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Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Where are the affordable houses in Gwinnett?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My girlfriend is house hunting.
She had originally purchased a townhouse in Winder, and she was scheduled to move in May. However, the new unit burned to the ground a couple of weeks ago. She had all her furniture in storage, and the house was still under construction, so she came out of the experience in pretty good shape, all things considered.
So now she begins, again, the whole process of deciding where to live.
“I would prefer to be in either Gwinnett or Barrow County,” she said. “Snellville, Lawrenceville, Winder, Dacula, even Bethlehem. I teach in Walton County, so I think maybe the eastern part of Gwinnett.”
“There’s Duluth, you know,” I said. “It’s a pretty nice area.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty nice,” she said. “I don’t know all that much about it, other than to say that most of the housing options there are not really in a teacher’s salary range. It’s either too much to afford, or it’s getting surrounded by apartments and commercial stuff.”
She was born and raised in Atlanta, so she has a pretty good idea of what the area is like.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
This is what she told me:
“Two bedrooms, two baths, 1 or 2 car garage, sewer. No septic tanks! That’s what’s proving to be the hard part of this house hunting thus far. There are some nice, affordable houses in the areas in which I’m looking, but the developers are so gung ho to sell property, they won’t do the infrastructure right. ‘Don’t worry about roads and sewers,’ the developers and commissioners say. ‘Throw a septic tank in the back yard, throw on some tar and extra asphalt on the roads in five or ten years to deal with the potholes. Add some traffic lights to the road arteries when the neighborhoods pack the roads in, make sure that they are so out of sync with one another that traffic moves even worse. Don’t even think about widening the roads to accommodate the housing.’ That’s about how growth is in Gwinnett and Barrow.”
“Why do we put up with it?” I asked her.
“I guess because we love the South,” she said. “It’s still home. So, I’m going to find a home that works for me.”
Where would you look for an affordable house in Gwinnett or Barrow?
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