The cultural difference manifests itself particularly in dating. In NYC, women ask and care about where a man went to school and works at. In L.A., they don't care. It's about your lifestyle, hobbies, who you know. In fact, with most white women in L.A., a guy with a big IG following and a Raya membership, is considered more prestigious than a guy who went to HBS and works at an elite hedge fund.
If you have elite pedigree, live in NYC. If not, try L.A.
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White women only make up 14% of the LA population.
I met the hottest Asian chicks when I lived in California. Half of them were insane but the sex was better the worse their families treated them.
There are 5 million Catholics in LA. I think I'm going to meet my future wife there.
Eye-opening statistic
Hm can any people from the LA area confirm this?
It’s just nicer and more laid back out there in general
LA chicks are massive gold diggers so no I don't agree with this. If u have $ it can probabaly go farther in la
I get the vibe that people are more superficial out there but probably care less about what college you went to.
The surfer bum who lives in a beach house probably is more appealing than a software engineer who lives in downtown LA
From personal experience, I’d say this is true. I would add that having money will matter the most (or looking/behaving in a way that makes it seem you have money).
I haven’t spent time in NYC but LA is superficial and relationship-based. If you’re known well you’ll get pretty far.
As superficial as the NYC dating market is, it doesn't hold a candle to LA. It's always been a relative gap but LA is the hub of influencers (though NYC is #2 but a more diverse sort vs. the standard gym thots in LA). In LA to do even decently well you need to be 6 foot plus, white, be jacked, well off, etc...literally need to check all the box possible. NYC is more forgiving by a significant degree. Though outside NYC, it tends to be easier still on the 'standards' though NYC does have a lot more females.
Ultimately I think the sweet spot to find a lot of quality girls who have reasonable standards is a major city not named NYC / LA / Miami which suffers from a lot of what LA does though not to the same extent (and not SF because those girls are butt ugly). Chicago, Houston, Boston, DC, Seattle, etc are all very good options
Most finance bros will be much better off in NYC than LA though if you had to choose. Either way, I don't think LA is the sort of environment where you'd want to raise a family or where you'd be content with a LT partner....you just look around and see 9s/10s everywhere (not great for personal contentment) and your kids learn superficial BS / get rich quick mentality matters more than working hard (vs. NYC where everyone's hustling)
This is on point, LA girls are probably the most superficial women on the planet
Just came here to say that I lived 5 years in SF snd I've never seen so many ugly women in my life.
idk if the last part about raising a family makes any sense at all
Lived in LA for a few years. NYC dating scene is better by a mile. Girls and people in LA are far more shallow and are far worse when it comes to gold-digging. Also, it’s much harder to bar hop in LA because there’s no transit. It’s not like NY where can get get a nice dinner in upper East or Hudson yards and then go clubbing in midtown or east village etc. You have to Uber everywhere in LA when you go out and it sucks. This also affects your pool of dating as it is logistically much more burdensome.
There’s also much more to do in NYC than LA. NYC has literally everything you could ever want to do. Even if you want to go skiing, you don’t have to travel far out of NYC whereas this is more difficult in LA. The food in NYC is also better than LA in my opinion.
Finally — homelessness is WAY worse in LA and the homeless are far more aggressive. When out in LA, you legitimately need to look out for homeless people harassing your date. Much less common in NYC as the police actually do something about homeless people whereas LA and California more generally doesn’t do shit.
I'd say skiing is easier in LA. You just drive to Bear Mountain (80mi), whereas in NYC you have to take a 4hr bus to VT. There are some closer places to NYC other than VT like Camelback PA, but they aren't that great.
Not sure I follow your comment on it being easier to go skiing if you live in NYC. LA has Big Bear a 2 hour drive away and everyone actually has a car to get there. Plus both Mammoth and Lake Tahoe 6 - 7 hour drive or quick 1-hr flights to either of those or Park City.
Dude, really compared west coast skiing to east coast skiing. Have fun on the ice cubes you call moguls.
LA seems fine to me. If you just get out of your house and make friends, you’ll meet plenty of girls to date. Hinge is also solid here, although I struggle to get excited about meeting someone off my phone.
Women in LA struggle to meet stable, decent guys. So many “hustlers”, wanna be influencers, up and coming musicians, etc. If you’re even semi cool and can take a girl to dinner without it being a burden, you’re already top of the pack in LA.
