Are there any Dopers out there who live in/near southern West Virginia? Mrs. Gap and I have been looking for a retirement house and have seen some very affordable and charming houses in this area. I realize it’s coal country and somewhat depressed, but in general, what’s it like to live there? We currently live in the north S.F. Bay area and the prices are so insane that retirement here is a non-issue except for the wealthy or those who have owned their property for years. We were both born and raised in areas with “4 season” climate so winters aren’t a problem to us.
I’m more familiar with South East West Viriginia but most of southern West Virginia is very rural and the roads can be bad and you are usually pretty far anything interesting. My In-Laws have a summer place that cost nearly nothing and has taxes so low compared to NY/NJ & California that it seems like nothing. However I feel like we are 45 minutes from the nearest real store. If you check on google maps for West Virginia they are near Gap Mills. With anywhere in Southern WV I would ensure you were in a town or very near one.
Climate: Cold in the winter but not too bad and the summers are nice as it cools off most nights.
Hope that helps a little.
If you are serious about that particular area I strongly recommend you visit it for a few weeks to get the feel of the place. Ideally once in the summer and once in the winter. To say it is ‘somewhat depressed’ is an understatement, and it will take some getting used to. Remember that coming from California pretty much everything will look cheap so don’t let that be your deciding factor. Don’t base your decision on whether people like it or don’t like it. What matters is how much you want to live there.
We moved from the SF Bay Area to NW Montana 6 years ago to retire after almost 2 years of looking for the perfect place, and yes, it can really take that long to do a thorough search of the entire US.
I recommend you check out www.findyourspot.com and go through it separately first, and then together, and see what places it thinks you should look at. Once you narrow your top choices down to 3-4 you should schedule some vacations (or extended visits) to see if they live up to your expectations.
Perhaps southern WV is the perfect place for you, or perhaps it not. Only one way to find out.
I’m pretty familiar with it. I can run you through what I’d consider pertinent information:
If you want big city lifestyle like you have in San Francisco, you cannot get that anywhere in West Virginia. In Southern WV, Charleston (the State Capital) will have many amenities you’d expect a city to have. It has a decent enough airport in terms of access to flights it’s small, but not so small that major airlines don’t run the larger planes out of it, and they have many flights a day unlike some small airports that only fly planes out a few times a week. The Charleston area is your best bet for “national chain” type restaurants, but even some pretty standard ones may not be there. There’s a few nice local places. They do have a symphony in Charleston, a venue for major concerts and a small theater scene. But this is all going to be just the barest of any of these things versus what you can find in a true major city. But for Southern West Virginia it’s literally the only place that will have any of this stuff.
If you live in Charleston or the county it is in, generally the roads are good enough and are well plowed that you can drive whatever you want. If you live in a more rural Southern WV county you legitimately need to have a 4WD vehicle and you need to probably have a pair of tire chains and you need to know how to drive in the snow. Snowfall there isn’t insane, but it happens every year. Most importantly, it’s snowfall on roads that will appear to be near-vertical and so far in the country that “treating” the roads means waiting for the temperature to rise enough to melt the snow/ice away.
If you’re looking for something more “out there” than Charleston, Beckley and Fayetteville are both much smaller and have less amenities (but they are actual towns, at least.) Also they are both right near the New River Gorge and are hot beds for white water rafting enthusiasts, the natural beauty of the areas around those towns is extremely high, and if you’re into the outdoors and really don’t care about the city life at all these would be good towns to look at as basically one second outside of town you’re right there in the woods but you at least still have access to some basic amenities.
Closer to Virginia Bluefield is also a nice small town, due to a combination of climate and elevation issues Bluefield is very temperate even during summer. It’s rare enough for temperatures to get over 90 F there that the town gives away free lemonade every time it happens in celebration.
Weather wise, Southern WV will have four seasons, and much warmer summers than you have in the S.F. Bay and much colder winters. Typically expect lows in the single digits every year, and highs in the high 90s every year.
WV is generally very poor. Most likely if you’ve been able to live even a middle class lifestyle in the S.F. Bay area your accumulated savings for retirement will make you upper class or rich by Southern WV standards. Much of the housing stock in Southern WV reflects the economic situation of the region, and thus will not be very nice. Most of the towns I’ve mentioned do have nice older homes, there aren’t a lot of large sprawling new development housing complexes in WV. The closest to that sort of suburbia would be the Teays Valley area which is right in between Huntington and Charleston. Charleston proper has nice homes but they’re all older, some 100 years or more, in the hills to the South of downtown (this neighborhood is called “South Hills.”)
Crime wise, WV has very low rates of crime, I think usually it’s listed as the State with the lowest rate of violent crime in the country. There is a bad problem throughout Appalachia of pill addiction and meth addiction, and there are some minor property crime problems related to this–although not nearly as bad as you’d expect. While large parts of Appalachia fit the appellation of the “Great White Ghetto”, not all of it does. Further a lot of the people lost to that are on a “draw” and don’t typically have to outright steal to feed their habits.
