Other Views on Greener Pastures

Concerning your “California, Here I Go” article, you did a great service for the vast majority of Southern Californians who still don’t understand why our housing market continues to deteriorate. The fact is that corporations are emphasizing job creation in low-cost markets, while rapidly retrenching from high-cost areas like Southern California.

Southern California has myriad cost disadvantages to other areas of the country. When you think about where one has to live in L.A. to afford a $150,000 home, you begin to look at long commutes, high pollution and “generic suburbia.”

Your article helped to make clear (1) the serious disadvantages for new jobs coming to Southern California, and (2) the reasons why so many people have started to leave this area. Real estate brokers, like the gentleman from South Pasadena, want to blame the press for the weak traffic of home buyers and an eroding price structure, but this is nothing more than a simple case of “Economics 101: The Law of Supply and Demand.”

A generation of people have come to believe that a home in Southern California was as good as gold. Southern Californians are learning some old Midwestern values, namely that “a home is a place to live, not an investment.” I commend your paper for helping these myopic homeowners to realize that, unlike the 1980s, L.A. is not a very attractive place in which to set down roots today.

CARL B. TASH

Brentwood