LA is cheaper to live in than San Francisco but it's not that much cheaper. Silicon Beach in particular (Santa Monica/Venice area) has been experiencing some p

LA is cheaper to live in than San Francisco but it's not that much cheaper. Silicon Beach in particular (Santa Monica/Venice area) has been experiencing some pretty steep rent inflation in the last two years. Even $70k isn't that much to thrive on in Los Angeles. I would love to see some sort of cost-of-living analysis that didn't just look at average costs of housing and food but also incorporated some mental measure of "being well-off" that used the area's Gini coefficient [0]. I say this because I have lived frugally in Santa Monica, CA and I have lived frugally in Atlanta, GA at approximately the same standard of living but being surrounded by conspicuous outliers definitely made me feel much poorer in Santa Monica. See [1] for academic discussion. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient [1] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20503742 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20503742