Finding a retirement location, Part 2 of X
In
Part 1, I made a list of states that were possible candidates for retirement. In a nutshell, after defining our desired retirement community criteria, we had narrowed our search down to 13 states. This time I started with a list of hundreds of communities in those 13 states, pulled from online demographic data. My focus was on four things:
1. Community size. Our ideal is a small town, either in a wooded or beach area, that's within 45 minutes of a city. (G loves beaches, and we both love the Blue Ridge and Smoky mountains.) We're also considering towns of 200k or less that "feel like a small town" or are the main hub for a lot of other small towns in the area. I threw out most of the communities on my list during this pass. A lot of "towns" that had the right population on paper ended up being suburbs of big cities, were way too remote, or were in some other way not suitable.
2. Walkability. This is usually a neighborhood-specific thing rather than a city-specific thing, so although I began with the
Walkscore web site, I also researched communities in the surrounding areas. And several more places were given the boot.
3. Churches. We attend a particular type of church and want to continue doing so. We threw out communities that did not have a church of our variety either in that community or within a reasonable driving distance.
4. Fracking (aka "whether you actually own the land beneath you, whether it's growing more unstable by the hour, and whether your water supply is being poisoned in addition to all of this"). I removed communities whose land is directly over a fracking initiative. With two states in particular, Colorado and North Carolina, new fracking has recently been permitted beneath communities that we are otherwise very interested in. Which
sucks. We have zero desire to end up in Oklahoma's predicament, though, so... no. If you're curious about regional energy/drilling data,
here's a good resource.
After those four culls, I was left with a list of only 25 towns in 8 states. In the order that they currently interest us:
In case anyone's curious, Florida's towns are all at the top because of the lack of a state income tax and the fact that our three remaining parents live there.
We don't in any way consider this list exhaustive. It's a starting point for our explorations. As we're visiting these places, we expect to find other interesting places nearby or along the way. Also, some of these communities are less than ideal to us in some ways but stellar in others, so we left them in the mix even though we have concerns.
During my next phase I plan to look at local crime statistics, city-level cost of living and taxes, and condo availability/living, since we love living in our condo and plan to be on the road in a camper for long stretches. I also want to dig deeper into each area's Walkscores and the town-level migraine indices.
Also, wanted to pass this on: the best resource I've found so far for researching potential places to live is the
City-Data website. They had lots of first-hand, no-BS information on every location I was interested in. I was also very impressed when I stumbled upon
this guy's potential hometown analysis. He looks like he'd fit right in around here.
I've cut out most items containing gluten too because it's better for the digestive system.
