where to live in georgia?!?!

December 31, 2006 10:51 AM

i'm going to be moving to georgia in may with my fiance. he's from augusta and would like to move back there. i personally would like to be somewhat closer to atlanta. i want to live in a town with culture and i would like to be able to have some land (acres away from neighbors). please help me decide where i should move.
posted by lilafain to society & culture (15 comments total)

This is a toughie lilafain. Are your employment opportunities hindered by living in Augusta or is it just culture?

Honestly, this is something that the two of you need to work out. Strangers on the internet may not be so helpful for this one.
posted by k8t at 10:56 AM on December 31, 2006

Don't know how much money you're looking to spend but you might want to look at Watkinsville which is right next to Athens. You're only 70 miles from Atlanta and you have the great college culture of Athens. There are lots of great metro Atlanta towns that are up and coming but I'm afraid it wil be difficult to be acres away from neighbors.
posted by ehamilt0n at 11:00 AM on December 31, 2006

Yeah, being acres away from neighbors is kind of a tough order, because large acreage tends to be either (1) large tracts with no power or water or (2) busted down into <5-acre lots by developers and hooked up with services (even in faraway rural areas), and people move in. Most affordable rural property is in category #2.
posted by rolypolyman at 11:21 AM on December 31, 2006

I'll second Athens.

Acres of land around Atlanta will be very expensive.
posted by donpardo at 11:28 AM on December 31, 2006

I lived for a while in Savannah and it sucked.

I'd go with Athens.
posted by yesno at 11:59 AM on December 31, 2006

Athens or Macon are really the only two blips on the map anywhere between August and Atlanta with 'culture' as I assume you mean it.
posted by iurodivii at 12:14 PM on December 31, 2006

Nearly everybody who moved to Atlanta since 1980 wanted what you want, lilafain. Hence, the not-so-fresh hellish sprawls that are Cobb, Forsyth and Gwinnett counties, nowadays. Even such formerly inconvenient haunts of moonshiners as Cumming and Dacula are now sprouting gated communities heavily advertised by Realtors®.

What you really need to consider is that Atlanta (and all of north Georgia, for that matter) are areas with only very rudimentary transportation besides automobiles, and so the traffic, especially at rush hour, is horrendous, and there are no practical alternatives for most people. So, particularly if you or your fiance work outside your home, or are frequently airline travelers, you need to consider carefully where you'll be working, as a major factor in choosing where to live.

In the 15 years I lived in the Atlanta area, I worked for companies in Gwinnett and Forsyth counties, and lived in Gwinnett County. When I moved to Atlanta from Boston in 1989, I lived 4 miles from work, and my commute was about 10 minutes, door to door. It took 35 minutes to get from my house to the airport. I was in heaven, after fighting Boston traffic for many years.

When I left the Atlanta area in 2004, I lived 11 miles from work, and it routinely took me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to do the commute, each way, due to traffic congestion on overloaded roads like GA400 and Highway 20, which were essentially country roads in 1989. From the north side of Gwinnett County (Buford- Mall of Georgia area), a 35 mile trip to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was routinely a 2+ hour adventure, except around rush hour periods, when it could take 3+ hours.

East of Atlanta, along the I-20 corridor towards Augusta, the same sprawl that happened in the last 20 years of the 20th century in the counties immediately north of Atlanta, is beginning, now that Cobb, Forsyth, and Gwinnett counties are so developed. In the '80's and 90's there was less residential development interest to the south and east of Atlanta, since the lakes and the mountains to the north of the city intially drew people transferring into the area. But it's now becoming quite profitable to convert agricultural properties along I-20 into sub-divisions, and even formerly rural areas like Putnam and Greene counties are starting to look pretty suburban. However, if you're willing to land in a still rural area east of Athens and northwest of Augusta, like Wilkes County, you could bag a property like this little 52 acre "farm", complete with house, outbuildings and equipment, for something like $600K.
posted by paulsc at 1:36 PM on December 31, 2006 [1 favorite]

My sister-in-law and her family just moved from the I-20 corridor to the I-85 corridor, substituting one type of Met-lanta sprawl for another. The area east of Athens looks your best bet; and while Atlanta is certainly not Augusta, it's not necessarily a 'town with culture', unless your idea of culture is sitting in traffic.
posted by holgate at 4:51 PM on December 31, 2006

Any chance you could convince the boy to consider Chattanooga, TN. It's withing striking distance of Augusta and it a lot less crowded, has a good university, a decent down town, different economics. I liked it on several visits there.

I'd rather be in hell with a backache than Atlanta. I lived for 6 months in Marietta once, and spent 3 of it in my car. Ick.

Come to think of it, that would have to be one helluva boyfriend to convince ME to move there! Good luck, though.
posted by FauxScot at 6:36 AM on January 1, 2007

Atlanta has become in recent years everything bad about a big city without anything good. It borders on a boom-town, and the population has overgrown the supporting infrastructure maybe two-fold.

