Why Charlotte Over Any Other Great Place?

Four years ago we made a list of what we wanted in a new city, and basically it looked something like this (in no particular order):

1. Quick plane ride away from family in northeast
2. Temperate weather--not too hot, not too cold (by the way it's 102 degrees here today!)
3. Good schools
4. Not in the boonies, so we'd still have access to amenities like restaurants, etc.
5. Not terribly far from the ocean
6. Cheaper cost of living
7. Jobs

We took out a map and started perusing every state east of the Mississippi. We discarded those that were more than 5 hours from the ocean instantly. We knocked out Delaware and Maryland quickly--still too chilly in the winter and way to close to where we were already living. Then we briefly considered Charlottesville, Virginia. It seemed like a hip and happening town with and artsy college feel. Unfortunately, the local school system wasn't great. Out!

We spent a few days thinking about Charleston, SC, which we'd visited and adored. Schools were disappointing and the only real form of employment there seemed to be retail or military based. Atlanta was another possibility, but we didn't want a place that was as busy as New York--so those fell off the list too.

Next we centered on Florida. We drove down to Punta Gorda on the Gulf Coast, visited Venice and that whole relative area. It was lovely, and we enjoyed being by the ocean. At the time real estate was booming and the prices were pretty high. We didn't find much by way of employment possibility for us, and schools were sketchy at best. Three months after our visit, Hurricane Charley all but decimated that area--so that made not moving there pretty easy.

I was willing to live in a more rural town, but Matt was horrified by the thought of not being proximate to a city. I could have sprawled out on a 10 acre plot with horses and chickens. Needless to say, I lost--and Matt was right in that we shouldn't put our kids in the sticks where they'd have limited access to kid stuff and activities. Plus, we didn't want them to be those kids that end up saying, "I gotta get out of this one-horse town and move to a great place like New York City!" Oh, the irony of that one would be unamusing. So, we had to keep looking.

North Carolina was on our radar a few times during this process. At the beginning, we were really centered on Raleigh. It has a variety of employment, diverse people, good schools and fit all the rest of our criteria. We took our trip down and were impressed. A few days later we visited Charlotte, and it instantly felt like home. So, why didn't we choose Raleigh?

First off, though schools are solid, Raleigh sports a school reassignment philosophy. In other words, just because you live in a particular neighborhood, it does not mean that your kid will end up in that school thanks to overcrowding. We also found Raleigh to be a little too spread out in terms of the landscape--it just felt like a big sprawling town with a puny little city center. And, finally, we felt you got better bang for your buck house-wise in Charlotte.

We visited Charlotte two or three times before we finally decided to move here, and we quickly gravitated to the South Charlotte area. We loved the look of the streets with their blooming crape myrtle's, easy accessibility to highway 485, pretty shopping areas that didn't look look like cheesy strip malls, and the schools were solid. We found that there were lots of northeasterner's in the area, too. Geez, this felt like home. It felt familiar. We loved it!

There were things we adored immediately: you could actually make a left turn when driving (those of you from New Jersey will be liberated from that pesky jug handle), the state actually lets its inhabitants pump their own gas (there truly is something to be said for the state of New Jersey not trusting its own people to use the pump), and you could buy a kick-ass house for pennies in comparison for what you could get in the northeast--with tiny taxes to boot. Truly it was hard not to just love everything about the place.

So, on our drive home, we decided that Charlotte was our new home-to-be. Now, we just needed to face our fear of telling our family that we were leaving 'em behind.