Area to the Southland, more in the work force face a decision to transfer. Some balk, but others who do move find they get to like it.
Deborah Dilley knew her promotion at First Interstate Bank was terrific, but she wondered, “If this is such a great opportunity, how come I feel so rotten?”
It was simply because the new job required moving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, or, as she recalls feeling at the time, “from paradise to the pit of the world,” where smog is king, where commutes take four hours, where people are flaky and where drive-by shooters menace at every corner.
She thought about declining, until her husband convinced her that it would be an adventure. Now, after more than a year of living in the Encino hills and playing golf whenever they feel like it, the couple have adjusted.
With the balance of financial power shifting southward from San Francisco, once the West’s undisputed corporate and banking leader but increasingly the town that plays second fiddle, more people like Dilley are being forced to choose between opportunity and lifestyle.
Hoping for career advancement, many employees are leaving their hearts in San Francisco but moving their belongings to La-La Land. Some go with trepidation, fearful of housing costs, crummy air and congestion. But they go nonetheless, relocation specialists say, because the moving and shaking is occurring in vast, dynamic Southern California.
“From a commercial point of view,” says Leon A. Farley, a San Francisco-based executive recruiter, “L.A. is becoming increasingly significant.”
If San Francisco and its environs remain a top-rated spot for travelers and a beloved home for residents, the fact is that in many ways the city is viewed as a dying Athens overshadowed by its sprawling, brawny southern counterpart.
Although a number of large companies still call San Francisco home--notably Chevron and Bank of America--many others have moved or been swallowed up in takeovers. The Bay Area still reigns in high technology and has a thriving amalgamation of small businesses and specialized service firms, but Southern California whips it handily in financial services, international trade, retailing and entertainment.
And even for companies with headquarters in San Francisco, Southern California provides a far bigger market for their goods and services. With 14.5 million people, Greater Los Angeles is more than twice as populous as the nine-county Bay Area.
As a result, companies seeking to expand in the Southland, from architectural firms to oil companies, routinely must seek candidates for promotions and transfers. Their overtures can meet with emotions other than sheer joy, and companies find that they often must sweeten the deal by throwing in a car or money for housing.
After all, in the view of many Northern Californians, nurtured on Los Angeles-bashing, it’s quite a trade-off. Will it be quaint Victorian houses or tacky mini-malls? The Golden Gate Bridge or tangles of freeway overpasses? BART or gridlock? Fog or smog?
Joyce Sonner was initially glum at the prospect of leaving the Bay Area. She and her husband, Leo, lived in an $800-a-month apartment in San Ramon and took BART into the city each weekend to eat at Fisherman’s Wharf or go to the theater.
But when Dow Chemical asked Leo Sonner to become senior account manager for its Dow Plastics division in City of Industry, with responsibility for a territory five times larger than the one he had, the couple decided they couldn’t pass it up.
Two weeks ago, they moved to a quintessentially Southern California house, complete with white stucco and a red-tile roof, in the oceanside community of Dana Point. From their sun-splashed deck they look out on the Saddleback Mountains and wide, sandy beaches.
The $1,700-a-month rent is far more than they were paying, but Leo can do much of his work from home and Joyce looks forward to owning a boat next year and taking classes at a nearby college to qualify as a building inspector.
Not too shabby, Joyce freely acknowledges.
“This is really paradise,” she says.
Others who make the leap have become converts for various reasons.
Architect Charles Wing, 41, received a big pay raise, an automobile and help in buying a Santa Monica house when he agreed to manage the growing Brentwood office of Kaplan/McLaughlin/Diaz. The San Francisco-based firm designed the classy new mini-mall at Rodeo Drive and Wilshire Boulevard.
“The multicultural aspect of Los Angeles is something I’m very positive about,” he says. “San Francisco is very provincial.”
Although he finds the air here much worse than in the Bay Area, traffic, he feels, is “really not that different.” And there’s the warmer weather.
Lisa Bottom, who spent her childhood in Southern California and returned last year after living in the Bay Area, relishes the museums--and the warmer climate. She took some satisfaction in mothballing some of her San Francisco wardrobe essentials.
“I’m making plans to root,” says Bottom, director of interior design for the downtown Los Angeles office of Whisler-Patri, another San Francisco architectural firm. Many die-hard San Franciscans, she added, “don’t realize there are wonderful and exciting aspects of life here.”
Many Bay Area-based firms with growing operations in Los Angeles find that the best approach is to recruit volunteers.