If youre looking for a girl who has an instagram following, fake lips, big ass, whatever. Yeah, she’s probably not going to go for a boring finance guy. But there are tons of regular girls out there in LA who work corporate jobs, are attractive/fit and would go nuts for a stable finance bro (stick to west LA though).
the idea that there’s more to do in NYC is a pretty crazy comparison to me too. LA has pretty much everything NYC has + incredible beaches / hikes / weather. Biggest weakness in LA is density.
I guess I don’t disagree that NYC is better for dating - I was only there for a summer and did awesome even as a young guy. But LA is fine. It’s the 2nd largest city in the country ffs. It’s not like it’s SF.
what neighborhoods in west LA are convenient for dating or meeting people? WeHo? culver city? Santa monica? Venice?
i find being centrally located while living near trains and nice bars in NYC is a game changer. but no idea what would help in LA
Sawtelle, Culver City, Santa Monica, Palms, Brea, anywhere along Expo boulevard ngl
Depends what type of people you want to date/meet. Generic bros/girls who were in Greek life and work standard corporate jobs are on the westside (Sawtelle, Santa Monica, Brentwood, Venice), entertainment and other “industry” types are in various parts of Hollywood, arts/fashion people and other hipsters are in downtown LA, Silverlake, etc.
But it’s also a huge city and those are not hard and fast rules. Finance bros can live in silverlake and hipsters can live in Sawtelle
If you're not a wealthy 6 foot tall jack dude with money, don't bother in LA
This is simply not true
Yes can confirm. Am 5'11 and have never gotten laid in LA. Choose NYC for dating
you can be 5’11 and still look like a troll lol
My overall working theory -
Vocal Minority bias - The folk who are successfully dating don't turn to the internet to talk about it as often as people who not finding success. This is true in general of dating, and I think exaggerated in LA. That said, I think LA is a unique city to date in.
Geography - It’s hard to date when you meet people in your city that can be 45 min+ away from you without traffic. There's a huge population, but to see them on apps you need to have your apps set to 5, 10, 15+ miles away. That's a big radius. Commuting to see your partner, much less a second or third date, is a challenge.
Careers / Money - Many people in this city are in what I think of as "lifestyle careers" - Hollywood can demand a lot of your time, on and off the clock. Tech, gaming, biotech, restaurant and hospitality all similarly. If you're working in LA, chance are you're working a lot + commuting a fair bit. You may also be getting paid enough that you're comfortable anywhere else in the country but barely scraping by in LA. It’s hard to sink tons on first dates when your schedule is booked and your finances stretched.
- Money pt 2: LA has a higher % of population of people on trust funds or otherwise independently wealthy. This makes a dating pool skewed when money can mean availability and access. I've had a date tell me she wouldn't go on a second date because of my credit card not being Amex. I think here there is more of this type of thinking than in other cities.
A sense of Fomo - Dating in major US cities has become a hobby more than process for finding a partner. If you end up dating someone, you give up on all the wildness of dating in LA.
dating in NYC is way better because of gender ratios, ease of transportation, and a high number of young people living close to each other. plus you’re not competing with as many movie stars, models, successful musicians, and professional athletes as LA.
nyc is definitely still superficial af. where you work, where you went to school, the neighborhood you live in, and your hometown/family background is highly scrutinized in NYC too. people here are still judgmental. if the gender ratios in nyc didn’t favor men in such an extreme way — i imagine women would be just as “superficial” here as in LA
other equalizers are no one drives in NY, so no one cares what car you have, you have to dress more comfortably to get around on foot (clothes more functional vs showing status), and it’s rare for anyone to have an apartment you even want to show off (your crowded office-like “luxury” building that’s annoying to get to isn’t doing you as many favors as you think)
Don’t people think NYC dating is often very difficult? Even aside from the elitism, I think there’s just so many people in the city that people have trouble choosing from what I hear
I’ve heard from my friends up there as a dude you at least get matches, even if they don’t materialize into much behind a first date for the reasons you mentioned, we’re just spoiled for choice as human beings I guess
NYC is the absolute easiest place to date in the world. There are so many people that live close to each other. Out of every place I've ever been or lived, I met the most girls in NYC on a consistent basis.
I think they’re equally toxic but in different ways as someone whose live in both for a decent amount of time.
This site generally though has no capacity for nuance when talking about California and usually repeats Fox News like talking points putting it down without actually having any clue as to what it’s actually like. The reality is that most of this site is incredibly biased towards NYC and many have never left the northeast. I went to boarding school with these types of people who think traveling to Mexico is like signing up for a live action version of Narcos and that the one homeless person who wandered into their hometown of Darien for the first time in 20 years is evidence of the great American decline.
