Deciding whether or not to more to Harrisburg (Fayetteville, Jonesboro: real estate, house)

[MoonDoggie]

My family and I are trying to decide if we are going to move to Harrisburg, AR. We are from the mountains, and are trying to decide if we could adapt to life in the delta. We have found that it is not only geographically different, but there is a unique attitude that is prevalent on the Delta as well. Any thoughts on the matter would be helpful.

Thanks.

[arguy1973]

Originally Posted by MoonDoggie

My family and I are trying to decide if we are going to move to Harrisburg, AR. We are from the mountains, and are trying to decide if we could adapt to life in the delta. We have found that it is not only geographically different, but there is a unique attitude that is prevalent on the Delta as well. Any thoughts on the matter would be helpful.

Thanks.

let me first ask, why Harrisburg? close to family there, a job?

[MoonDoggie]

Moving because of a job

[arguy1973]

if it were me, id try to move closer to Jonesboro and drive to harrisburg, its only about a 15-20 minutes drive.

[rackensack]

Harrisburg has absolutely nothing to offer as a place to live, unless you're a mosquito or a ricefield slick. You're right that there's a different mindset in the Delta than in the mountains, but Harrisburg has a different mindset even from the rest of the Delta -- well, that is if calling it a "mind"-set isn't stretching the definition of mind.

I'm a product of several generations of Arkansawyers on both sides of the family. (I say this to establish that I was not some "furriner" with no idea of what to expect.) Both my parents had lived within an hour of Harrisburg at times in their lives, and I grew up mainly in Augusta, Des Arc, and Clarendon until I was about 12. After that we moved up to NW Arkansas and spent the next several years in Fayetteville.

Just before my senior year of high school, we moved to Harrisburg. In theory, folks in Harrisburg shouldn't have been any different than what I was used to in other parts of eastern Arkansas. They were. If you like narrow-minded, xenophobic, bigoted, ignorant (and proudly so) people, it's heaven on earth. The Jerry Springer show could make several seasons worth of shows just filming the daily interpersonal relationships of Harrisburgers, starting with the mayor, Donnie "Buzzy" Faulkner (just a sample: https://www.jonesborosun.com/archive...y.php?ID=30801 -- there's more where that came from). If you don't mind driving to Jonesboro every time you need to buy something other than a six pack or convenience store fried chicken and potato logs, you might be able to cope (with help from plenty of the six packs, and probably the meth and pot the locals are so fond of).

True story -- when driving home to Harrisburg one Friday night while I was at college in Conway, I got pulled over by a cop in Fisher (hadn't done anything wrong, but I was in the way when he tried to pull out of his hiding place to catch a guy barreling through town at over 80 mph -- he lost that guy, so he tailed me to the city limits and pulled me instead). Once he saw that I lived in Harrisburg, he was determined that must have drugs in the car somewhere -- I was from Harrisburg, right? He turned my '74 Datsun B210 hatchback inside out, and all he found were the frozen Woodruff County strawberries my grandmother had given me to take home when I stopped by to see her in Augusta earlier that night. Just an indication, though, of the degree to which Harrisburg's reputation for drug use and drug trafficking permeates the area. And it's not an undeserved reputation. I went completely straight during my senior year of high school because I was determined not to be like the rest of the idiots around me, and if they were doing drugs and drinking, I would go the other way.

Entertainment, at the time I lived there, consisted mainly of driving from the high school parking lot to the stop light (yes, "the" stop light), taking a right and heading through town, out past the grocery store and partway up the ridge and turning around in the parking lot of Butch's Steak and Donuts (their specialty was fried chicken, but they did have a seafood buffet on Friday nights) and heading back to the high school parking lot. Repeat ad nauseam.

When I became a National Merit Scholarship Semi-finalist (on the basis of my scores on the PSAT, which I'd taken in Fayetteville before we moved to Harrisburg), it merited a full third of the front page of the local weekly paper, with a picture and everything -- was only the second time Harrisburg ever had one. This really ought to be a pretty minor deal -- Fayetteville High produced a dozen or so at least every year. But in Harrisburg, any scrap of even modestly good news looks huge by comparison with the rest of what happens there.

I'd like to say that of course there are some really good people there among the rest. I'd like to, but I can't. There were a few at the time we lived there, but they've mostly moved since. Perhaps they've been replaced by others, but I doubt it. I've had occasion to work recently with some guys who had been in Harrisburg for extended periods as part of their work with American Greetings. They didn't give me any reason to think that the last two decades have brought any positive changes -- rather the opposite, in fact.

If, God help you, you do decide to actually try to live in Harrisburg rather than driving there from Jonesboro or someplace, whatever you do don't buy real estate. Took my parents the better part of 3 years to sell our house there when we finally did move away again, despite asking almost exactly what we originally paid for it 4 years before, and having improved it substantially.