Relocating to DFW/North Texas? Check Irving out. (Dallas, Austin: middle-class, sales)

[happycrow]

"It's Irving over breakfast, Irving through the day
Even when we're making love
There's Irving in the way
She's got Irving inside her and Irving won't come out
Though there's nothing about Irving to write home about
When I hold her and we kiss
It's Irving that and Irving this
Her six-letter word for bliss is Irving..."

-- Austin Lounge Lizards

Irving's known for a lot of things. Like... um.... well... not a lot, actually.

Whereas Dallas has huge and expensive flagship glamour projects, but can't keep its potholes filled in, Irving is different. What Irving has to offer is a medium-sized middle-class city done right, and once you've lived here a while, it's, as the Lounge Lizards point out, really easy to start finding other cities, even notably fancier ones, coming up short by comparison. If you can afford Turtle Creek or West Plano, most of Irving isn't your cup of tea (though there are plenty of houses here at a half-million and up), but middle-class migrants should consider it.

http://www.city-data.com/city/Irving-Texas.html

Basic character: A middle-class town next to an airport with a humble-but-quality working-class zone through it's south-central region, festooned with highways.

Entertainment: Uhhh, unless you're REALLY into golf, bring your own, or drive to Dallas or Fort Worth. Outside of its arts scene, Irving isn't really an "entertain me" town in terms of large events since the Cowboys left for Arlington (and while a lot of people in Valley Ranch hate that they've relocated, many Irving residents don't miss the Cowboys one bit, as their players tended to behave badly off the field).

Housing: LOTS or renters. Purchase homes run from thirty-grand starter foreclosures to half-million-dollar golf-course houses (and then up). Most houses are middle-class and values bounce around from the 120s to around 175. So if you're reloc'ing from the upper midwest, you can afford to live here. Foundation and soil problems *are* an issue in Irving, but the town tends to avoid a lot of bubble-driven mania that infests the more expensive areas, and prices are remarkably stable (bad for flippers, good for people who regard housing as a cost rather than an investment). Californians relocating to Irving are likely to either get into a very nice house, or else pocket quite a bit of cash for savings and other relocation costs.

Crime: Used to be high-average, steadily dropping to low-average.

Diversity: Huge, as you'd expect of an airport town. There's no ethnic majority in Irving, and the "subrace" descriptions have quite a bit of variety. For instance, Irving is ~40% hispanic, but there's a lot of diversity underlying that. Two of the best Mom'n'Pops in Irving are little hole-in-the-wall Argentinian joints.

Traffic/Accessibility: DFW airport's accessibility concerns directly privelege Irving as a place to live, and let you bounce around with the ability to pick multiple routes to your destination (rather than being dependent on a single highway). You can get anywhere in the DFW metroplex in forty minutes or less because of all the highways cutting through and connecting assuming you're not trying to fight through a rush-hour commute. You can be halfway across DFW in the time one of your peers has actually made it to a highway to start zooming, which means that if you're relocating for work, it's never a horrible choice and often a good one. That makes the Kimball and the FW Zoo readily accessible (I'll draw flak from the Dallas cheerleaders, but they're superior to what Dallas tends to offer), as well as some of Dallas' nicer restaurants at the Galleria on the I75 corridor. Anecdote: I used to teach community college, and as an adjunct held classes in South Arlington, Plano, Allen, and Dallas. It was a lot of driving and burnt through a lot of Pimsleur tapes, but it was completely do-able with relatively little in the way of traffic jams.

Light rail is under construction in Irving and may or may not have a notable impact. Because the stations usually seem to be isolated from actual living areas rather than embedded into them, I am skeptical here, but rail into downtown Dallas is completely viable.

Note: because the soil tends to buckle, every few years one of your favorite side-streets will have repairs going on, and that can be a pain in the tail.

Culture: Irving has a small but thriving arts scene that perpetually does cool stuff under the radar, and regularly picks up cool little museum finds (like the recent installation from Mongolia). The Irving library system has been undergoing significant expansions and are greatly improved over a few years ago.

Restaurants: Good across the price range and easily accessible. Lots of very good mainstream and ethnic Mom'n'Pops, from Le Peep (an breakfast/brunch institution in Las Colinas off the O'Connor/114 interchange) to sushi at Hanasho on Beltline. High-quality burgers at Burger Island on Story Rd. off 183. Cavalli Pizza, the best pizza in the region and probably the best in Texas, is up on the other end by Regent and 635.

Parks: A surprising number of them, done surprisingly well. Like most of the town, they're nothing particularly fancy, but they're solid. Neighborhood rec centers are common and widely used, along with a fairly new and much-beloved water park for the munchkins.

Natural Beauty: Are you kidding me? This is North Texas. Sorry, unless you're into rolling prairies and have a love of lots and lots of concrete, North Texas ain't for beauty (some nice sunsets, though - that's a given in TX). The city does a pretty good job with its greenbelts and generally avoids eyesores, but Irving is not the answer to "what's a six-letter word for a beautiful place in Texas?"

Schools: Unremarkable but solid, with no failing schools and several good ones, including Cistercian Preparatory School, and a number of charters. Irving's public schools generally exceed the state averages except in Math, where they tend to have a strong lag. Higher property values in parts of North Irving reflect that area's access to the generally-superior Coppell ISD.

City Government: Competent, responsible, and solid, it gets "wrapped around the axle" on large public projects that involve politics and big personalities but otherwise has a laser-like focus on its residents' quality of life. Ten years ago a majority of Irving residents said "hell no I don't think I want to keep raising my kids here," and the city government freaked out and realized it needed to work harder. Notably, it actually has. I am personally a converted skeptic on this one, but have been impressed.

Weather: like most of DFW, except that the DFW airport creates a notable heat bubble. That means that a lot of summer rain bounces around North Irving, and a resident who's a gardener type will find that frustrating. On the other hand, the section of Irving that's in the airport's "shadow" also tends to suffer a lot less damage from hailstorms and tornadoes.

Summary: Irving as a city is like that pair of really comfortable, really ugly loafers your wife keeps trying to get you to throw away, but you never do.

"How'd it get in her so deep, this Irving?
I've always thought that Irving was featureless and bland
But Irving has a hold on her that I can't understand
They'll always be together even when they're miles apart
She's got I-R-V-I-N-G tatooed on her heart"

[Cowboys fan in Houston]

I got to hand it to Irving for diversity. Its one of the most multicultural areas of the state and even the country. Irving is home to the most diverse zip code in all of the US.

[Westerntraveler]

If I had to live in the metroplex again, I would pick somewhere in Tarrant County like Arlington or Grapevine.

[bakerref]

Irving, sounds like a nice place to move to. We are looking at moving from San Diego to the DFW area later this year or the first of next year. I am transferring with my company and my sales area will be all of DFW. My wife and I are in our mid 50's and our kids are own their own. My wife will be working from home. We are going to rent for awhile until we really get used to the area. We first were looking at moving in to the Dallas area, then we starting to look at the Fort Worth area. But after reading about Irving, we are back to the beginning. We are going to sell our house in San Diego, that we have owned for over 20 years and want to live in a area that is quite, but has something to the area.

[ChristieP]

Originally Posted by Westerntraveler

If I had to live in the metroplex again, I would pick somewhere in Tarrant County like Arlington or Grapevine.

I lived in Mesquite for the first 22 years of my life, then i went to San Angelo for college, and stayed out there for a few years. When I finally came back to DFW with my husband, we picked Grapevine and have never looked back!!