The average poster shitting on California on this site has either never been here, been here once and did horrible touristy shit like Hollywood & Vine or did no research and assumed DTLA must be where people hangout (people only go for Laker games), or moved here out of college/for a job for several years and struggled socially.
Also lol to the person bragging about the weekend trips you can do from NYC.
Compare that with Yosemite, Big Sur, Tahoe, Napa, San Diego, Newport Beach, Vegas, and Scottsdale all within driving distance. You may not like driving but I’d rather be sitting in a Porsche driving as my primary means of transportation than in a venereal disease infested tin can that’s frequented by the homeless people you shit on place like California for having.
Mexico, Whistler, Banff, Vail, Breckenridge, Aspen, Telluride, Park City, Sun City, Deer Valley, Whitefish, etc. are all doable weekend trips accessible by plane.
NYC:
1. People over compensate for a lack of a personality and interests/hobbies with insert fancy degree or job (possibly both) here. They work in IB and therefore think just because they have a good job or went to a good school that should instantly put them at the top of the dating pool.
One example that comes to mind is one guy from my firm was visiting and came out with us one night. Dude was trying to buy coke the entire night and complained when he couldn’t find it. He then proceeds to hit on one of our analysts and shits on one of our mutual friends because he didn’t get promoted as quickly as him. Guy was an absolute loser and tried to get laid by using his job title but couldn’t hold a conversation with a girl so predictably got rejected all night. This guy now goes around and parrots how bad the dating scene is in here when the reality was that he had no game whatsoever.
2. People may not care about how many instagram followers you have but they absolutely care and almost fetishize how much power or proximity to it you have.
I went on a few dates with a girl shortly after moving to the city who said I had a powerful name and loved that I worked at a brand name bank. I ended things pretty shortly thereafter once I realized that’s all she really cared about and basically wanted to be a Greenwich housewife.
Another girl I went out with looked into my family’s pedigree and would make comments about how my family belongs to a great country club which I never brought up (think Wingfoot/Shinnecock) or that she could never see herself dating someone without a family vacation house in the Hamptons/Nantucket.
Friend of a friend moved out west from NYC and was from Greenwich with a solid background HYP + MF PE as an associate. Dude spent the first 18 months living here making it his life’s mission to get into LACC, which is in the top 5 most difficult country clubs to get into in the country and takes decades (old money + CEO’s/MF PE partners only ones that get in). He unsurprisingly couldn’t get in and moved back to NYC a year later because he could schmooze his family connections + pedigree to get into a decent club.
LA:
1. Influencer Culture and Superficial
This is more pronounced in the younger generation but has become increasingly more visible over time. It’s pretty easy to avoid entirely but you need to know what you’re doing to get around this. I recently went to a Rams game and it felt like I was at an influencer convention.
The superficial criticism is very real, however and you have to be in great shape out here to maximize your dating pool. You can get away with a dad bod and slamming bacon egg and cheeses in NYC but that shit doesn’t fly out here. That being said I feel obligated to say that the whole scooped bagel thing is a crock of shit and nobody actually does that out here. My relatives gave me shit for it over the holidays and I had no idea what they were talking about. Whoever invented that concept deserves to rot in hell.
2. Chiller Vibe
People out here generally don’t care where you went to school or what job you work at so you need to have a personality to date out here. The people who struggle the most here are the ones who think pulling the I went to Wharton card or I work at GS will move the needle for them. Know a guy exactly like this who couldn’t get laid for 3 years and eventually found a GF. Once that happened he instantly stopped complaining about how much the west coast sucks.
The downside to the chill culture is people aren’t as motivated to pursue great jobs. Tons of people I know are working generic ass jobs and have no desire to move up or progress in their career because they’re happy with where they currently are.
Personally, think a balance between the two is best.
