Ms. P and I will be looking to move after I retire in 4 years or so. We’d like to live somewhere with a lower than average cost of living, with a river nearby. A city the size of Charleston is perfect. We couldn’t live somewhere that has an overwhelming number of Trump supporters, but we don’t need a liberal echo chamber like we have in the DC area either. We saw that there is a UU church and a couple of synagogues, so that tells us that there are people around we wouldn’t have to avoid talking religion with. We’ll probably visit sometime during the summer, but meanwhile I wonder if any Dopers have spent time there.
Well, that part is going to be a problem. While the city will be somewhat less so, WV as a whole is very conservative these days.
What kind of weather are you looking for? I’m originally from Cleveland, and the weather is not much better in WV than it is there. I would not want to live there precisely for that reason. You’re also looking at some pretty hilly terrain and winter driving can be … exciting.
There’s also really not much to do in Charleston, though if you are into hiking, camping, rafting, etc. WV as a whole is a good state for that. The hills/mountains can be spectacular in the fall.
I can’t think of any really good restaurants there either. I’ve spent time there on several occasions and never found any place that was better than mediocre.
Real estate is cheap, though.
I’ve done Wheeling, but not Charleston. It’s topics like these that I like to suggest the city-data forums. The CDF has a subforum on West Virginia (on each state, actually), and also 3 subforums for Charleston, Huntington, and Morgantown.
I use CDF regularly to find data / comments / recommendations for regions and areas. I frequently ask here, too, but usually the CDF will generate more info and opinions. You’ll likely get some wild, wonderful ones too.
I grew up in the mountains, so I have experience with that. We should be able to get a good look at the downtown area this summer. If there’s nothing going on, that’s a big minus. We don’t need a lot to do; we had our time in NYC and DC.
I’ve spent a ton of time there, I was partially writing a post up but realized I was way too broad in my scope. Do you want a general overview of the city? Or just rough positives and negatives?
And the C-D stat page. I found it interesting in taking a quick look at Charleston:
That was the first thing I did when Ms. P mentioned Charleston. It came up because of WV paying people who work from home to live in the state. She had driven through once and remembered the Capitol dome lit up at night.
Rough positives and negatives would be sufficient right now, although I wouldn’t mind a more detailed response. Ms. P is the detail person in our household, though.
I was interested in WV for possible retirement, but it scores very low in health care (#47 according to this)
The 50 states:
According to the Wikipedia page, the city council is fairly blue but who knows if those are local conservative Democrat holdouts.
I’ve only spent a night and a morning there, in order to see the 60s-early-80s era concrete architecture. My sense was that it has a good amount of active commerce still happening downtown, which is unusual for a relatively small city, but that there seem to be only the average amount of cultural draws.
With regards to the concrete architecture: it isn’t really artistic Brutalism but just regular stores and office buildings that seem more “genuine” to me than the buildings in other places that are so new that they look fake, and are still in use so they don’t look run-down. Some of them are ugly parking garages, (along with some not-so-ugly parking garages) but perhaps the abundance of parking lots explains the vibrancy of downtown, or perhaps the other way around.
I want to set a few baseline caveats before going into the pros/cons.
For one, Charleston is a geographically small city, a lot of similar state capitols in other states are bigger because they have annexed smaller communities as they’ve grown. Charleston has never really done that. So a lot of the residents of the area talk in terms of “the Valley” which refers to the Kanawha Valley, which is the river valley Charleston sits in. Charleston dominates the eastern end of the valley, with the State Capitol being near the far eastern edge of the north side of the river. On the south side of the river the city extends a few miles further east, that area is called “Kanawha City” by all the locals, but it is not a separate city, it is part of Charleston proper. Past the end of Kanawha City there’s a few small towns (like less than 1500 pop towns) considered part of the area: Malden, Rand (home town of Randy Moss), Dupont City and Belle on the north side of the river, and Marmet and Chesapeake on the South side of the river. Heading west away from Charleston but still in the valley are some larger small towns/cities (usually in the 8-12,000 population range): South Charleston and Saint Albans south of the river, Dunbar and Nitro north of the river. Saint Albans and Nitro sit the west most of those, and are kind of considered the western end of the “Charleston” area and western end of the valley in local terminology. All of these towns have very immediate access to either Interstate-64 or US Highway 60, and people who work in downtown Charleston coming in from the furthest of these “bedroom” communities have a commute at maximum in the 20ish minute range.
