We are thinking of leaving California in a year or so, and have been looking at the Cary, NC, area. I would love to hear about Dopers’ experiences living in the area (or long-term temping, like college).
Things we are wondering about-
Public school system (we have two kids in elementary)
Arts and culture
Property values and appreciation rates
General friendliness of folks
Any aversion to Californians relocating? Colorado was really bad in that regard when we lived there…
Sports and leisure activities (one of the reasons we are looking at that area is the overabundance of minor league baseball!)
And anything else you think we should know!
They have a Trader Joe’s there (the only one in North Carolina). I regard Trader Joe’s as an essential sign that a place is civilized- if they don’t have them, they probably aren’t
No particular bias against CA, but native Carolinians are kind of tired of anyone relocating to their state. Especially when the come saying things like "you just can’t get good _______ like they have back in________. " But nobody in Cary is native anyway so you are good to go.
Cary is basically suburban yuppyville, but there is lots to do nearby if not right in Cary (thought they have a new amphitheater that gets big name acts). Lots of college towns and the state capitol adjacent lend culture (planteatriums, museums, etc.)
Everything in Cary costs a little bit more than if you buy it in Raleigh. And they’re at the limit of their aquifer so you very often are restricted from lawn watering, car washing, etc. in the summer.
IMHO the High School is a dive, but they have snooty Cary Academy for those who want an expensive alternative.
Cary is a white-bread vanilla suburb of Raleigh. It’s boring. Practically every development there has a housing association that tells you what you can do with your property, so it’s overwhelmingly beige. It’s a bedroom community, so there are traffic problems when people travel to and from work every day. It is not diverse.
There’s also a joke about Cary standing for “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees,” and that’s not far off the mark, actually. It’s arguably the yuppiest place you can live in the Triangle. It does have a very low crime rate, the schools are decent and the people educated and polite. The average home price is around $275,000.
I’ve been to the Trader Joe’s there. It is TINY - I’ve never been to any other one, but I would assume the ones in CA would have things like a deli counter, meat department and so on, right? This store is too small to have any of those things and it was absolutely packed to the rafters with people when I was there (on Saturday afternoon). All the registers were open and carts were lined up in the aisles, making it even more difficult to move around. As I waited in line, I noticed most people were buying wine and snacks - which takes up a good portion of the store. I was hoping to find low-fat ramen noodles there, and they didn’t have anything like that - they really don’t have the space for any kind of selection. I’ll still have to go to Whole Foods, I guess.
I live in Cary and think it’s a great place to live, especially if you’re married with kids. There is some ‘suburb’ stigma from neighboring cities as some other posters have already shown, but it is not really any different from the rest of the Triangle area.
Cary is very close to the NC Museum of Art, which is rather excellent IMO. The Durham Bulls minor league baseball team is nearby, maybe 30 minutes if the traffic isn’t bad.
Caryite here. If you move to Cary, you will have to get used to not taking it personally when people like romansperson rag on your city (or I guess Cary calls itself a town). It’s true that a lot of the neighborhoods have HOAs, but that has been the trend with nearly all new construction in the area. Traffic really isn’t any worse in Cary than in other parts of the Triangle and if you were going to be working in RTP, western Cary would be a lot more convenient than Raleigh. Cary also has a rep for “involuntary annexation” of nearby unincorporated land which leaves people a little miffed.
You are going to have to get in your car and drive a bit to do anything cultural while living in Cary. There is a wannabe downtown area, but calling Cary a collection of suburbs is fairly apt. Just up the road in Raleigh though there is a nice Art Museum, as well as a couple other history/science types. The amphitheater in Cary has some concerts in the summer and there is also the BTI (or is it Progress Energy?) center in downtown Raleigh that hosts many musicals and other performing arts.
There are three universities with respectable athletic programs, the Durham Bulls, and the Hurricanes all nearby for sports entertainment. Cary and Raleigh have very nice park systems with extensive greenways throughout the cities. The Triangle is also conveniently located just a couple of hours from the beach and the mountains. There are also a couple of fairly large lakes nearby if you are into bass fishing, etc.
The school system is in a state of flux at the moment. There are no Cary schools per se, as there is only a county wide school system. There has been somewhat explosive growth in the region in the last decade and the schools are having trouble dealing with it. Wake county still probably has the best schools in the state though.
Housing is more expensive in Cary than other areas in the Triangle, but not radically so. Appreciation has been rather sluggish compared to other areas of the country, but I think that also makes the Triangle less susceptible to a bust.
I don’t think the friendliness of the people is especially noteworthy in either way. I am fairly friendly with a number of my neighbors and there are occasional neighborhood events, but I am not sure that’s the norm. Seems like hardly anybody is a native Carolinian, so there isn’t much bias against newcomers except the occasion whiny letter to the editor in the paper.
A friend of mine in Cary was furious recently when the town–and I’m not joking about this–outlawed poison ivy. If you have it on your property, the town will send a crew onto your property to kill it and will then charge you for the service. It made him want to go all Unabomber.
