I go to LA several times per year. I love it for about a week, then I’m ready to go home. The cost of housing is pretty fucking high in the parts of town that make LA fun. No desire whatsoever to live in the burbs and pull up google maps to find out it’s gonna take me 1.5 hrs to get to a restaurant in West Hollywood, and I currently can’t afford a house in West Hollywood. So we’ll be happy to spend some time out there every year in the SIL’s west LA guest house, enjoy all that LA has to offer, and go home to wherever that may be. Right now that’s N. Dallas, and wherever we decide to eventually leave Texas, it would be my strong preference to keep the real estate investment at its current level or at least somewhere in the same ballpark
Charleston checks a lot of boxes for us right now. We can get a comparable house to what we currently have 10 minutes from downtown and one of the best food scenes in the country. The beaches are 15-20 minutes in the other direction, except on weekends when the traffic can be a bit of a clusterfuck going to the beaches on Fri. night/Sat morning and back towards town on Sunday night, especially in the summer. Outdoor recreation options are plentiful. There are downsides. Charleston is a lot like Austin politically (blue dot in a red state), but statewide is maybe as shitty as Texas. If you get 20 minutes outside of town it’s a more polite version of Deliverance. Having lived in DFW for most of my life, I take for granted the ability to get a direct flight to damn near anywhere. Lots of connections through Atlanta or Charlotte depending on your choice of airline. There are a few daily direct flights to Dallas, and that would be a frequent destination, so that helps ease the pain a little.