Madison, MS (Jackson, Clinton, Ridgeland: apartments, movers, chapel)

[bamaguy]

Pros/Cons to living there? We are moving from the midwest with one child.

If not Madison . . then where else should we look around Jackson, MS?

[gr8 r8z]

My family and I have enjoyed living in Madison since 2002. Thats not to say there aren't other great areas to live, Brandon, Flowood, Ridgeland, NE Jackson, etc.
Great public schools, excellent shopping, community activities, etc made Madison our choice. In 2002 when we made our choice, Madison was more forward thinking, progressive than the Rankin areas. Thes areas have made strides to catch up and done a great job. But i would think the general consenus would still have Madison as the front runner.

[brickpatio]

Madison was rated as one of the top 10 places to live in America for families. It was based a combination of high incomes, relatively low housing costs, good schools, good city planning, safety, etc. The northshore of the Reservoir in Rankin County is also very nice, right by the water but also with bike trails and wooded areas. The Brandon postal code area includes a big area from the Reservoir past Lakeland Drive down to the actual city of Brandon. This entire area is centered roughly from Lakeland Drive at Old Fannin Rd to Lakeland and Highway 471, now partially annexed by the city of Flowood. The actual city of Brandon also has good public schools and is a growing area, but it is an actual town rather than just a suburb. Ridgeland is a mix of everything, from million dollar homes to apartments to shopping to marinas. Northeast Jackson is really "in-town" now, with established neighborhoods such as Belhaven, Fondren, and Eastover. This area has top notch private schools.

[poptones]

We keep hearing that but about Madison being well "rated," but "rated" by whom?

[gr8 r8z]

Originally Posted by poptones

We keep hearing that but about Madison being well "rated," but "rated" by whom?

Google is your friend, but since you asked madison ms top ten - Google Search=

[GrandviewGloria]

Madison is basically Mississippi's Last Chance. The movers/shakers/job-makers....people who have the smarts/gumption/earning-power to live anywhere, move to Madison. They move to Madison, in lieu of moving to Boulder, Portland, Missoula, Vermont, New Hampshire... So, for many, it's Mississippi's last chance to provide a world-class way of life for people who have what it takes to live anywhere in the world.

It's amazingly crime-free. You can actually put your kids in a public school, and expect that they will get as good an education as they would in a (Southern) private school. And they won't be bullied for being smart or well-behaved.

CAVEAT: people who raised rotten eggs get a rude awakening, real fast. I can rattle off a list of Fashionable Northeast Jackson socialites who should have gone to the abortion clinic instead of River Oaks Maternity Suites, to have their little bundles of 'joy' delivered. These people moved to Madison, and their brats got arrested. By the second arrest, the parents of these lovely individuals are booking a moving van, and headed back to Eastover, where they belong. Boom Car drivers get arrested and drug-searched. A loud muffler will get you pulled over. If you cannot behave, Madison is not a good place to be. There are a lot of problem people who will not even drive THROUGH Madison. They've been arrested/ticketed, too many times. Bad drivers slow down, even on the Interstate running through the town. Madison residents take down tag numbers, take pictures of VIN numbers through the windshield... Lots of retired law enforcement in town, and just pulling into the WalMart parking lot has been a big mistake for a number of people driving stolen cars/people with outstanding warrants... I've seen little old ladies sniffing at cracked windows, seeing if they can detect 420. Sometimes they do; et puis l'ordure frappe le ventilateur! Then, there's an impromptu Festival of the Blue Lights.

One elderly resident had some creature try to reach into her car (his first time in town, driving through, at a big-box development, out by the interstate...), and try to grab her purse or the keys... She bit him. And knowing Madison seniors, I'd bet she'd be capable of killing him. As I said: lots of retired cops/military/government-ops.

Society matrons are up at three in the morning, monitoring properties where there are suspicious goings-on. Drug rings get busted, mortgage fraud gets exposed.... People in Madison have had it: they've been driven from one community or another, aren't gonna take it, anymore...and are gonna go down fighting. People seem prepared to die for their town.

Madison County's founding families were The Genuine Article: real, Roman/Viking/Druid/Hebrew-descended aristocrats (as opposed to just rich Crackers). In contrast, Jackson's 'old families' are descended from the Carpetbaggers and Scalawags who murdered and dispossessed the 'real' families of Hinds County. The rest of the state has, since Reconstruction, regarded Jackson as a backwater. Rich Delta girls drove to Memphis, or Atlanta, or Dallas to shop: never to Jackson. So, when the farm economy plotzed, and people from the rest of the state moved to the Jackson area to find work (dipthong-laden Southern accents made one unemployable in Dallas and Atlanta, by the '70s, so many were trapped in Mississippi)...so, when the better families from the rest of the state moved to the Jackson area, they settled in Madison County, to get away from Jackson's insecure/repressed/moralistic/religion-obsessed/backward social scene.