Ultimately, I love both places despite the criticism and am primarily clapping back against the many people on this site that can’t take NYC’s cock out of their mouths. It’s a great city and one of my favorite places to visit but isn’t the be all end all everyone on this site makes it out to be. If it fits your personality then great but if it doesn’t there are plenty of other places out there where you can have as much or more fun.
sir this is a Wendy's
Long read but you make some good points. Maine reason the avg WSO user doesn’t like LA is because you need to have hobbies / have friends outside of work in order to get laid. In NYC, high paying job + hinge + even mediocre social skills will land you a 7
that actually sums it up pretty well
it sounds like people in LA are just less educated lol, more suburban frankly and can have a much higher quality of life by default with less money (amazing weather, privacy of car, MUCH more affordable/spacious housing, idk maybe more decent jobs that aren’t prestige/pipeline driven, and not always competing with the best talent in the world in your field like NYC). and it prob skews hotter (more fit/camera ready women/men) due to beach people, affordability and of course the entertainment/modeling industry.
but if you’re over going to new restaurants/bar hopping, dating tons of random girls (that often materializes to nothing in the long run anyway - you can only choose one), and like playing sports/travel/fitness/beaches/nature — isn’t LA much better? i could be wrong but late 20s/30s life in LA seems so much better than NJ/CT/NY/LI once your hard partying/office grinding days are over. (assuming family doesn’t tie you to this area) how bad can the people really be? and what does it even mean to “know” people in LA? Like who? what does it even mean to be connected. i hear this all the time but have zero idea what it means.
in NYC if you have nightlife contacts/social circle, hampton house, disposable income, a nice standard/quality of living(simply due to most young people living in complete squalor or spending literally all their income on rent)/good taste/being fit you’re an outlier
how is LA any different?
Generally agree with your sentiment but will say the finance scene out here I personally think on average is more competitive due to their being fewer alternatives and demand far outpacing supply.
If you lose your job in NYC you can go to hundreds of no name buy side shops or drop down to terrible banks like BNP Paribas, Soc Gen, or Nomura extending your career once you’ve broken in.
I have several family friends who have had mediocre careers and been fired from 2-3 jobs but always land on their feet due to this abundance of jobs. One emerging markets fund manager I know very well when describing his career admitted he got every major event that happened in his analyst -> VP years wrong and somehow managed to get promoted and raise money. Same guy then proceeds to recommend a stock he bought at the top while up 500% that within a month dropped 50% in value, which killed his fund. This guy is now in senior leadership within research at a BB.
These guys are obviously outliers but my point is that everyone working in NYC finance isn’t Bill Ackman, Carl Icahn, etc. Putting a middle bucket IB analyst or equity research person in LA, SF, etc. isn’t going to make him a top performer. He’s still going to be mid bucket with the only difference being he’s more likely to get pushed out of the industry entirely to IR or Corporate Finance due to there being less opportunity if a layoff were to occur.
As a result, I think the people that manage to last out here and make a career would be better than your average NYC banker or investment professional. This also means the ceiling is lower because you may only have a few Howard Marks type figures compared to an NYC, which will have 3-4X more of these types of people.
Will push back and say that the jobs pipeline is not nearly as strong until you get to the senior levels. Most young people out here aren’t working in great jobs with great pay and are making like $60-70K. You’ve got to wait until the VP or MD equivalent levels to start making any semblance of real money out here. San Francisco from a career perspective is a much better place in that regard with wages that are basically double even at the junior level. If you could get a remote job with SF pay and live in LA you’d be living a very good life as junior instead of an okay one.
Bar hopping out here is much more difficult but can still be done fairly easily if you know the geography of the city. Staying in the Venice and Santa Monica area is pretty conducive to this as staying in West Hollywood, which has a lot of variety. Going from Venice to DTLA isn’t practical (30 minute Uber) but is doable and the same could be said of NYC where you wouldn’t go all the way out to Bushwick at midnight if you were already out in Midtown (30 minute subway). Plenty of new restaurants to explore as well although admittedly since COVID these concepts have slowed down exponentially. They’re gravitating more towards proven luxury concepts from other markets like Teleferic, which is a famous and highly rated tapas concept that started in Barcelona.
As for dating around the pool is still very large but much more homogeneous. San Diego State, Arizona Stea, UCLA, USC, UC Santa Barbara, etc. are consistently bring in a pipeline of ridiculously attractive women who on looks alone are in the 7-8+ range. You’re much more likely to find an Amal Clooney type though in NYC, which is more my speed as opposed to some marketing chick.
As for knowing people in LA it can mean everything or nothing. Typically when people say that they either have a family member or roommate from college that moved out here that they’ve visited 1-2 times basing all of their opinions on heresay, act like they’re best friends with people they’ve met once/in passing ,or they’re the social climber type who flexes loose connections to club promoters in places like Miami/Vegas. The latter is the same kind of guy that buys tables at Tao or Lavo where mid tier chicks who aren’t attractive enough to get the time of day from the in demand guys entertain him in conversation for a half hour while drinking all his booze and bounce once he won’t order any more bottles.
