We are transfering to San Diego in the next 4 to 5 months. We have been looking into Apartments, renting homes, and military housing. I'm assuming those who have lived there or live there now have looked at all their options with this as well. So what is better there? Renting in town or military housing. Forget the being around other military families or even BAH. I'm looking for the room, the neighborhood, the road less traveled. Jesse and I were looking into Poway at apartments but we were told that EVERYONE lives there and traffic to get there is terrible. And we were told it is a little more exspensive.

Any advice would be great... TIA

We researched all our options when we moved out here two years ago. We had one kid and for the apartment complexes we liked we would have been stuck paying utilities out of pocket for a small 1 bdrm 900 sq ft place in a good location. That just wouldn't work for us. There were some 2 bdrms we looked at but they were very small as well.

We moved into housing and we love it. Our house is much bigger than anything you can afford out in town and it's nice not having to worry about utilities and internet bills!

Depends. If you need a two or three bedroom, you will have no problems finding a place out in town for a fairly reasonable amount and you should come in under BAH if you're going the apartment or even townhome route (versus getting an actual house). Things are a bit more expensive in poway but it would be a FIRST choice for us if we could afford a four bedroom house there. The area is gorgeous and central to everything, not far from base, schools are some of the best around, family oriented and totally different feel to it than downtown/central san diego. It's not that bad of a commute at all. It only took about 20-25 minutes from base.

Depending on what you get for BAH, you may or may not be better off living in housing. For us, it's hard to find what we need out in town for under his BAH (and we get about $2100 a month) because we need four bedrooms, we want some sort of backyard and we need to be in decent, safe area. A lot of the places in SD you'll find that are affordable do not have yards b/c they are built townhome style or just have patios or gravel b/c it's hard to keep up with a yard in a lot of areas. The yard is VERY important to us though b/c we do a lot outside and we have the dog and everything. So, that has made it 10's harder finding anything in town that we can afford.

Housing has a lot of decent options if you need three bedrooms. It becomes somewhat limited if you need four though. So, you should be okay if you need housing. I get the most recent hot sheets for housing if you want me to let you know which units are available and when.