If you really buy there, use some common sense and drive around the neighborhood. The “eye test” is pretty good at telling you if it’s run down or not. But again, even poor neighborhoods in WV are not dangerous. Generally speaking the better housing stock is on elevation, and not in river or creek beds. The reason being is simply, those hollers and valleys are frequent sites of flash floods, and people of means have long since built their homes away from that to remove the risk of those natural disasters.
I should have mentioned that findyourspot.com is great for showing you areas that fit what you think you want, as opposed to a few random towns or cities. We were pointed to particular town in Montana and when we got there we didn’t really like it, however we fell in love with a town only 40 minutes away that we would have never known about had we not learned about the first town using this website. Of course YMMV.
I think Martin Hyde’s assessment is a good one. I spent a considerable amount of time in my college years in Monroe County (home of the aforementioned Gap Mills, I believe, and not far from Beckley and Bluefield), where my roommate’s parents had the old family homestead. Monroe is actually an agricultural county where dairy farms abound in the many valleys and is altogether pleasant. It can get extremely cold but you will find few days burdened with the type of mid-Atlantic humidity that I get here in Maryland.
You will go inevitably insane if big city entertainment nearby is important to you. But there’s actually a lot within a day’s drive and for a retiree that’s not the worst thing. You can make a three- or four-day weekend to someplace different with some frequency and then come home to the peace of country roads.
If my family situation were different I would give this option some consideration for myself as you can really stretch your retirement dollar.
I don’t know if I’d tackle the coal country, though.
Thanks so far for your replies. Mrs. Gap and I are not “big city” folk, though we do feel at home there when we go. I was born in Chicago’s south side, raised in the ‘burbs and have lived there, on the north side of Chicago (Rogers Park) and in the L.A. suburbs. I’ve also lived in the high desert of California, in the mountains of California, and in Florida. We now live in “Wine Country” now, north of S.F., and mostly stay out of the city. We’re not big on nightlife/cultural stuff, so missing the opera won’t be a problem. Small towns are more attractive to us than cities now, and we enjoy being outdoors when we can. Snow’s no problem, there was plenty of that in the mountains (we lived at 5000’). 4WD and common sense go a long way.
Mostly we want to live in an area that we can afford to live in on Social Security with a little augmentation here and there. California’s prices are NUTS, so we are driven to look elsewhere. We are “get along” types, and living in Florida helped us understand and cope with vastly different political attitudes than we have.
I’ll check out findyourspot.com but won’t be holding my breath. Most of the sites I’ve visited in regards to “retirement” work on assumptions that may be useful for “typical” retirees, but we tend to think outside those common assumptions.
I’m from southeastern Kentucky and generally agree with Martin Hyde. I would first say that if you have a guaranteed 100% retirement income it can be a beautiful place to live. If you’re thinking of part time job, hobby business, or buying into a business you could be very disappointed. This a chronically depressed area and there’s not much money to be made.
My first thought. If you’re thinking of finding a rustic mountain cabin or designer chalet you’ll have to build it yourself. There is not much designer anything here - you may be able to buy an OK house but your neighbors may be in a house trailer. In most rural areas there are no building codes.
Regarding climate, in late fall and early spring there can be weeks of depressing, gloomy, rainy weather. Consider flooding potential when looking at houses and think about how you would feel to stay at home for say, a week at a time because you don’t want to damage a vehicle in a flooded creek, muddy backroad, or snowy ditch.
Regarding crime, if you’re in a small community or the house is easily visible from a main road you’re fine, probably safer than most places. BUT - if you decide to re-visit Florida for a month there are literally predators looking for untended property to steal to support their “pain clinic” (lots of those) pill habit. There are scrappers that will haul off any piece of metal they think is abandoned. Lots of desperate people with no future around…some are salt of the earth…some not.
So basically if you mostly stay around the house with sufficient income it’s great. If you only want a home base to return to between trips choose carefully. And guns are just another tool in Appalachia.
West Virginia isn’t bad at all unless you are one of the groups of people caught in multi-generational poverty that live there in large numbers (no snark implied). It is an extremely pretty state and I have had friends and relatives (including a college professor) that learned to love it just fine. The cost of living is a huge advantage over high cost of living states like California. I don’t know about you but I find the amenities of a larger city to be greatly overrated. In my day to day life, I only need a single decent grocery store and and internet access to provide anything that I could reasonably want. If I ever found myself looking up ‘cities with good public transportation’, that would probably be the day that I put a bullet through my head because I simply don’t live that way nor would ever want to.
Living in a small town or even the boonies these days is very different than it was 20 years ago (and I really liked it even then). Just subscribe to Amazon Prime and you can have virtually anything non-perishable you want within 2 days delivered straight to your door for no charge. It isn’t like you will be cut off from civilization is you move to an out of the way area. You can have a cheap house, land and almost anything they sell anywhere else with just a few clicks of the mouse.
You are a retiree so you don’t have to worry about decent public schools or anything else that drives down the property values for other demographics. One thing that I would question is why you picked West Virginia in particular? It can be a fine place for many people like yourself but it certainly isn’t the only one. If your main criteria is ‘places that are much less expensive than California’ then that includes the vast majority of the U.S. by land area. The really expensive cities aren’t that big if you break out a color coded map. That is good news because it gives you many options. NYC, Boston and Honolulu are right out but you could move to most other places and still come out greatly ahead.