Charleston is divided along river boundaries. Charleston proper sits North of the Kanawha River, take the Southside bridge south and you’re in “South Hills”, a neighborhood of Charleston with a long history of being where the “old money” wealthy as they were, live. There’s lots of normal single family homes here, usually of nice construction quality and usually well maintained, but dating back to the 50s to 80s or so, there aren’t a ton of new construction in South Hills. There’s a number of “local historical” actual mansions in South Hills tied to past governors or executives of companies that used to be centered around Charleston (like some of the coal and chemical companies–none of which have executive offices in the area any longer.)
On the north side of the river is the heart of Charleston, EAST of Elk River, is “Downtown.” West of the Elk River is the “West Side”, one of the few regions in the entire state of WV with a high black population, there’s lots of important WV black historical figures who grew up or lived there. Unfortunately the “West side” has a negative connotation with many whites in the area, and there is some genuine poverty and crime issues there–but there’s also some nicer neighborhoods and homes in the West side.
That’s some of the real basic lay of the land, so the pros/cons should have some better context.
PROS:
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Travel to/from Charleston isn’t “half bad”, Yeager International airport is small but flies real passenger jets, you aren’t riding on tiny turboprops. Before airline deregulation it serviced some of the largest planes, and the air national guard base up there has had C-5 Galaxy planes land and take off there. A lot of the planes flying out of Charleston are jets with 2-2 configuration (2 seats each side of 1 aisle), or 2-3 configuration, with the occasional 3-3. I mention that because some people are antsy about smaller planes.
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With the above caveats, Charleston links directly to Washington DC flight wise, so lots of direct flights to DC. There’s also regular direct flights to Charlotte and Atlanta. Most other major cities (at least last I was there) you have to route through one of the above. There are some direct flights to “vacation” destinations seasonally, there’s budget airlines that operate direct flights from Charleston to Fort Lauderdale and Charleston to Myrtle Beach, SC.
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It’s not terribly useful but there’s an Amtrak station in SC with regular daily service that can take you to Cincinnati or to destinations to the east. I64 can take you from Charleston east into Virginia and eventually the Carolinas (it’s actually one of the major transit routes for Midwesterners looking to get to the Carolinas–east of Charleston this interstate is a toll road), I79 takes you north to Pittsburgh, with a split off to I68 around Morgantown that can take you east through Maryland to head to Baltimore or DC.
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Rough Driving Times to various cities:
Pittsburgh: 3.5 hours
Charlotte: 4 hours
Winston-Salem: 3.5 hours
Cincinnati: 3.5 hours
Columbus: 3 hours
Lexington: 2.5 hours
Charleston is kinda remote in some ways, but also not that far from a lot of other cities in basically every direction.
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Housing is incredibly cheap in Charleston. In Charleston proper most of the nicer homes on the market will be built between 1950 and 1980. There are some really lovely fully renovated Victorians in the East End and a few other historic neighborhoods that are also out there if that’s your thing. They tend to be on the higher end of the price scale for the area, but at a pittance compared to what they would go for virtually anywhere else in the country. If you want newer construction you probably have to look outside Charleston proper, but as I mentioned the region is geographically small. There’s a large unincorporated area called Cross Lanes that borders Charleston where a lot of the new construction that has been does, has been done. There’s a few condo communities downtown. A lot of the housing stock in the small cities that are also part of the Charleston area tend to follow that 1950 to 1980 construction timeframe–Charleston was a booming center of the American chemical industry during that span of time and experience a housing construction boom in that era.
