One Huge Reason Why We're Moving To Spain
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Because—
It’s officially official. We’re leaving California for Spain in less than 7 months.
In a minute, one of the many big reasons why we’re making the move.
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We have a ton of ground to cover not only through the rest of 2024, but in 2025 and beyond. From the visa ins and outs to the logistical and emotional aspects of moving to the process of renting (more on that in a minute), settling into a new country/culture and, eventually, buying an apartment in Spain.
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I aim to deliver this content alongside thoughts, ideas and strategies you can adapt to your personal financial and life situation.
So, one of the big reasons.
It comes from a Medium story I published the other day that didn’t get much traction over there. Plus, it illustrates a major impetus—alongside so much else—for the decision to move to Spain. I hope you enjoy or that this resonates with you on some level, leading you to upgrade to a paid subscription to this newsletter.
I was telling my wife the other morning that I no longer enjoy or want to participate in my favorite hobby.
That is, walking around the city. Los Angeles.
This development is nothing short of depressing. As in, it — literally — depresses me.
I have lived in cities for the better part of half of my life. Particularly San Francisco and Los Angeles. I have visited dozens of others, walking many from end to end.
That’s what I love to do. Explore the urban environment.
Even the (sometimes seedy) nooks and crannies where most people, including locals, just don’t go.
And I have never felt unsafe. Maybe a little uneasy here or there in notoriously “bad” neighborhoods or odd, one-off situations. At the same time, I have probably walked through a few parts of town where it never dawned on me that I probably should have felt unsafe or uneasy.
I just love the city. The good, bad and the ugly. And I don’t like to be scared of it. Because — historically — there has been no reason to be. Our perception of crime tends to be much higher than our odds of being victim to it.
The idea that cities are unsafe is one of America’s most dangerous and unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecies. At least — in my mind (which tends to think about and experience cities differently than most people) — it always has been.
Until now.
Lately, there’s less good and a lot more bad and ugly. Definitely in LA. And, from what I understand, throughout much of the nation in cities and suburbs of all sizes.
Sad to say, but there’s something — (just something) — to the narrative that some politicians (with the help of Fox News) love to overblow to score political points from middle America and the swing states.
That cities are dystopian wastelands. They’re not. Our cities still consist of vibrant neighborhoods that help make them the greatest engines of the global economy.
To root for cities to fail is asking for trouble. If New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other large- and medium-size cities go down, America goes down.
To distort reality and act like the entirety of these places are unlivable hellholes is as false as it is unAmerican.
So it’s difficult for a left-leaning city lover such as myself to tell it like it is about cities.
This dynamic is so much of what’s wrong with American politics today. It’s one of the worst consequences of polarization.
As a liberal, you hesitate to admit that cities have some issues because, even conceding that obvious ground prompts the city-hating politicians and Fox News to ride hard the specious“see, we’re right” and “it’s because the Democrats are in charge” bandwagons.
And it happens in reverse. The city haters broad stroke cities as wholly dysfunctional from tip to tip forcing the liberals to act like there’s nothing wrong.
This type of discourse shouldn’t be about conceding or forcing, about gaining or losing ground, about being right or wrong. About acting like everything is bad or nothing’s bad at all.
It should be about figuring out what the hell is going on and fixing it.
Together.
Because healthy cities that everyone promotes — regardless of political affiliation or ideology — benefit something long forgotten in the United States. The greater good.
Even now, I know full well that my odds of being a victim of crime are significantly lower than the perception I’m about to detail.
But perception matters.
Because much of our perception springs from the reality of what we see and experience. Even if we’re not directly impacted by crime (e.g., physically assaulted, robbed, raped or murdered), we’re impacted by the perceptions we create in our minds, based on —
how we view, interact and, subsequently, deal with our surroundings;
the stories we see about when things do go horribly wrong; and
the anxiety all of the above triggers.
I love nothing more than walking from my apartment, around Central LA and into Hollywood to make a stop at my favorite dive bar.
But, as I was doing it the other day, I realized that I just don’t see myself doing it anymore.