Being connected is usually a function of growing up and going to a private independent school or living in a wealthy neighborhood. There are like 10 schools that people with money here send their kids and all of them collectively have enrollments of under 5K kids. I went to a target school for my masters and met someone in my age range +/- 2 years. We went to similar schools for K-12 so therefore have a lot of overlap in terms of our social and professional circles. Recently found out he knew my neighbor growing up because his dad is the partner at the law firm that advised my classmates father on the sale of one of his businesses and they golf together. Both of these people have no connections to each other whatsoever on paper yet know each other fairly well and have many mutuals. In other words, being connected out here is largely a function of the world being a much smaller place the more successful you are.
Ultimately, I think they’re more similar than not as a young person and diverge as you get into your 30’s when people typically settle down. Once you leave NYC to settle down the drop off is dramatic. I personally don’t understand how people who love anything and everything about NYC and its spirit end up settling for vanilla ass towns in CT, NJ, and the NY Suburbs. These places along with the rest of the east coast lack any semblance of the culture, sophistication, decent cuisine, etc. they love about NYC.
The biggest claims to fame many of these places have are that Georgia Washington’s horse once took a shit next to the town hall. Inside said town hall is an overweight guy with Crohn’s disease named Joe Smith who has a history degree from Yale. The highlight of Joe’s year is on Veterans Day where he gets to take his towns version of the shroud of Turin to the local public school and let all kids to marvel at the blanket they wiped the horses ass with and subsequently threw into the town hall shed. This blanket covered in 300 year old poop fragments he shows the kids is what underlies 75% of our towns property value, which is why nobody is allowed to touch it. Joe’s ability to keep one of George Washington’s three dozen horses poop blankets clean a responsibility it took him 20 years to obtain and one he had to wrestle away from his arch nemesis Harvard graduate John Smith was exactly the kind of track record he needed to campaign for HOA president in his master planned community.
The fact that he’d have to unseat John once more is something that caused his stubby poop fragment covered hands trembling as it took everything he had last time around. John was everything Joe wasn’t he only had high blood pressure which was a far more prestigious ailment to be diagnosed with and was the result of eating decades worth of steak drenched in butter and salt chefs in their town used to mask the fact that they couldn’t cook something with flavor. The fact that John’s ailment was self inflicted only made it that much more prestigious as it wasn’t a sign of poor familial breeding and bloodlines, which he pointed out during the first debate. The second blow came when John pointed out to the crowd that Joe was such a working class name and one they wouldn’t have allowed to by property just 100 years ago in that town as it wasn’t white enough. Joe down to his last strike knew where John planned to finish him off next and knew he had to do something if he wanted to win the coveted HOA presidency.
Desperate for inspiration Joe went back to the drawing board and decided to do the unthinkable, which if successful would change the course of all northeast suburb HOA master planned community elections forever. Even though his plan was nearly flawless Joe knew it might not be enough to take down a Harvard man and in a moment of desperation picked up the poop blanket huffing the 300 year old poop into each of his orifices before leaving for the debate.
As he confidently left the poop shed and marched into town hall reeking of hay and horse poop Joe sent the message that he wouldn’t go down swinging. As expected, John went after Joe’s alma matter Yale which he referred to as Connecticuts admirable attempt at competing for talent with Massachusetts trailblazing vocational state school MIT. While both ranked highly under the US News and World reports value college section he argued that Harvard was unrivaled to his constituents. In closing and in the spirit of bringing underrepresented voices into the HOA presidency conversation John promised to permit one state school graduate to take an unpaid internship to shadow him for one week. When asked about the timing of the internship John outlined it would have to be before Memorial Day and after Labor Day, which was peak season for his yachting and vacation house plus he didn’t want to confuse the staff by bringing in a state school graduate from an upstart like Yale of all places into the fold. Next his staff might ask if they could drink from the same cups as his family and their guests a preposterous thought. As he concluded his speech applause erupted throughout the town hall and with it the odd of John Smith prevailing increased threefold.
Oddly enough this didn’t bother Joe at all because when John Smith took his shot he left a slight margin for error. Like a horse running out of the stables at the Kentucky Derby Joe came out attacking John at a rapacious pace. The crowd including John were astounded by this development and were almost dumbstruck that a lowly state school grad could conceive such ideas. Despite these best efforts Joe knew deep inside he had to pull out his trump card if he were to have any chance at winning the HOA presidency.
