Considering relocation from Intermountain West to York/Dallastown area for job (Pittsburgh: low crime, home)

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Hello everyone,


Longtime lurker of City-data forums but finally felt the need to make an account and ask for help as this next relocation may be tricky.


Currently living in Park City, UT, previously was Boulder, then before that CA/HI. I have lived in Pittsburgh/NJ and my wife is from King of Prussia so we are familiar with PA generally, but not the south central portion. Typically, the furthest I ever went was the Poconos.



I have a job offer in Dallastown, PA for a good company, good pay, and good career/quality of life balance for raising our kids. My wife is looking to be closer to family and this location is about 1.5 hours away. While York, PA is not somewhere I ever envisioned myself living, I am now having to consider it.


Our values are:


Close access to beautiful nature (relatively to the area not Intermountain West)

Access to good restaurants
Under 15-20 minute commute
Not too isolated so that my wife can still go to markets, libraries, etc
Lower taxes as we won't be using school system
.5-1 acre of land so that we can teach our kids to garden
Low crime, we are not used to the idea of murders in the areas we live and this is one of the major drawbacks of the cities..


Because of our values, I am looking at the Hallam-Wrightsville area heavily. It is close to the river, Samuel S Lewis State Park, and Rocky Ridge Park which appears to be the most beautiful part of the immediate area, 15-20 minutes to job and 15-25 minutes to York and Lancaster for restaurants/shopping.



However, living in more south York towards Seven Valleys seems to have a lot of positives as well.



Do you think there are any other areas I should consider? I would definitely prefer to live in the most scenic part of the area with a close commute as we are used to living in very beautiful locations.

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Seven Valleys is extremely safe. It’s not exactly close to anything though. It’ll take you about 20 min to get to Hanover, maybe 25 minutes to get to York. It sounds like you want to home school, but I advise against that. Your children need broad experience from teachers that specialize in business, physics, chemistry, calculus, etc that you may not necessarily be an expert at. You want to give your children the best foot in the door as possible. That being said, Seven Valleys might go to Spring Grove. Not far from there is the Susquehannock School District, a better school. I would look at Glenville, Brodbecks, out towards Shrewsbury and New Freedom.