I’ll take a freaking Uber. I’ll relegate my walks away from Hollywood, to the bustling main street that anchors my relatively posh — (thank you, rent control!) — neighborhood. Because when I go towards Hollywood, it’s just no longer pleasant.
While there has always been a level of grit and blight — some seediness — it has never been this bad. Things have become exponentially worse over the last year or so.
When I walk in parts of Los Angeles now, I feel unsafe.
I feel the need to be skeptical of people I see. I hate that I feel this way and, instinctively, act on it.
Over the weekend, there was a guy walking parallel to, but across the street from me. I kept one eye on him at all times.
Later, there was a guy walking towards me. Something about the way he carried himself made me feel uncomfortable. So I crossed the street and walked on the other side.
But then, after a block or so, there was a large homeless encampment. It — and a bunch of trash that spilled out into the street — blocked the sidewalk. So I made the decision to go back to the other side.
Throughout my walk, I was making these decisions, every few minutes (sometimes seconds) to turn here or there to avoid this or that. Be it shady-looking people, blight or downright disgusting, if not unsanitary conditions.
I did this for more than an hour. It’s just not fun. It’s an exercise in inanity really.
Very few people — unless attached to a dog — seemed to actually be out for a walk. Even on largely residential blocks where you can’t rent anything for under $2,000 or buy something for less than a million.
And the ones who were appeared skeptical of me.
It hasn’t always been this way.
As a walker of the city, I usually make it a point to smile at older people — the elderly — when we cross paths. I know lots of them are lonely. Often forgotten. And, even if they're not, who doesn’t like exchanging an informal, fleeting pleasantry?
While you can still have these chance social interactions with people of all ages, they’re fewer and farther between. Especially among the elderly. They — and others — walk by with their heads down.
And I can’t blame them. Because if I’m taking extra precautions when I walk.
If I’m looking behind me after I pass somebody.
If I’m startled by sounds and people suddenly getting close.
If I — a guy who knows how to handle himself in all types of urban environments — am experiencing this level of anxiety, I can’t imagine what they’re feeling.
I can’t imagine how young kids and women feel when they’re exposed. Aforementioned old people. Or the physically frail. It’s a type of vulnerability nobody should have to experience in exchange for going out in public.
Can’t imagine it, but I have an idea.
On the perception end of things. My wife and her daughter were walking in Downtown LA the other night. They had to play whack-a-mole with homeless people setting fires and shady people walking about who they didn’t feel safe walking past.
On the hard reality side of things. I don’t have to list a million accounts, but people get shot here every single day over stupid shit. There’s a hostility in the air that’s worse than it has ever been and it’s boiling over more often (or, at least, it feels that way).
On the even harder reality side of things. A woman recently moved from Massachusetts to Venice, on the West Side of LA. It was her dream. After having only lived that dream for a few weeks, she was one of two victims in a pair of brutal assaults/rapes that happened in the Venice Canals. They caught the guy. A homeless man.
At this point, it’s appropriate to stop and say that, yes, we have a homeless problem. And some homeless people commit (often horrific) crimes. But to view the homeless, as a group, as criminals is more than a little fucked up.
They’re among the most vulnerable and victimized people you’ll see on these streets I’m talking about, largely because they’re living on them.
That said, homelessness is one of the drivers of the perception we have — that I have — of places like Los Angeles.
We need to address it and a whole host of social and other issues, ranging from inequality to the high cost of living to how/where we build housing and how we clean the streets.
Something Los Angeles appears to have given up on doing throughout the city. If private citizens and businesses don’t clean the streets and sidewalks in front of their spaces, it doesn’t get done.
I wish I had a good way to end this article. I just don’t.
It pains me to watch this happen.
It pains me to only really want to walk in one direction from my apartment.
It pains me to feel helpless amid all of these problems that just seem too big, out of control and (pathetically) accepted to be solved.
It depresses me to live in a place with so much potential — and still so many hopeful examples of that potential maximized — that (ultimately) has such a low overall quality of life.
It gives me a layer of anxiety I have never experienced before.
Walking in the city has always been the tonic to ameliorate or wash away my anxiety. Now, it not only causes, but contributes to a persistent layer of the stuff I can literally feel percolating inside of me.
Los Angeles, California
Valencia, Spain