No matter what you've heard, San Diego is not an easy place to find. Most folks came here originally because of the climate, which is everything the weather channel and hyperbole claim it to be. But little else about San Diego is so conspicuous or accessible. Visit New York or New Orleans, Chicago or San Francisco, and in half a day you get a sense of place. But visit San Diego and in half a day you'll get nowhere but lost - even though you won't quite realize it.

Should you choose to wander, you re liable to come up with some wonderful images loosely strung along a sensational and meandering coastline. There are close-knit communities, great seafood tacos, and extraordinary shopping malls. But it s awfully difficult figuring out how it all fits together. You'll wonder if Oakland is the only California city where it could be said there's an absence of there-ness. You'll be confounded in trying to find a center in this sixth largest city in the United States - especially since we re not a place with anything so obvious as big shoulders or big easys. In San Diego, if you seek you shall not find. If you go looking for this city, you'll never discover it. Instead, you have to relax and let San Diego come to you - and truly, it will come.

It is with considerable apprehension that San Diego planners talk with outsiders about the difficulty in understanding this City and this region. Deciphering its core is not so easy as performing an economic base analysis or randomly administering psychological profiles. Indeed, it is primarily some local history that prepares a visitor to begin discovering this very unusual place..

To begin with, most current residents are transplants. The military brought a fair number of people who planted themselves permanently when their service was done. After that, the promise of jobs and the absence of cold brought a lot more. Significantly, it was not from the great cities of America that most migrated. It seems that a preponderance of San Diegans came from the Mid-West and from smallish communities all over the country. Few of them were captains of any industry when they left home. Mostly they were laborers and technicians and small business entrepreneurs. But what they brought with them affected the look and character and essence of San Diego.

Though many of the newcomers sought comfort and opportunity, they wanted it in a facsimile of small town America, like the place they'd left. With an ample supply of sunshine and an abundance of suburban land, they created exactly that. Even today, no matter how big San Diego grows, it still bears a strong village imprint.

Transplants also came with a sense of frugality. It's not by accident that San Diego is a mecca of discount malls, K-Marts, Wall-Marts, the hometown of Price Clubs, and a goldmine for Pennysavers and Entertainment books. Residents know well the value of a nickel and most are regularly irked by rising prices and announce it quite clearly with their shopping habits. Except perhaps for housing, San Diego is a place filled with value.

Recognizing that this region is composed mostly of small town residents from elsewhere is an important key to understanding San Diego. Even when folks from larger industrial cities moved here, what drew them was most often the weather and the implausible quasi-urban nature that s characteristic of San Diego.

The local version of implausibility - our very own riddle within an enigma - means that San Diego is not really a part of Southern California. Geographers might think so, but they re among the few. Countless professional surveys embrace Los Angeles, Imperial, Orange, Ventura, even Santa Barbara County in their polls of Southern California attitudes and opinions. But all too often San Diego isn t a part of those analyses. And whether purposeful or not, outsiders seems to consider San Diego to be someplace else. Even somewhere else.

In fact, many San Diegans truly believe they live south of Southern California. The axioms and myths that apply to the fast-lane and often brutal hedonists to the north have nothing to do with us. We are a different sort of people. We are kinder. We are gentler. And though some of us might be a bit more direct than in other parts of Southern California, we all believe we live at the end of the rainbow.

Right now, San Diego is also a place where power is moving very rapidly to the people. But the people are hardly united in aspiration. Many trace the City of San Diego s loss of unity, its spiritual spiraling down, its absence even of a desire for a common civic vision, to the onset of district elections.

Voted in by the electorate less than half-a-dozen years ago, district elections proved an event so significant it reintroduced the term Balkinization into every other San Diego conversation. With the decision to have elected officials representing nine distinct if bizarrely drawn portions of the city, and with more than 50 recognized communities within those districts, the City seems to have entered a twilight zone where it s every neighborhood for itself. A library expansion in one area is seen as costing infrastructure repair or a recreational program in some other neighborhood.

Though we tend our gardens because we care about where we live, we also fear that someone else will get too many roses if we don t pay attention.