Update and some Housing Thoughts

Still no news on when placement is going to be. We are hoping by the end of the month.

Right now we're in the middle of a really important decision: moving. We want to move to a larger house within a couple miles of our current house.

One of our top locations is just a bit to the south and east. The problem is that the school district is terrible. Well, they're terrible all over Georgia, but this one is especially bad. Many other homeowning parents manage by relying on charter/magnet schools and private schools.

There's a lot of really complicated issues about crime, education, class and race involved here. I try to make decisions based on pragmatism, and it's amazing how much irrational weirdness and fear is involved in neighborhood choice.

Listen to this quote from a forum on local neighborhoods:

If you are going to visit ___ I would suggest you do it in the day only and even then you could be robbed or jacked at any red light. Be sure to get gas before you go there.

I called my husband over and we read that and both laughed like crazy. It's referring to a neighborhood he goes to almost every day for work. My mother lives nearby.

I used to live next to a really bad neighborhood in Miami. I've also stayed in a squat house in the lower East Side in the early 1990s. I know what bad neighborhoods are like. There is no way I would walk more than 100 feet from my house in Miami alone after dark. To me, a bad neighborhood means gunshots, dealers on corners, broken crack vials, burglar bars on every window, cages on A/C units so crackheads don't steal them for the copper, mean pit bulls behind chainlink fences, robberies and murders.

It doesn't mean subdivisions with well-maintained brick ranch homes on quiet streets where the only sounds are birds singing and children playing.

The neighborhood that quote is talking about is a middle-class, predominantly African-American suburb. There are also a fair number of older retired white people there who resisted the initial white flight, a few younger ones who were attracted by the lower property prices, plus some newer immigrant arrivals.