And the sprawl, Jesus, the sprawl. Before long fully 1/3 of Georgia is going to be considered "Atlanta Area". For example, only 400,000 people live in the "city" of Atlanta. But over 5 million live in the "Metropolitan Area" of Atlanta. So, 8 times as many people live "around" Atlanta as in it. That means traffic all the time. Look at this Google satellite image, and realize every tiny squiggly line you see is a neighborhood. It's a labyrinth.

The traffic problem cannot be overstated. You are quite likely to get stranded in traffic on what a normal person would consider off-peak hours. "Rush Hour" is about 4 hours in the morning, and 4 hours in the evening.

I knew someone who moved to Atlanta and they were 3 miles from their office, and they could *WALK* faster than they could drive. On days they had to drive (poor weather) they would leave at 5am to only "moderate" traffic.

Your wishes of being "near Atlanta" and being isolated with acreage are simply incompatible.
posted by Ynoxas at 7:55 AM on January 1, 2007

Conyers and Covington are both growing pretty fast but are still very affordable and accessible to the city.
posted by eggerspretty at 8:39 AM on January 1, 2007

Conyers is where my sis-in-law used to live. She's now near Winder, which should give her a few years before the sprawl catches up. I didn't find much about Conyers to like.

If you're not limited to GA, then might somewhere like Clemson be an option?
posted by holgate at 9:52 AM on January 1, 2007

Athens thirded (or fourthed).

You might also want to consider Buford, but it doesn't have any culture other than the Mall of Georgia, and it's not on the way to Augusta.

Covington or Conyers are other choices as eggerspretty says, the Covington home prices are fully 1/4th what Alpharetta home prices are and they are very nice homes.
posted by arimathea at 2:37 PM on January 1, 2007

I am from Augusta (lived there through middle and high school and now sporadically visit) and now live in Atlanta (past 5ish years). What you want is impossible. For a couple of reasons. I won't get into the Atlanta Traffic(TM) or the culturally devoid suburbs North, East, or South of Atlanta. Perhaps what you are asking for in your original question is something more like "I want to live (weekdays) in a town with some culture and then on weekends and vacations, have a place in the boonies / mountains / pastoral lands that I can visit where my neighbors will be acres away."

If so, you might be in luck.

One can live a well-cultured life in Atlanta, especially if you don't need *world-class* opera, ballet, and symphony-type stuff, but instead want music, food, and solid (okay, mediocre really) museum options. Inside the perimeter is the only place I'd live. There are many areas of Atlanta with beautiful terrain and homes on 1/2 acre or more. If you have north of $500,000 to spend on a home, you will be able to have a very nice, large home on a tree-lined street in the middle of the city. For $300,000 you can live comfortably (but within easy sight of neighbors) in safe neighborhoods with decent public schools and other stuff.

Culturally Augusta is, um, a backwater. Now that James Brown is dead, you'll be even worse off. There is a symphony and a ballet and some museums, but they are adequate for a town of 250,000. Not particularly inventive or exploratory, so I hope you like the Nutcracker. Again. Augusta has a large population of south asians so you can get decent Indian food, but there's not a lot of other options. There are a few good restaurants, but many Augustans think that Fridays is a good restaurant, so I hope you're okay with chain food.

Augusta is still pretty, and has some very nice areas. It's a fine place to raise kids and it is improving. The downtown (there is one building over 12 stories, so...) now has a smattering of cool bars, some good eats, and actually has foot traffic on some evenings. The college that is there, along with the medical school (and the army base) means that there are some young people around. Augusta to Atlanta is a straight, boring, ride of 2 hours flat to the eastern edge of Atlanta (atlanta is 30 miles across so...) without much traffic. So it's a do-able daytrip that I took often as a kid and that my parents still make. It might be hard to see a show or stay late in Atlanta and then go home to Augusta, but, it's definitely possible.

If I wanted "country home" within striking distance of Atlanta and Augusta, I'd look at:

Madison, GA. There are nice ante-bellum homes in downtown. You'd be close to I-20 for a quick ride into Atlanta (1 hr... more during rush hour) or Augusta (1 hr). It's still cheap. There is a lake out that way (Oconee) with a planned private golf community / retirement-community-type thing. So it may be getting more people and more stuff going on soon. Social Circle is another town nearby.

Jackson / Jackson Lake is southeast of Atlanta, by about the same amount. It's not on a main road, so it's a bit more off the beaten track (and probably slower into ATL and AUG). Never been here.

Thompson, GA is a cute rural town way outside of Augusta. It's also on I-20, for a straight shot to ATL or AUG. I worked there at a summer job in Highschool. You could probably buy land out there pretty cheap. And you wouldn't starve to death or anything. This is a lot closer to Augusta (30 minutes).



On preview: I see a recommendation for Wilkes county. That is *far* from Atlanta and pretty far from Augusta. It's also in the middle of the country, so don't expect much fine dining, or music, or, well, much of anything.
posted by zpousman at 8:06 AM on January 2, 2007

Columbia, SC is an hour from Augusta. It's a cute little town as well. There's not as much to do as there is in Atlanta, but it's much for a city (and much more fun stuff to do) than Augusta.
posted by zpousman at 8:07 AM on January 2, 2007