Actually - and this will be a shocker for many - the schools are one good reason to move to West Virginia (at least certain parts); some of the best schools for the lowest cost to live you will find anywhere.
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Since this is basically an informal poll of user knowledge and experiences, it is better suited to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
One thing I forgot to mention in my earlier post is that there is a fairly significant shortage of quality medical care facilities, a fact of life facing my elderly parents who live in a small WV town near the Ohio River. If you have a complicated medical situation, it can be a hike to find the kind of facilities to which those of us who live in more metropolitan areas are accustomed.
I grew up in northern WV, and my family was originally from Richwood. I’m familiar with most of the state, though I’ve only driven through Bluefield a few times and don’t really know much about it.
The economy in WV sucks. The state did really well back in the days of the steel mills and coal mines, but the coal is high in sulfur. EPA regulations made high sulfur coal less desirable, and automation took away a lot of the mining jobs. The steel mills have mostly shut down due to foreign competition. When I was growing up, people were certain that the mines and the steel industry would both recover, and the state was reluctant to invest in other economic opportunities. By the 80s it became clear that neither industry was going to recover (at least not in any way that would be a major help the state economically) and the state finally began looking elsewhere. The state is still playing catchup, with many towns being smaller in population now than they were in the 70s.
This is good in some ways for retiring there, as it means that land is dirt cheap and housing in general is cheap. It’s not so great for businesses though, and that means that a lot of the convenient businesses you may be used to might not be around. As was posted upthread, you’ve always got online ordering available, but that’s not as convenient as going to a store and checking something out where you can touch and and play with it.
Health care has had a problem in the state as well. Health insurance and liability laws combined with lower average salaries than the rest of the country have driven a lot of doctors away from the state. If you are close to Morgantown, it’s a teaching hospital as well as the local trauma center, and the facilities there are top notch. Morgantown is a college town though, with students usually outnumbering the rest of the townfolks. Aside from Morgantown, your next best medical care is going to be near one of the other “bigger” cities in WV (there aren’t any true “big” cities there) like Charleston, Huntington, or Wheeling (at the north end of the state). I don’t know how good the medical facilities are around Bluefield.
One thing I like about WV is that once you drive about 10 minutes out of even the biggest cities, you are out in the wilderness. You don’t need to be in the southern more rural part of the state to be out in the woods. On the other hand, this is exactly what my wife hated about the state when we lived there (we moved there for a couple of years after we were married when I worked in a power plant along the Ohio River). The lack of “civilization” as she called it made her feel isolated. I loved it, she hated it.
Travel through the state is actually not bad. There was this idea several decades ago that the state was being held back economically because there weren’t any decent roads going in and out of the state. After some successful lobbying in Washington, a good set of highway roads were built connecting to even the more remote southern parts of the state. This did not cause the economic boom that some folks thought would happen, but it did make the southern part of the state a lot less isolated.
I personally like WV. I grew up there, and if it weren’t for the economy of the state, I would still live there.
I kinda joke when I say it, but I always tell people that WV has four square feet of flat space and everything else is on a hill. I’m exaggerating of course, but get used to hills.
People visiting from flat areas (like Iowa) have said that the mountains made them feel claustrophobic. Having grown up in WV, I find the flatlands of Iowa to be a bit uncomfortable. I like having hills around me.
But because everyone has guns, muggings are extremely rare. To get shot in Appalachia, you basically have to be the town asshole or otherwise intentionally make yourself a target.
I grew up in Appalachia and don’t remember shootings being all that rare. Are you implying that my town had a higher than average number of assholes?
I don’t know about WV specifically, but IME in the Midwest small towns are very insular. Folks who moved in 20 years ago are still thought of as newcomers.
If you are the type to want to go through all your retirement years with just the two (and eventually just the one) of you always being eyed with mild distaste bordering on outright hostility, then move to a small town in an area with a bad economy and bad schools.
And another thing I thought of over the weekend… 
You wrote of great deals on housing. You may find some amazing deals compared to SF but a higher-end house could be very hard to sell if you don’t like it here. There aren’t many good paying jobs to generate buyers. I highly reccommend renting through late summer, winter, and next spring to experience the climate extremes and general lay of the land.
Not quite as cheap, but a few more amenities: the Tri-Cities area of NE Tennessee and SW Virginia. (The Tri-Cities are officially Bristol VA/TN, and Johnson City and Kingsport, TN, though there are some smaller towns on the edge of the area, like Jonesborough, TN, and Abingdon, VA, that have a lot going for them.)
And a little less cheap (but still way cheaper than SF), but more amenities than the Tri-Cities: the Roanoke, VA area is nice.
Both of these places are on the I-81 corridor and have airports, so it doesn’t take forever to get to civilization.
Heck, Roanoke almost IS civilization.
(I kid, people of Big Lick, I kid)
I grew up in Bristol and couldn’t see living there now. When we retire? Maybe, I’m not sure. I definitely prefer the DC area.