Product Description

Moving to Los Angeles has never been easier!

Expanded to include Orange County, the fourth edition of the Newcomer’s Handbook® for Moving to and Living in Los Angeles extensively covers communities from Santa Clarita to Newport Beach, from Malibu to Pasadena, and neighborhoods and cities in-between.

The fourth edition also presents essential sections on Finding a Place to Live, Moving and Storage, Money Matters, Getting Settled, Helpful Services, Childcare and Education, Shopping for the Home, Cultural Life, Sports and Recreation, Greenspace and Beaches, Places of Worship, Volunteering, Transportation, Emergency Preparedness, Temporary Lodgings, and Quick Getaways. In addition, a handy calendar of LA events, a listing of LA-related guidebooks, fiction, and nonfiction, and a directory of useful phone numbers and web sites round out this indispensable book. A set of six maps—an LA overview, plus five area maps—guide the reader to communities, freeways, and points of interest.

In addition to being thoroughly fact-checked, updated, and revised, the fourth edition includes such new material as:

• Orange County communities, focusing on Newport Beach, Irvine, and Tustin • An Immigrant Newcomers section • A Literary Life section • A thorough discussion of intrastate and interstate moves and consumer complaints

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #634184 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 334 pages

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Welcome to El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles (in English, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels). That’s the name the Spanish gave to this city in 1781 when 44 settlers made their home in what is now downtown Los Angeles. Today, LA is a multi-ethnic, multicultural society as diverse as any city in the world. The city is so large you can fit St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Manhattan all within the municipal boundaries! People from more than 140 countries live in Los Angeles County, including the largest population of Mexican, Armenian, Korean, Filipino, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan communities outside their respective home nations. Los Angeles ranks as the second largest city in the nation behind New York City; the County of Los Angeles alone would rank as the ninth most populated state. It’s safe to say that with 9.8 million people living in LA County, there is indeed something for everyone.

For decades, people around the world have been attracted to Los Angeles for its promises of fame and fortune, and excellent year-round weather. While only a sliver of the population is famous and wealthy, the good weather here is no myth. Average temperatures range from 58 degrees Fahrenheit in December to 76 degrees in September, and it’s not uncommon to have an 80-degree day at the beach in February, while much of the rest of the country shivers under a layer of snow.

Greater Los Angeles’s traffic and other negatives like crime and racial tensions are perhaps as famous now as her pluses. But as someone once said of LA, "If this is hell, why is it so popular?" For those who choose to call Los Angeles "home," she welcomes you with a wealth of opportunities.

Customer Reviews

pretty useful
I just moved to Los Angeles and had bought this book a couple of months before the move. My copy is pretty well-thumbed thru at this point. There's a lot of really good basic info here, to give you a clue as to where to start (e.g. how to set up your utilities, what neighborhoods are like) and it did a pretty good job of helping me with ideas/expectations of what life would be like here. It's not a be-all, end-all book but it'll give you a very solid jumping off point if you're moving here (and i moved cross-country) and i think it was definitely worth the $15 or so.

Essential reading for the Newcomer
Los Angeles is absurd sprawl of quasi-independent towns that can easily overwhelm a newcomer. Make a mistake, and you could end up living in Sun Valley - a nice name for a rather ugly place, and just wait until summer: the low rent won't compensate for the bill from the electric company. Add in a bizarre city government and top it off with California's own unique way of doing things (visit the DMV), and you'll begin to understand why a guide like this is essential to a newcomer.

You may think, "I can find all this on the Internet for free," and you'd be right. That is if you can get the Internet to function. The cable company and the phone company are not exactly customer oriented in Los Angeles. It might help to have a guide book like this when you're trying to set all that up.

Maybe you've got Internet on your phone so you can just go to Google and... yeah, I'll see you in Sun Valley. Since you're not a savvy resident you didn't know that the particular "Apartment Locator" site that you looked at was actually a scam or that a particular "church" was really shilling for Scientology.

If you're moving to Los Angeles I'm sure this book will save you time and money. It'll also reduce your frustration (though it won't eliminate it--wait until you talk to the phone company).

LA Rediscovered after 23 years
I grew up in LA, and I assumed I knew everything about all the secret spots and the do's and the don't of LA. However, this book blew me away on how much I don't know about LA. It was a ton of fun rediscovering LA with my girlfriend.