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Charleston is generally politically liberal if we’re talking Charleston proper. The mayor and city council are usually among the more liberal politicians in the state. The State House and Senate members with Charleston districts are almost always Democrats. This isn’t even Joe Manchin style Dems, Charleston dems are often in favor of progressive stuff that’s wildly unpopular in the rest of the state. That being said this is a small enclave, if you get even much outside the core downtown of Charleston itself, even in the small cities that are part of the Charleston area, it turns into hardcore Trump country and quite fast.
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If you like river activities, Charleston is pretty nice. The Kanawha is part of the inland waterways of the United States, the river is fully navigable and used for commercial activity starting a few miles to the east of Charleston, west all the way to the Ohio River. The river is fairly wide and deep, and basically never freezes over. Access to the river is easy and cheap/free, with tons of places to put in, additionally homes on the river with private docks are fairly affordable if you’re comparing them to out of state real estate. Kayaking is very common, as is speed boating, pontoon boating and other pleasure craft. The Elk River that runs north/south through Charleston and meets with the Kanawha is also navigable for several miles and even more for small personal craft.
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There’s significant forested areas basically covering the entirety of WV. Too many to really list out but hiking and outdoor activities are one thing no region of WV is in short supply of, Kanawha State forest is probably the most accessible right by Charleston, but there’s several major outdoor recreation areas in Southern WV that Charleston provides quick access to for day trips.
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Internet is good in the Kanawha Valley, Suddenlink is the local cable company and I think they offer 1 gig downstream in much of Charleston proper, and 400mb in most of the region. Do not even consider Frontier (the phone company) their internet is bad and poorly maintained, and Frontier is a bad company.
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For a city its size I rate Charleston’s ethnic restaurant scene “above average.” There’s a few fine dining places, a few good family style Italian places, there’s a good Banh Mi place in South Charleston, there’s a couple good sushi restaurants, a couple decent Indian restaurants, a good number of American Chinese restaurants that are decent, there’s a nice ice cream parlor down town, there’s a couple Mediterranean (Arab or Greek) places, decent number of local pizza places (I like Graziano’s but tastes vary.) Now that being said, while Charleston covers a lot of the “bases”, it’s not a major city, so if you don’t like the 2 Indian restaurants in town, it’s not like there’s other options for Indian there. There’s some good BBQ / soul food type places in the West side. All the above refers to local restaurants. A lot of the generic chain restaurants are there in large number, back in the 90s they finished construction of “Corridor G” (there were a series of east west highways built by the Appalachian Regional Commission to interconnect the state better), this is US-119 heading South out of Charleston. About 5 minutes outside of Charleston is a large series of “shopping plazas” where you’ll find your big box stores and a lot of the common chain restaurants you can find in most of America. I mention that because while a lot of chain places are ehhh, it’s nice that in WV you have access to them because many parts of the state you have to drive over an hour just to get to any kind of big box store or any kind of national restaurant chain.
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I think for a city its size, healthcare is “good” in the valley. There’s a few major hospitals (Thomas, CAMC General, St. Francis), I have family in Charleston and for routine medical care they have never had issue getting care. There’s actually a lot of immigrant doctors that have settled in WV, it’s an area where doctors are in demand and housing isn’t too expensive. Lots of Indian American doctors have settled in Charleston. Pretty much any kind of specialist you need has offices in Charleston. Routine surgeries are done here as well, I’ve had relatives undergo orthopedic surgeries in Charleston, hernia repairs etc. That being said it isn’t a major city and the specialty surgery field is one area where you may end up sent to Cincinnati or Pittsburgh. I had friends who had to have an in utero surgery to correct spina bifida in the womb, and that sort of thing is not done in Charleston. Basically for your day to day medical needs you don’t need to leave the area. If you have something that requires fairly specialized surgical skills, you may get referred to a hospital a few hours away.
