In short
Los Angeles has no centre: it is a twelve-hundred-square-kilometre conurbation where Venice, Downtown, Pasadena and Malibu have almost nothing in common.
The climate is the real argument: two hundred and eighty days of sun, a sea at twenty degrees in summer and mountains an hour away.
What it really costs
Housing is expensive and so is transport: without a car the city is hard to live in, and hire plus fuel plus parking weigh heavily.
The metro has expanded a great deal and now links Downtown to Santa Monica, but it does not cover the residential west or the canyons.
What nobody tells you
Distance is the real subject: thirty kilometres can take an hour and a half at rush hour. Choosing your neighbourhood amounts to choosing what you will see.
Fire season runs from June to November and is lengthening. Smoke degrades the air for days, including far from the fire.
The ocean is cold: eighteen to twenty degrees in summer, with a current from the north. This is not the Mediterranean, despite the climate.