The (Episcopalian) Chapel of the Cross became the social hub for these displaced aristos. With a sound social nucleus in place, other superior types started moving in. For a while, the county was for independent thinkers, sitting on their country estates....artists with rural studios.... My decorator said, in maybe 2000... "Hollywood's a movie, and everybody's a star. But in Madison, everybody's writing, and living in, their own private screenplays." And it really was like that: so different from the extreme paranoid conformity that made Jackson such a miserable place to be, back then.

Today, Madison is filling up with the remnants of 'Fashionable Northeast Jackson', and their small-minded ways were making my Husband and kids antsy. We're brand-new, up-from-a-tarpaper-shack, nouveaux-riches, and the newly-arrived Second-generation, Colonial-Home-worshiping, new money out of Jackson was trying to high-hat us (second and third generation new rich trying to intimidate first-generation...plus ca change...). DH & kids were begging me to move. When a redneck lynch mob forced developers to deface a really gorgeous building, because its Roman-style urns looked "like minarets", I'd had enough. Made a good bit of change, selling our dream home (yeah! In the middle of the Depression!)....low-balled an 'architecturally important' estate home here in Portland, got it at my price....got the (h-word-place) out of Dodge.

But if you're ambitious, high-IQ, and have to live in Central Mississippi: Madison is the only place to live.

[jacksonian]

Summary: Madison, Ridgeland, Brandon, Flowood, and Clinton are all good places if you like suburbs, and Jackson is great for people who enjoy city life. Regardless of where you live in the metro area, when out-of-state citizens ask you where you live, your answer will be Jackson, because anyone that has never lived in Mississippi or has no relatives in Mississippi will not know any of the suburban towns that make up the Jackson metro.

[poptones]

when the better families from the rest of the state moved to the Jackson area, they settled in Madison County, to get away from Jackson's insecure/repressed/moralistic/religion-obsessed/backward social scene.

The (Episcopalian) Chapel of the Cross became the social hub for these displaced aristos. With a sound social nucleus in place, other superior types started moving in. For a while, the county was for independent thinkers, sitting on their country estates....

ROTFL. So you are saying these "free thinkers"escaped backward religious and moralistic beliefs by adopting slightly different backward and moralistic beliefs?

I'm looking for the consistency here. I don't see it, and I'm not even sure who's lacking it the most...

[GrandviewGloria]

Originally Posted by poptones

ROTFL. So you are saying these "free thinkers"escaped backward religious and moralistic beliefs by adopting slightly different backward and moralistic beliefs?

I'm looking for the consistency here. I don't see it, and I'm not even sure who's lacking it the most...

I don't think that elite Episcopalians actually have beliefs. They have pretty rituals, which I think is a good thing, as long as one doesn't buy into the dogma...and they are too smart and classy to do that. I've been told, however, that Jackson area congregations mostly behave roughly two steps down the Protestant ladder from the norm for like-branded sects elsewhere in America. So Jackson Episcopalians act like Methodists, Presbyterians act like Baptists...and so on. Chapel of the Cross is supposedly a rare exception: they actually behave as Episcopalians should. It's where the 'cool' (but rich and high-born) people go to church.

Chapel of the Cross has its own culture, and I don't think it's very dogma-centered. In most of America, that sect has been mostly about being around other large strawberry blond people of Norman English descent (and if you've ever picked up kids from an Episcopalian school, and seen all the faces as a crowd, sitting in the carpool line, you'll see what I mean: they even have a different head shape from the common, flat-faced blonds). There are the social-climbing wannabes, of course, who are mostly 'Mediterranean White': but they are high-IQ/high-earners, and may actually enhance the scene. I, however, don't have a dog in that race, and so speak entirely as an outsider.

Anyway, I'm falling asleep on the Stairmaster (thank heavens there was room in my wardrobe for this thing: it's one of the few rooms in the house without a glass wall), and I may not be making sense. So yes and no: it's a difference of degree, but it's also a difference in outlook.

[jacksonian]

I happen to agree with Poptones on this one. I'm not familiar with the NE Jackson scene, but I am involved with Downtown and Fondren activities/events, and I can say that intense religious discussion is a rarity from my experience. If there is any place in Mississippi that is not insecure, it's Fondren. And Downtown is where many of the Madison churchgoers get their hangovers from - apparently holy doughnuts and coffee have some sort of curing powers.

Recently, I was dining at one of Madison's lovely chain restaurants (in-laws invited us and we couldn't say no) for lunch on a Sunday and they were piping in church music over the loud speakers while the Nascar race was on. I supposes the sound of "glory, glory, glory" is the accepted form of audio to wash out the redneck dialect.