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I don’t really know the violent crime statistics for the Kanawha Valley, Charleston has murders but I’ve walked much of it and never felt unsafe. I think random crime is fairly uncommon in Charleston, there’s plenty of people in the valley who don’t lock their doors at night.
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Charleston has a traditional four season temperate climate. I list that as a positive because I’m the type of person who enjoys four seasons. The summers are warm and humid, but usually not devastating like the deeper south, the spring and fall are really nice, the winters are cold but not bitterly cold like states further north. Winter frequently is mild with “one big” snow a season and that’s it. It rains a lot in Charleston during the spring and summer months but serious storms are rare, WV is fairly immune from most serious natural disasters.
I will do a separate post for the cons as it may be lengthy.
As for the cons, I think the core thing is that the cons are really cons about West Virginia, a state I own a vacation home in and have usually stood up for, but that has a huge amount of problems, some of which I think are much worse now than 4, 5 years ago. I only can really identify a few “Charleston” specific issues, so most of these cons are “endemic” to West Virginia, and if anything in Charleston they are mitigated more than in most of the rest of the state (other than maybe Morgantown and the eastern Panhandle), but mitigated doesn’t mean removed.
CONS:
- WV has serious issues with poverty, poor education, and drug addiction.
- WV has lots of poorly educated people, in prior years I have always felt these are good, salt of the earth people. In the Trump era there has developed what I would call a “celebration of ignorance”, stupid, bigoted and offensive behavior and conversation are far more common now. Trump gave a lot of these people a “permission slip” to stop maintaining what I guess was only a veneer of civility.
- The current WV slate of politicians is among the worst ever seen. The recent legislative session saw plenty of bad ideas become law, and while a few bad ideas were blocked they seem likely to reemerge in future sessions. These bad ideas likely will leave the State’s infrastructure in poor shape, its school will continue to decline, and the health and welfare of its people will continue to regress.
- WV is economically going in the wrong direction, it is losing population, and the kids who go to college in WV rarely stay in the state, exacerbating a serious “brain drain.”
- WV never experienced a housing boom in the last 30 years, which in some sense was a positive (the 2008/9 crash actually didn’t seriously affect WV home prices), but the converse is, a lot of places your house has become a serious investment vehicle. In WV you likely won’t lose value in your home over 10 and 15 years, but it will probably only appreciate 1-2% a year.
- Aforementioned, the infrastructure in WV is horrific. The roads are crumbling, with massive potholes that do actual damage to vehicles common. The State government is psychotic and unable to address any of these issues. “Potholes” might seem like a minor complaint, but if you drive in the state and have to have frequent tire and car repairs because of it, it becomes more of an issue.
- Religious fundamentalism is widespread and pervasive. As an atheist I’ve never been a fan of this, but going back historically most people in WV never pushed religion on me. But again, in the Trump era, basic norms of civility and behavior are gone, so expect a lot of people you interact with may push religious nonsense on you, and they’ll look at you like a demon with three heads if you tell them you aren’t a religious person (flipside maybe you are religious and if so this won’t bother you.)
- No pro sports really, this should be expected of a smaller state, but your only real option for pro sports is the Charleston WV minor league team (now in an unaffiliated league, as Rob Manfred reduced the number of affiliated minor league teams.) There are two colleges in Division I (Marshall and WVU) but both are not local to Charleston.
- I am hesitant to list it as a con because it goes against a little of what I said above, but if you’re used to big city life, there may be things you miss in Charleston. I can give you some nice restaurant recommendations, but there’s no guarantee you’ll like them. In a big city like Chicago, Philly, DC etc that’s fine because there’s thousands of other restaurants to try, in Charleston while I do think there are some diamonds in the rough, this a city of around 50,000 in a county of around 200,000, options are going to be more limited than other places with more people.
