Agreed Camarillo is cooler, up to 10 degrees in the summer. That would be welcome, but more inland areas in all of So. Cal are hot in the summer.
Simi, like most places, is a trade off. My wife works in W.L.A. and I work in Pasadena. Camarillo would just about be impossible to commute like we can from Simi. Their 101 fwy is absolutely impossible to deal with.
Camarillo had the same identical downturn in the last real estate pullback. Painful.
A blast from the past:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04EEDA153BF934A2575BC0A967948260
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E05E3D71538F93BA35751C1A962948260
August 17, 1981
A word to the wise: The great Los Angeles housing boom is over. The real estate price explosion in southern California, which sparked a national boom still continuing elsewhere, has stopped. The bubble that everyone said could never burst has burst.
All over Los Angeles and Orange County, home buyers can buy a property for less than it would have cost a year ago, although there are exceptions. Buyers who can pay cash can almost steal houses and real estate. The days when ordinary citizens got rich from buying houses are gone, at least for the time being and at least in southern California.
But what a bubble it was. In the 10 years from 1970 to 1980, the price of the average house in Beverly Hills went up by a factor of almost seven. The average house in West Los Angeles, a region of by no means opulent homes, rose by almost six times. Houses in Malibu routinely doubled in value every year in the late 70's. By the end of the decade, newspapers advertisted ''starter houses,'' for families who had never owned before, in remote desert suburbs starting at $200,000.
Any lucky person who got in on the boom in the early 70's saw his paper profit reach about 30 times his down payment by 1980. People who had never earned more than $40,000 suddenly found that they were millionaires just from that little house with a pool in Pacific Palisades. Ronald Reagan is said to have paid $29,000 in the early 50's for a house in Pacific Palisades that is now for sale for $1.7 million and cannot be sold, which is the whole story.
The boom went on for such a long time because the economics were right. All through the 70's the cost of owning a house in the better neighborhoods of Los Angeles was negative. That is, the cost of servicing the mortgage plus taxes was less, usually far less, than the increase in the price of the house. Figure it out: mortgages were less than 10 percent for almost all of that decade, under 7 percent if you count the tax features, and houses were increasing in value all over the West Side of Los Angeles by a good 20 percent a year on a compounded basis. The banks, savings and loan institutions and and the economy generally were paying families to live in the better neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
The economics of housing inflation were such that for a long period, lenders made mortgage loans at rates substantially below the appreciation of the houses they were loaned upon and in some years, noticeably below even the trend line for inflation. This cheap credit fueled the takeoff of the boom. As prices rose to stratospheric levels, the price history itself fed the boom. Real estate agents assured buyers that however high prices were, they would go even higher.
Wives went to work. Second mortgages were drawn up. People would do anything to get in on the boom, which looked as if it would never end. Even when prices got so high that ordinary citizens could no longer afford to get in, rich people came from all over the country and the world to get in on the one true never-ending bubble.
Even when mortgage interest rates shot up to 13 and 14 percent, the houses were still going up 20 percent a year, so who cared? The end came when Paul A. Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, decided he was going to fight inflation in a major way. By relentless pressure, the mortgage rates were driven up to 18 percent. Sounds came out of Washington that a new Administration meant business about keeping money tight for a long time and bringing down inflation. Little by little, the idea circulated that maybe if interest rates stayed high for a long time, housing would no longer be such a great buy. After all, if an investor can get 18 percent on his money with no risk, why should he take a chance on real estate, which is already very high, which costs money out of pocket and is historically not a very good investment when disinflation sets in?
Once it was admitted that it might just be possible that real estate would not go up forever, the essential spirit of prepetuity that every bubble needs was gone. Buyers became fewer and more choosy. Houses that once sold in a week stood unsold for a year. As demand fell, prices stopped rising, then began to fall. Although some surveys show a very slight price rise in the last few months, brokers say that any determined buyer can buy a house anywhere except the Malibu Beach Colony for less than it would have cost last year.