My hubby likes puttering around outside—the yard, his woodworking, whatever. He is also happy with his computer indoors. While he still enjoys having a yard and woodworking, I’m glad he has it.
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I think Columbus crime rates came up when Jim Jordan was doing his performative hearings in NYC to try to intimidate/influence Alvin Bragg, various news reports discovered that several of the Ohio towns in Jordan’s district have worse crime rates than NYC. Columbus itself has a higher homicide rate than NY.
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ShawD wrote a love letter when trying to purchase a two-family house in the Boston area. Her realtor was told that her offer was accepted even though it was not the highest, because of the contents of her letter. She explained that she was planning to live in the top unit and rent the bottom unit (as the prior owner’s family had before he moved out) and that she loved a couple of interesting fixture (Tiffany light).
I am surprised that they are meaningful. I just threw out the letters after reading them to see what it could tell me about the various seller’s economic situations and constraints.
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I’ll ignore the Columbus bashing on the thread seeing that two of my daughters live there (Columbus zip code, not a suburb) and live in very good neighborhoods, not void of crime (is there such a thing?) but with plenty of perks that is keeping the housing prices continuing climbing on beautiful homes. Of course they are fortunate to have decent jobs and don’t live in the select few neighborhoods (like most urban cities) that sadly are crime ridden. (This not directed at Shaw!)
Moving on…
@shawbridge , but that’s exactly it! A letter may be a letter of true words - or just the right words to tug at your heartstrings or have you seeing secure $$$ from the buyer - or it may be a bunch of baloney. Let’s say two buyers have bid $300K on a house. One sends a letter telling you they have oodles of $ beyond the 300K and they are engineers so their jobs are super secure and they have no student loans and other indications of great cash flow. The second doesn’t send a letter or sends a letter just saying they’d love your house and are secure in their 300K bid.
It’s 300K either way - even if the second buyer doesn’t have one penny left after taking care of the down payment and house payment. Shouldn’t matter to the buyer, but the first one wins out because they could do a security appeal to you. Just one example. Pics could be even worse! “Here is me and my wife and our two children, all Caucasian, dressed nicely and affording a professional photographer!” Does that send a message that another couple may not be able to send and could influence a seller?
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When my youngest was looking her realtor said no letters were allowed. Her realtor was able to say they had horses and planned to keep it a horse property. It didn’t help they were the higher bid but the seller went with someone who was going to use it as an animal sanctuary.
The place they bought was for sale by owner, the owner learned all about them as she met them in person.
For rentals letters and photos a definite No! There are fair housing laws.
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For what it’s worth, NYC has long had much lower serious crime rates than any other big city in the country. When there are shocking crimes (most recently people with obvious mental illness pushing people onto subway tracks), they really stand out. Not that the crime rate is zero, and for sure some neighborhoods aremuch, much more dangerous than others.
I know zero about Columbus! I confess that I have never visited Ohio.
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Letters are common in my area, and when I was buying 5 years ago, suggested by the realtor. The areas I have lived in here in my current city are very neighborhood focused. Values matter, race doesn’t, which is what the letters reflect. Local roots and understanding, kids, care for the environment. The house next door just sold and the seller today said the prospective buyers had written letters. And offered far over asking price.
I’ve never been to Columbus and basically never been to Ohio except for a day or two working in Cleveland and flying into Cincinnati to evaluate a potential acquisition opportunity in Kentucky (plus driving across the state). So, no Ohio hate from me.
But, in contrast to places with higher murder rates than NY, we live in an exurb of Boston whose crime rate is 83% lower than the national average.
On the question of where to move, @Schadret, for years, I hoped to convince ShawWife to move someplace warmer for the winter or full-time. I know NJ and understand your lack of interest in living there full time, though much of NJ is actually much nicer than people’s image. To find a new place, ShawWife and I took trips and extended stays in Tucson, San Diego, Sausalito (spent three winters living on a houseboat), Longboat Key and Sanibel Island, among other places. I love the mountains and we stayed for weeks in Canmore (Alberta), Boulder, and Santa Fe. I did not get much interest in any of these areas from her in some cases because the artistic community was not up to her standards and in some cases because we couldn’t get a place with room for a professional art studio, and in some cases because the real estate market was so expensive that we would have to move rather than split time between Boston and that destination. I was going to look in the Sarasota area, but after six years of looking, we purchased a house in the same safe exurb and the location of this house is so nice that we don’t have much of an interest in leaving (we actually turned down entreaties to join friends in a magnificent trip in Italy, a country we love to travel in, to stay with friends in Martha’s Vineyard and Boothbay Harbor, etc.). So, I’m not longer looking.
@Schadret, I think I 'd start with the basic criteria, which include cost of living, access to culture, crime, access to health care, access to airport, taxes and other things people have mentioned. I would weight them and prioritize locations that meet those criteria you weight most highly. I personally think about how difficult it is to get from the location to wonderful places in nature because I value being in nature. ShawWife weights the quality of the artistic community and here connection to the local community. Once we were able to buy a house in nature in the greater Boston area, I am happy to stay put. And ShawWife is very happy staying. It’s not perfect, but we were able to find a place that scored well on some of our most highly weighted criteria.
City crime rates can be very deceiving as it varies so much by neighborhood. My current city got a bad rap a few years ago but the area I live in is at least as my former suburban neighborhood. And it’s also as safe as the small town area where H and I grew up (safer than some places there).