- WV is called the Mountain State, this brings great natural beauty and outdoor activity options. It also means flat ground is a premium, this means if you do not have a 4wd vehicle when it’s snowy and when there is ice, you could be trapped behind an incline you can’t get through. It also means if you like cycling or jogging, but don’t like the extra exertion of sometimes heavy elevation changes…well that’s kinda how the city is, it’s built in a mountain valley. Many homes are “built on an incline”, meaning your driveway may be quite steep and your yard may not have a lot of “flat” ground to it.
- WV has a bad record of regulating its companies in regards to the environment. Kanawha Valley used to be called the ‘Chemical Valley’, in the 50s and 60s it was like the biggest chemical manufacturing area in the country, much of that has moved to the Houston and Gulf Coast area, but there are still some active chemical plants on the Kanawha River, and Elk River. For this reason while the Kanawha River is popular for boating and kayaking, it is considered quite polluted, and locals will tell you (correctly) to not eat fish caught in the river. If you check this advisory, the state’s DHHR recommends not consuming many types of fish that you can catch in the river, and the ones it doesn’t advise against eating, it says to limit to one per month (I don’t know any locals who eat fish out of the river) Current_Consumption_Advisories.pdf (wvdhhr.org)
7-8 years ago a chemical storage facility on the Elk River leaked, and the Elk is the water source for Charleston’s drinking water and also many surrounding counties, this caused a major issue with water safety and people were unable to drink tap water for weeks until the issue was mitigated. There is a political opposition in WV to any environmental regulation or improving this situation whatsoever.
Several times 1990s I spent some time around the Hurricane, Charleston, St Albans area. I remember thinking, “If I could earn the money I earn here there, I could live very well”. Not that that would be possible, given what I do for a living.
The other thing I found out was, ‘Kanawha’ is pronounced “K’naw” there. Say it like you think it would be pronounced and you’ll be looked at as a dipshit outsider.
Man, that was a good assessment of the area by Martin. I have a cursory knowledge of the region (parents lived in Jackson County for 20 years) and I think he’s nailed it and quite comprehensively.
Ms. P and I were very impressed with Martin’s assessment. In my professional (librarian) opinion, it is one of the best informational posts I have read on any board.
We are now more interested in exploring the possibility of retiring there. The negatives are not things we haven’t dealt with in the past. I’m a hillbilly, albeit a liberal and educated hillbilly. The blue in the midst of red reminds me of Ithaca, where our son has been the past three years. We are active in our church, but it’s a UU church (and there’s one in Charleston). I was raised Southern Baptist, and Ms. P was raised a cultural Jew. I don’t agree with the religion I was raised in, but I speak the language. Speaking of language, I’m glad to know the pronounciation of “Kanawha”. It makes me think of “dant” (Dante) Virginia and “Kay-ro” (Cairo) Illinois.
Charleston is somewhere I certainly think we could live on my pension and my wife’s SS. She’d probably work for a few years as a massage therapist, so it wouldn’t be her SS for a while. We’d sell our house (which will be almost paid for), so we’d be pocketing a good bit of money after buying a house somewhere cheaper. Since we’re right outside DC, a block from a Metro station, it’s gonna sell for a lot of money. We’ll probably get a condo or townhouse wherever we retire to.
We’re not crazy about some of the negatives, but moving somewhere with a lower cost of living will certainly make retiring at 60 easier. Any place we can afford to do that will have its drawbacks.
Again, thank you very much for your input. It has been most helpful.
Seconded.
Thirded.
Hit that one out of the park, @Martin_Hyde
It was a very good and comprehensive post. I think the pro-Trump and pro-Republican statements were a bit much, especially for Charleston. Even outside of Charleston, you may see a large contingent of Trump signs, but people will be civil and friendly. I’ve lived in three other states, and West Virginians are by far the most friendly and neighborly people you will find no matter your politics.
This is one of the best posts I have ever seen on the Dope. It is really well written and must have taken quite a bit of effort.