[jcims]

You can move west without moving to a desert. I’m in San Diego for a bit. It’s been in the low 70’s and climate control consists of opening or closing the windows.

Meanwhile back home in the midwest I’m trying to coordinate someone to be at my house while the HVAC folks replace the compressor in my heat pump. I was going to wait until we got back but the temps are getting so high we’re concerned our fish are going to die.

[ChainOfFools]

san diego long time resident here. the city has the climate you describe only by virtue of it being centered almost entirely within a coastal scrub biome about 20-30 miles wide. it's a sweet spot both created by and geographically impacted within the enclosure of a low coastal range immediately east, beyond which things get very hot and barren almost immediately.

this strip exists in some form for most of the so cal coastline up through roughly the central coast, where the mountain range edges up to the water line itself.

it's just not anywhere near enough land. Too narrow, and much of the land is impractical to live within outside of retirement or vacation circumstances (not even considering that vast swathes are on military property).

It cannot absorb a mass westward migration. this is evident in the property values where settlement has already been long established.

[jcims]

Understood, i spent the weekend roaming around Borrego Springs.

My broader point is that there is a lot of land in ’the west’ that doesn’t meet the criteria that the author is talking about. Oregon, Washington, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado all have attractive destinations that aren’t (literally or practically) the desert.

Also, anecdotally it seems many of the folks migrating to Austin are actually moving east.

The point the author is making is legit, I’m just engaging in the time honored tradition of roasting bad titles.

[khuey]

> It cannot absorb a mass westward migration. this is evident in the property values where settlement has already been long established.

Sure it can, if it were built at any remotely reasonable density. But there are plenty of people deeply invested in that not happening who already live there.

[eindiran]

San Diego (the city) barely escapes the semi-arid/arid designation, placing it slightly within the CSa / Mediterranean climate[0] designation. But it is surrounded by BSh areas (the Sonoran desert and California chaparral) - by area, I'd guess most of San Diego county is BSh. So unless you want to live right next to the coast (and can afford to), Southern California is mostly desert.

San Diego itself really does have an amazing climate though.

[0] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifica...

[vineyardmike]

>You can move west without moving to a desert.

is San Diego really different from LA water (or climate) wise?

[eindiran]

The difference is that what people think of as LA includes a huge number of suburbs that push out quite far east into the desert. So if you are in Santa Monica or Malibu, the climate is very comparable to coastal San Diego. If you drive out on the 10 for a ways, its going to get brutally hot and arid quite fast.

Water-wise, San Diego also gets a lot of its water from the Colorado river, but it has a desalination plant as well. I'm not sure how much impact that has on the water situation there.

[sjg007]

Technically San Diego is in a desert.