But when I mention where I live, people assume it’s full of crime.
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Right. This is very irritating as a Chicagoan. There are plenty of safe places to live and enjoy in this city – and I’m talking about the city, not the suburbs. When we meet people elsewhere who make negative comments, it tells us a lot about the media diet those people are choosing to consume, and nothing at all about our hometown.
I really liked Columbus when I visited. The state politics would be rough on me, but the city itself was great. I loved the neighborhood near OSU.
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Yes, Upper Arlington, Dublin, Westerville, New Albany. Bexley and Clintonville closer to town. There are definitely places to avoid, and they will be obvious when you’re there.
I’ve been to both cities recently, and the comparison to Gary, IN illustrates the limitations of Neighborhood Scout. Wow.
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I live in rural Michigan and if you listened to my neighbors, you would think it was a crime hotspot (it isn’t).
How I feel about crime statistics? Be aware of your surroundings and don’t do anything stupid.
I was once in Marquette Michigan and the nightly news opened with the theft of a kayak. That’s a crime and it’s part of a statistic. But I wasn’t worried about the huge crime spree.
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Love our area, but in CO there seems to be an awful lot of theft of cars and catalytic converters. (Probably feels worse for those of us on NextDoor, seeing related posts.) However our own risk is greatly reduced because our cars stay in the garage, and they are not the most sought after models.
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It seems that stealing catalytic converters is like an occupation now it seems so commonplace! 
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Youtube is dangerous. Here’s why… 
Dream downsizing plan A:
- 1-5 acre of land in central FL an hour’s drive from WDW (but DH will never go for this because of the FL weather)
- zoned so I can have 3-4 tiny houses on it legally, each with water, sewer, & electric hook up.
- tiny house #1 = me & DH. There’s a 10’x30’ model I have my eye on.
- tiny house #2 = married couple we’re close friends with. They don’t have kids. The husband is legally blind. Have discussed this idea w/them and we all think it might be really helpful to be neighbors in retirement.
- tiny house #3 = smaller than the other 2 (probably 8x20). Use as guest house for when other friends, relatives, our kids come to visit. Or as man cave for DH & friend/neighbor to watch Star Trek reruns on super loud TV.
- OK if tiny house #3 set up entirely as off grid. Composting toilet, solar power, water harvesting.
- space for a tiny house #4 in case SIL (DH’s sister, who will be divorced at that point) wants a cheap/free place to park a tiny house to live in during retirement. She’ll be on a very fixed income. She’d have to pay for her electric, though.
- water harvesting set up for each tiny house roof
- greywater harvesting for sink & washing machine waste water to be diverted from each tiny house to fruit trees that we’ll plant on the property. All other water would go into sewer system (septic or city sewer).
- solar power for each tiny house w/enough panels where we could all live OK off of solar power for a few days if we had to.
- room for a big garden
- room for creation of a nice fire pit area.
- room for us to build a covered deck or patio next to each tiny house (but not attached to the tiny house) so one could enjoy the outdoors across multiple seasons.
- enough room on the property so each tiny house felt private from the other one. This could be achieved with landscaping, of course.
- 15-20 min drive from civilization, where “civilization” = a regular grocery store, a Walmart, something like that. Not just a podunk down corner store.
- if no city water available, well already drilled.
- hour’s drive from a major airport.
- space for a small shed to hold gardening equipment
- large above-ground water tank (and by ‘large,’ I’m talking 1500-2000 gallon sized)
- good Mexican, Asian, and Indian food available w/in a 30 min drive. But will settle on just Mexican and Asian if I have to.
- climate conducive to growing fig trees
Dream downsizing Plan B:
All of the above except these changes:
- if older daughter ends up settling down in TX, tiny house village set up a 15-20 min drive from Georgetown, TX. We’ll vacation in WDW or Disneyland instead of going to WDW once a week. And on cheap enough land that I’ll have money left over to buy a DVC timeshare contract so we can then vacation at DVC properties in Hawaii, CA, and FL.
- each tiny house set up w/foundation-mounting strap thingies for however they handle mobile home foundations in CA, for example, for earthquake preparedness.
- hurricane shutters for each tiny house if we’re in hurricane territory.
I saw a video the other day of this one tiny house manufacturer’s customers had sent them photos of his 2 tiny houses in Iowa that survived a direct from a tornado. Both houses survived totally intact…1 got picked up (including the attached trailer it was on) and tossed into the Mississippi River, where it was floating on the river. And the other one basically got knocked over on its side. Roof stayed on and everything. It was pretty impressive. The homeowners were HOME and INSIDE when it happened…they survived just fine.
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I can’t remember where I saw this link first. I really like the concept of this neighborhood in Ithaca NY. (I just don’t want to live in Ithaca NY).
Do you know of any similar neighborhoods around the country?
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There’s a lot of new housing developments that are popping up around Arizona like that, but they don’t all have community gardens…most have a community pool, big common area park, etc. in the middle and everybody’s front door looks out to the common space like it shows in the drawings/pictures from the weblink you posted. I think it’s a great idea.
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Very nice, but I couldn’t do Ithaca either.
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There is a lot about this I like!
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Sounds appealing. But I’ve heard enough discussions about HOA woes that it would be a factor.
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