With nothing to lose Joe went for the jugular attacking somewhere not even John could foresee coming. While John was busy celebrating his victory as the incumbent HOA president he dropped the ball big time and didn’t even know it. While he was at the local golf club eating another butter and salt drenched steak a successful Jamaican couple who had sold their critically acclaimed restaurant concepts in NYC had their eyes set on moving outside the city to get more space for their growing family. They ended up touring several houses within John’s HOA jurisdiction, which John hard heard about but dismissed as some Suburban Legend made to distract Harvard graduates like John from their daily obligations. These claims couldn’t be any more real than Bigfoot he thought to himself until Joe came out with proof via video.
What was briefly considered salacious by John and the others now certainly had merit. Joe rested his case and let the angry townspeople pepper John with questions about how he could let this happen in their backyard. Certainly there property values would be affected they thought to which John had no good answer. Since real estate was primarily the domain for state school graduates like Yale or vocational schools like MIT he couldn’t come up with an answer to satisfy the angry crowd. Out of nowhere someone suggested they carry John out in disgrace and the crowd obliged in short order.
At this point it was abundantly clear that Joe was the victor and drunk off his powers gained as HOA president he suggested they take John out to the towns poop shed. There the townspeople one by one took turns stoning John before leaving his body to wither away over the course of the next year in the poop shed.
His blood stains they thought would serve as a good warning to anyone who allowed less prestigious families to tour in their town and add to its rich history. That next year on that brisk fall day when Veterans Day fell Joe proudly marched into the school with civic pride radiating off of him and blood seeped into the poop blanket. The kids sat in amazement during Joes retelling of his rags to riches story where he recounted being practically a ward of the state during his 4 years at lowly Yale in front of his many supporters. This he thought was paradise as he left to eat his annual butter drenched steak from the club in remembrance of John with the poop blanket in hand from George Washington’s 23rd horse.
You have to be delusional (or on WSO too much) to think you can walk into LACC like that. For people on the younger side, any luck at Riviera or Bel Air?
Don’t know much about Bel Air or its process but am familiar with Riviera.
Not as difficult as LACC and one of the easier ways in is to buy a house next to the course if you don’t have anyone to sponsor you. This alone won’t get you in but unless there’s something wrong with you than you’ll get in within a few years.
Issue with that is the cost of it will be $5M+ for a pretty generic house (sub 2,000 sq ft. and 3 bed 2 bath) and $10M+ for anything resembling something I’d think people on this site would find acceptable (2,500+ sq ft 4 bed 4 bath and modern),
Biggest problems you’ll run into out here are that there’s so much wealth that you can’t just get in somewhere by having $30M+ like many places on the east coast. You’re competing with foreign billionaires, guys that have sold their businesses for $100M+ dollars, famous people, CEO’s, etc. which in the eyes of these clubs is more prestigious than being a trader or PM at a good fund.
Part of what makes LACC so appealing is they’re the only prominent club in town that turns away the celebrity or celebrity types. Its mostly consisted of old $ people in Los Angeles (think people who built the city and owned all the real estate 100+ years ago), high powered business people (Jamie Dimon, Howard Marks, etc. types), and executives (CEO’s of multibillion dollar companies you’ve never heard of). Only finance guy I know in their that isn’t a Howard Marks type character is a guy that’s on a first name basis with Biden and has dinner with Obama when he’s in town.
Because the average person is retarded and just does whatever everyone else around them does or sees. If you're in LA most rich and successful people, especially young, are in media/social media. So the average girl is going to gravitate towards that. In NYC its finance.
Never understood the girls that go for the club promoter/musician/social media type of guys, their social "assets" don't have the longevity that Andover/Exeter -> Ivy League -> BB/EB -> PE MF have, for instance. How is marrying a club promoter going to benefit your kids 20 years down the road?
They don’t marry the club promoter in substantially every instance.
They use them for the social clout and ability to experience things they couldn’t otherwise afford before moving on. Insanely low switching costs with these types of characters and very low consequences as these people in many instances won’t be ultra successful or in their future social circles.
An example of this I can think of is my buddy is a photographer whose drowning in options every night. He’s much more tuned into the club scene out here than I am and asked me if I wanted to go out with him and some of our buddies. Normally not my scene but said sure since I hadn’t seen him in a while.