Personally, I would never live there. My experiences with Cary have been pretty negative. Lots of folks clearly feel differently, but you want to make sure you’re the type that would like it. Consider alternatives in the Triangle: Chapel Hill is much more collegey, Durham has a thriving African American cultural scene (and all kinds of fun with the ex-prosecutor!), Raleigh is one of the state’s cultural centers, and Carrboro is a great little funky town.
Asheville, sadly, is full at the moment, so that’s not an option.
Well, people have ragged on Cary, which in my transplanted-Yankee opinion is precisely what they describe: the dictionary definition of suburban sprawl with nosy-neighbor-equipped-with-authority HOAs thrown in. But the Triangle (“Research Triangle” marks you as an outsider or as someone working for a promotional business; “Research Triangle” is used around here only in one context: the mega-commercial/industrial park area named Research Triangle Park, nearly always abbreviated RTP) is a fine liberal metropolitan area. Some additional useful information can be found in Sampiro’s IMHO thread asking about Raleigh and Greensboro.
As a state, it’s full of surprises. There’s a lot of the sort of fundamentalist anti-evolution ultraconservative religio-political stance that I’d thought was the province of only a few fringe types – but mixed with that is warm hospitality, a progressive attitude among much of the populace generally, and for the most part a really pleasant courteous environment. We live about two miles outside the official bounds of the Triangle in a small town with two general stores (one of which recently closed, probably temporarily) and a farm-supply store within a half mile of us. There’s a big patch of uncut second-growth southern forest 500 feet from where I sit, and a pond that has Canada geese and blue herons most of most years. But I’m a half hour from the sort of big-city accouterments I’d be hard-pressed to find in Utica or Binghamton back in New York. My landlady despises Bush as much as I do, even though she’s 70 and talks like she just walked out of one of Sampiro’s bizarre-family-and-friends stories. She’s also the 3rd sharpest businesspeson I’ve known in my life, with an amazing eye for knowing when to hold and when to sell.
Forget Yoknapatawpha County and all the Deep-South Decadence: North Carolina is Mayberry played straight – laid-back and Southern but ready to deal with the 21st Century. (Mayberry, by the way, is a pastiche on Andy Griffith’s home town, Mount Airy, northwest of Winston-Salem, and nothing says more about North Carolina than that they good-naturedly accepted the role and play it up but also have a good modern town.)
North Carolina used to call itself “the Good Roads State” because it led the south in paved (and gravel) roads when everybody else’s secondary roads were dirt. While budget issues are as big here as anywhere, it continues to try to keep its road system as good as possible, and IMO for the most part does a fine job.
I could say a lot more – but suffice it to say I’m a transplanted Tarheel, not a native, and I love it here.
My wife and I lived in Cary for five years in the late 1990’s right after we got married. We hated it.
We had a nice house in a decent subdivision, but despite trying, we never really fit in with our neighbors. They were good people, for the most part, but my wife and I aren’t sports fans and aren’t religious and those two little details marked us as the neighborhood oddballs.
It’s very white bread. My son was the only non-blond in his preschool class.
There’s not much in the way of entertainment either. Not many good restaurants, not many interesting stores. We’d drive up to Chapel Hill on the weekends to buy comic books and see art house movies.
In retrospect we probably would have been happier staying in Chapel Hill. We both went to grad school there and really liked its funky small college town vibe. Unfortunately when it came time to buy a house we couldn’t afford the extra $50K it was going to cost to buy into the Chapel Hill market.
If you’re looking for bland suburbia, Cary is IT. Lots of people seem very happy there. Just not me … .
I’m fairly new to NC and now live in the greater Triangle area but not in Cary.
AFAICT, Cary is the 'burbs, period. Nice tract-type houses, lots of new developments of the Stone-Brooke-Meadow-Towne-Dale-View variety. Applebees right down the road, know what I mean? So "yes to comfort and affordability, but “no” to cultural opportunities or town personality.
I have found to my surprise that I like NC better than I thought I would. (How’s that for damning with faint praise?) But I live and work in a fairly liberal area by Southern standards, and I have still found some aspects of living in the South to be difficult for me as a native westerner. But the economy is good, it’s actually quite pretty, and the people are very nice.
Preach it, sister! You knew what I needed to hear!
Hey, I appreciate ALL the posts! This is the kind of stuff I can’t get from just visiting or surfing websites.
I am used to people hating transplants- I live in CA! Very few true natives around here, what with families always moving around due to military, aerospace, tech, etc. HOAs don’t chap my ass like they do some people’s.
But I don’t want “blah” if I can help it. Something more funky like Chapel Hill might be fun. Someone up-thread gave $275,000 as an average home price in Cary- does that mean that Chapel Hill would be around $325,000? Because for a SoCal, that sounds cheap…
IMO Cary gets a bad rap. Not all of Cary is suburbs, and it is not exactly the only place around here where you can find suburbs.
There are cool things if you look for them. A great independent movie theater, a ton of good restaurants in addition to the chains, a strong south asian community, an amazing east asian supermarket.