“It’s strictly voluntary, and, believe it or not, some have (volunteered), but not many,” says David Blatteis, chairman of Blatteis Realty Co., a 62-year-old San Francisco company with a small but growing Southland office. “Talk to my older brother, Daniel. He can tell you why he moved down there. It baffles me.”
Opportunity, that’s why.
The more progressive business climate “is the overriding reason why I moved,” says Dan Blatteis, who plans soon to add staff to the three-person Century City office. “Retailers are expanding at a much greater pace in Los Angeles. There’s more wealth.”
Blatteis Realty chose to reopen its Southern California office two years ago after finding that many of the retailers and restaurants for which it was trying to find sites in San Francisco, such as California Pizza Kitchen, were based in Los Angeles.
Dan Blatteis, 31, acknowledged that it took him a long time to “learn to love L.A.” But now he prefers the warmth to San Francisco’s chill, foggy nights, and relishes the broader range of cultural activities. He even thinks the restaurants are as good as those in San Francisco.
Another plus: Blatteis lives “two minutes” from his office and can walk to work.
Chevron Corp., the San Francisco-based oil giant, finds its El Segundo refinery the toughest place to sell to would-be transfers.
“Because it’s a beach location, the cost of housing even an hour away is very high,” says Sue Osborn, Chevron’s senior analyst for relocation policies.
Even for Bay Area employees accustomed to hefty price tags on houses, real estate is the No. 1 concern when it comes to moving south, Osborn says.
Close behind is the cost of operating a car, more of a necessity in the Southland. Many of Chevron’s employees in the Bay Area live near BART and other mass-transit lines and commute to facilities in the East Bay.
In moving as many as 40 employees a year from the Bay Area to operations in Ventura, La Habra and El Segundo, the company often encounters what Osborn calls the “Northern California syndrome.”
“People up here tend to think the lifestyle is better,” Osborn says.
Among Northern Californians, there is also a widely held notion that Los Angeles is more expensive. But evidence indicates otherwise.
A family of four in a median-cost city could afford a 2,400-square-foot house and two cars on an annual income of $60,000, according to relocation specialists Runzheimer International. The same lifestyle would cost more than $83,000 in the Bay Area and just over $77,000 in the Southland.
On a percentage basis, job growth in the two areas is projected for the 1990s “to be roughly the same, about 1.8%,” says Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, based in Palo Alto.
In sheer numbers of jobs, however, the Bay Area does not hold a candle to Southern California. The Southland is expected in the year 2000 to have a total of 7.6 million paying jobs, compared to 3.6 million for the San Francisco area.
Despite the opportunities, some firms find it tough to draw from anywhere but close by.
“We don’t find people eager to go to Los Angeles,” says Stephen A. Enna, executive vice president and personnel director for Wells Fargo & Co. “It’s less expensive to recruit from the local market. They’re settled and happy. You don’t have to go through the enticement stage.”
Executive recruiters also encounter resistance to Los Angeles from older employees for whom a move would be an economic setback.
“An awful lot of senior people will take a lesser job or compensation to stay in the Bay Area,” says Bernard (Buzz) Schulte, San Francisco-based managing director for the Northwest region for Korn/Ferry International, an executive recruiting firm.
Jim Somerville, for one, couldn’t be pried free.
While senior vice president of administration for Core-Mark Distributors Inc. in South San Francisco, Somerville briefly considered a post at a large Southern California food company but withdrew his name. That was despite the fact that Core-Mark’s business--distributing tobacco and other products to convenience stores--is in a severe downturn.
“The smog was horrible the times I was there,” Somerville says, adding that his wife, Robin, has had respiratory pneumonia.
The Somervilles, who have a house with a pool in the small community of Los Altos, south of San Francisco, also balked at moving because they found that Los Angeles lacked the “sense of neighborhood” that exists on the peninsula. For a time, Somerville considered commuting by air from the Bay Area but ultimately decided the strain would be too much.
“It’s really an issue of lifestyle,” says Somerville, who has since resigned from Core-Mark and is now concentrating his job search in Northern California.
For Dilley, vice president and manager of institutional trust sales and marketing for First Interstate, life in Los Angeles has been a series of adjustments. And, even though she and husband Ken Rosenberg enjoy the weather and restaurants, some of the negatives she dreaded occasionally stare her in the face.
Dilley was driving some Bay Area visitors around one time, trying to convince them that “it’s not that bad here.” Within the next 24 hours, they saw police arresting nine youths, a burglary and a car with bullet holes.
“I’m really enjoying my stay, but I view it as a stay,” Dilley says. “I’d go back in a minute to the Bay Area.”