Club promoter gets us in and to the VIP section, which is more of a social lounge than tables that your used to at a traditional club so we’re surrounded by a bunch of famous people interacting. I know a handful of famous athletes from growing up here, competing nationally, and playing D1 ball so I go up to say hello to a few Chiefs/Eagles players since I never see them anymore. We’re acquaintances and not friends but we grew up together so I figured it was worth a shot since they didn’t have much security around due to privacy of area we were in. Shoot the shit with them for 30 ish minutes and catch up asking about the family before letting them move on with their night.
As soon as this happens and we go back to the bar we’re swarmed by a bunch of thirsty ass hoes who think we’re there ticket to meeting Mahomes/Hurts and these other guys. I didn’t entertain it at all and told one of the chicks I’m here to hang out with the guys and when she wouldn’t take the hint told her I didn’t want to end up like Magic Johnson which went over about as well as you’d expect. My photographer buddy though milked it for all it was worth and dated her for a month before she realized he wasn’t her meal ticket and then just repeated.
The reality of the situation is that lots of attractive women can afford to sleep around without consequences and marry for money at any point in their 20-early 30’s. Most of the promiscuous women I know are the ones that eventually disproportionately marry the successful engineer or the Exeter -> Ivy -> MF PE dudes after sleeping around with no consequences.
Consensus among my friends that are women are that the Ivy -> MF PE types are really boring and don’t have any life experience. Even as a straight dude working at a large name brand fund I don’t necessarily disagree.
My coworkers are really dull and the last people I’d want to spend any amount of time with outside of work. We occasionally do social events as a company and it’s like watching paint dry. Nobody can talk about anything outside the markets, nobody has any hobbies, goes to concerts, travels, goes to restaurants. So you’re either end up stuck talking to some dude who might as well be named Clarence about how much flows a Bitcoin ETF will take away from equity markets or your hard ass MD named John who will go on a tangent about how being forced to say happy holidays in company emails is an assault on free speech or complain about his kids. The latter is at least kind of entertaining and the former fair game at happy hours but are not things I want to be occupying my time with at an office Christmas party where nobody can have more than 2 drinks.
There are absolute fun people in finance but they’re in the minority and never traveled on the path (Exeter -> Ivy -> MF PE). In my experience those are the people that disproportionately contribute to the work environments in this industry sucking and create toxic behaviors like the elitist attitudes. So I don’t think it should come as too much of a surprise why most people don’t want to marry or date that kind of person unless it’s primarily for the money.
LA is going to outperform NYC massively in the coming decades. I say this as one who prefers NYC’s cultural aesthetic.
I personally think it’s TBD and could see LA become the west coast Miami.
I grew up in a top 0.5% neighborhood and the cost of living isn’t sustainable if the city wants to continue to be a major city for commerce. Places that were selling for $750K in 2000 are now worth $15M+. Who can afford that?
The median home price in neighborhoods that aren’t the ghetto are $2M for a middle class lifestyle (sub 2K sq feet and 3 bed 2 bath). You can get a 3K sq foot house in Scarsdale, Westchester, Bronxville, etc. where a lot of MD types live for that kind of money. Equivalent places here like Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, etc. are $3M+ but come with a catch. That catch is that for $3M you’re buying an apartment, condo, or townhouse instead of a home. You want to own a house in any of these neighborhoods and it’s closer to $7M. Your average MD or Partner at a consulting firm likely couldn’t afford that and on the off chance they could it would be a struggle forgoing a vacation home as the cost.
I think at some point it’s all going to reach a breaking point to which the solution will determine the future of the city. I believe currently this is the only place in the world outside Aspen, Telluride, etc. where the greatest predictor in whether you’ll own a home is if it was passed down to you by your parents.
They’re going to need to implement policies that are friendly to affordable housing and change the tax codes to force sales for people that just hold property here if they have a shot at remaining a T1 city. Currently you pay property tax on the purchase price of the home for as long as you own it. So if you bought a place for $750K in 2000 that’s now worth $20M you pay property taxes on $750K. Tons of people use this to park their $ as a result and I think a tax would help more inventory get to market which currently doesn’t. Limiting foreign investment would be another decent strategy using places like Vancouver as examples but I can’t see that ever happening. I doubt either of these ever happens but are probably the most feasible paths to getting starter house prices below $2M.