You are centrally located to art/music events in Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh. Very close to the art museum as noted earlier.
It is not a hugely cool place compared to, say, Carrboro, but it can be fun. I work in Cary and used to commute from Chapel Hill, and I don’t regret the move at all.
Despite being a transient and poor ABD type, I check Chapel Hill real estate listings and dream. I find that real estate in the cool parts of Chapel Hill is pretty frickin’ steep (much as I have a soft spot for The Hill even I would have to admit that many of the parts of CH that are not close to UNC suffer from many of the criticisms laid at Cary’s feet). But if any place in the world is worth it…
My love for that region of North Carolina is boundless (though I would readily grant that my view of the region is colored by a very specific lens) and of the 10+ places I have lived in my 25 years, it is the only one that I would ever dream of calling home. This time of year–ACC Tournament time–kills me and makes the homesickness worse than usual. I’ll just stop, because I could seriously write a ream on this topic.
However, you must answer one very important question. Failure to answer this question correctly will lead to your baninnation from all cool activities, attractions and stuff in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and parts eastward.
What is the proper base for barbecue sauce?
/wants to live on Franklin Street one day
//or Cameron Avenue
///totally not picky
I’m currently in Raleigh; I just graduated from NC State, so I probably don’t have the same perspective as more settled family people. That being said…I have no desire to live in Cary…it’s all suburbs and strip malls. Raleigh has some nicer ‘established’ neighborhoods, but I’ve also noticed an explosion of McMansions nearby in the six years I’ve been here.
Not exactly top-of-the-line entertainment, but Raleigh is home to the annual State Fair. It’s worth going to once, I think. Other good entertainment options have been covered here (the art museum is just down the road from my place).
The urban areas are a bit more liberal and/or tolerant than you might expect, but I still run into the occasional…exception (example: NC State’s “Brickyard Preacher”).
Nothing to say about Chapel Hill, except some good friends moved from there a few years ago to a small town…they wish they had stayed in Chapel Hill, because the people were more pleasant.
I’m not much help to you, because I’m in Gates County (extreme NE corner), and it’s about as rural and rednecky as you can ever get. Still, I love it, because it beats the hell out of the megacity environment of Tidewater Virginia. I’d never be able to buy a hobby farm north of the state line…
That’s a good guesstimate. Obviously more desirable areas will be more, and those houses tend to get snapped up in a hurry. You can get a good sized older home with some actual land for $325,000 in Chapel Hill, though.
And the Chapel Hill school system is very highly rated (East Chapel Hill High School made it to #38 on Newsweek’s Top 1000 High Schools last year). Because the university is here, your kids would also go to school with kids from all over the world, too.
We live about 15 miles north of Chapel Hill and like it much (we couldn’t afford to buy a chicken shack in Chapel Hill, so we ranged outward a bit :)).
And apologies to Baracus - I don’t mean to rag on Cary, exactly. It’s just that I am used to a lot more space and nobody else minding my business, and Cary just feels claustrophobic and too uniform for me. Cary tries very hard to make their town a pleasant environment to live in, and there’s a lot about that that’s good; the part I don’t care for is how it encourages sameness. Still, because there are so many people there, there are services I have to drive out to Cary to get, because they don’t exist on my side of town. I was just there a couple days ago to take my dog to a specialist to see about his neck pain because the vet school was backed up and we couldn’t get an appointment there for another week. That practice is where it is because that’s where the most people with the money for those sorts of things are.
I’ll second this. I can always tell when I’m in Virginia, because the road suddenly turns crummy. It’s relative, however. A bad road in Virginia is still often better than a good one in Indiana, and I have yet to see a chuckhole east of the Shenandoah Valley…
Makes sense, and I’ve heard others from up in that area give essentially the same reason for living there. But, if the staff don’t object, you are hereby designated the Official Doper Expert on How to Pronounce “Pasquotank”!
PASS-kwuh-tank, “pass” as in “pass me the ball” and “tank” as in “Sherman tank.” Primary stress on “pass,” secondary stress on “tank.” Pronounced with a southern accent, of course. Duh.
I deal with government officials from all over NC. Two of the challenges of my job has been (1) trying to memorize the correct pronunciation for counties such as Cabarrus, Carteret, Perquimans, and Tyrrell; and (2) trying to figure out which towns are in which county, when the obvious answer is wrong: Frankin is in Macon County, not Franklin County; Beaufort is in Carteret County, not Beaufort County; Rockingham is in Richmond County, not Rockingham County. :dubious:
EJ’s Girl, it’s also worth mentioning that NC is really quite a beautiful state. There are mountains and beaches and forests and gentle rolling farmland. It feels much more historic and established than California (because it is) and there are a lot of interesting historic places to visit if that’s of interest. There’s also a major airport in Raleigh with quick short flights to DC and New York (among other places) and a daily-non-stop flight to London. Education and health care in the Triangle are the best in the state and amongst the best in the country; both Duke and UNC are within a half-hour drive.
