In my BSM 1.0 game I have all cities at 100.. well Cali C is a lil lower but that place is far away and has only one quest giver
It's quite easy with the barkeepers reset missions function, repeat a few times until there's a mission in town. That "dont look like you can do it" is pretty daft game-wise, there are a few highly rated missions for beginners and I don't understand why the game treats them all the same.
The only problem I found with this was that on repeated fed-ex quests the mission sometimes does not appear in the journal again, though everything else works ok.