The alternative is much more grim and likely in my opinion, which is that it becomes even more slanted towards class divisions. As in the only people who stay here are the ultra wealthy and ultra poor. You probably get a middle class consisting of 20 something’s who leave after a decade to buy housing elsewhere. Issue with this is it creates a brain drain of talent making it more difficult to compete with the NYC’s, SF’s, London, etc of the world and reliant on satellite offices to prop up your local economy. In this case scenario you’ll have a ton of people employed as tour guides like you see in Europe designed to cater to the whims of billionaires with mass unemployment for younger people.
nah. LA is way too big geographically and is too poorly run/loosely managed compared to NYC. nyc is going to get more expensive, gentrified, better transit, more green spaces and commercial friendly (mixed use properties in currently residential only/away from city centers areas) over time. regardless of your politics - if you read local news/policy actions/proposals you’ll find that quality of life improvements are being more real time in NYC every year. i cant say the same for LA
LA might add a few transit lines or bike lanes in the next 10 years with ever increasing traffic, decaying roads and homeownership will remain much more challenging to achieve if that’s your goal vs the NY metro area. too much NIMBY vibes in LA, car brain, and competition from true world class cities like nyc attracting more “high caliber people” globally. also can always find more accessible homeownership in places like TX/FL if you want space/no winter
OP resorts to the superficial stereotypes of NYC and LA residents. If you are in shape, have money, and are a decent conversationalist, you’ll do well anywhere. Don’t overthink it.
To younger readers, listen to Danger Zone, I would bet the claims about his background are accurate. Old money, off the charts new money, proles, most people don’t care about your MBA or the investment firm on your fleece. If you attended a well-known private school with 50k+ tuition, most attendees at your reunion are neither in finance nor care if you are. It “can” be a flex to have nothing to do with a corporate career. A significant number never substantially relied on a salary or their own earnings, sometimes you have to dig to connect the dots.
To the poster who made a claim about the more successful moving to the suburbs around NYC, that’s inaccurate. The people who made it in Manhattan in their 20s/30s or come from the Exeter background Danger Zone describes will live in a Classic 7 and have access to a summer house (either their own, parents’, or grandparents’). Their children will go to Buckley or Trinity. Moving to Short Hills/Chappaqua, sending a child to Delbarton or Staples, and taking a train four days a week with VT vacations (as opposed to CO/UT) at Christmas is off their radar. There’s nothing wrong with that upper middle class suburban life in the tri state area and most cannot afford it, but it’s not the goal a lot of people move to NYC to enter finance possess.
why are we pretending that the only people in these two cities that are relevant are the ultra wealthy? what i said is accurate for the majority of w2 earners in this country — which most people on this board are/will be for the majority of their lives. and there’s nothing wrong with that lol relax
Most people on WSO don’t aspire to be W-2 wagies. Most don’t end up being “the majority” either. Posters here tend to have good four year degrees and a semblance of a career, most NYC residents have neither. Annotations below:
“the NJ/LI/CT suburb crowd that leaves the city is likely tied down by career to NYC [most could lateral to a satellite city for a higher quality of life, they are often tied down by inertia, the perceived prestige of living in NY state or CT, or elderly parents], seeking to save on taxes [the difference between Manhattan and Bedford isn’t that big here, some property taxes in the suburbs are crushing], buy property [yes, the suburbs are cheaper per sf in the tri state, a credit to my point about the Classic 7], and/or start a family NOT in the city [most parents who claim this as a reason to leave could not afford activities and schooling for children in NYC, it was not a cultural decision]. and most people in this industry/from money are actually from those areas anyway [this is untrue, don’t try to convince someone who was a Goldman partner before it went public that being B&T is a sign of coming from money, as they understand affluence. You sound provincial] - so they’re really just going back home in a way based on my observations [lol, have fun coaching youth soccer on your Sunday with an assistant who has two DUIs and a child of divorce].”
You sound like the type of Murray Hill dude who went to Fairfield Prep and said they went to prep school or Manhasset HS and says “it was basically like a private school.” Stop glorifying your quarter to half acre, 2.1 kid average existence. Some of us were Born Better.
Who would want a girl if her first question on a date is "What is your salary." Your whole relation will be based on how much you earn. The dating scene is pathetic.
People in super expensive cities I’ve noticed are generally more materialistic and focused on money. Aren’t European women like this to an extent?
As a European, it is crazy what strategy you need to develop in order to date and find a girlfriend. You need to be in this club, go there at that time, say this and don't say that. It also matters where you were born, what car are you driving wtf
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