Palm Springs

Retirees, LGBT and Metaphysics

Palm Springs is still hot. It’s still a center for the LGBT community. And in the past ten years, it has developed a vibrant new age scene. Not only are there cool outdoor restaurants, golf courses and low slung hotels hidden behind walls and hedges, but now there are also yoga studios and psychics and meditation centers. The new age community is thriving.

Some Statistics

The statistics we provide are rounded to account for change in both the geography and the demographics.

Elevation: ~450-500 feet
Precipitation: ~5″ per year (on the high end)
Average high: 89 F, Low: 63 F
Population: ~47,000 (2016)
Median age: ~53
Male: ~57%. Female: ~43%

LGBT

LGBT: Estimates vary drastically. Some have it at 10% while Gay Palm Springs, a website for the local gay community, estimates it at 50%. Regardless of the number, Palm Springs has one of the highest LGBT population densities in the world. Larger than West Hollywood, Venice Beach and Key West. The influence is strong. If you want to see a man dressed as a woman dressed as Santa Claus, this, we can confirm, is the place.

The Windmills

The Coachella Valley was one of the first areas to fully embrace wind power. It was very unNIMBY of Palm Springs. The stretch of I-10 heading into the valley is a sea of white stalks of windmills, rising on up the hills like waves. As one of the first such farms, you can get a history of windmills simply by looking at the various styles. As with the lake effect issues concerning large solar farms, wind farms appear to be raptor traps.

Golf

In the valley between Joshua Tree and Mount San Jacinto, Palm Springs sits on an aquifer. And they use plenty of water. Bob Hope, his Desert Classic golf tournament and the creation of sprawling resorts with large pools and lush golf courses expanded the resort town to the east, into Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert and La Quinta.

Much of the spirituality comes from the connection to nature. The strand through downtown is at the base of the San Jacinto mountains. You can see them easily. In the valley between Joshua Tree and Idyllwild, the

The Geography

The Coachella Valley, in which Palm Springs sits, stretches from Banning to Indio before it spreads out into the Salton Sea and a slew of rural desert towns surviving primarily on irrigated agriculture. The valley widens and spreads until it hits the Gulf of California in Mexico.

The San Jacinto Mountains to the west form a moisture block. No part of Southern California would be considered rainy, but the mountains catch what does come in off the coast. For this reason Idyllwild has significantly more precipitation than the towns on the desert side.