Neighborhood ideas with access to U of M (Minneapolis, St. Paul: cul-de-sac, for sale)
Minneapolis - St. PaulTwin Cities
Please register to participate in our discussions with 1.5 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
We are looking for our first home. Budget is $200,000. We have 2 kids with a 3rd on the way. My husband will be at the U of M (east bank) 5 days a week and we really want to minimize his commute as much as possible without paying for parking everyday. Safety is also a top priority. Does anyone have any suggestions on what neighborhoods we should be looking at? Thanks!
p.s. If you saw our old post, you'll notice that our budget has changed. This is largely due to family help that we just found out we'll be receiving.
I remember your post, but don't remember if you had a lot of specifics about what type of neighborhood you like. Beyond safe, I mean. With 200k to work with you have vastly increased your options. Do you want an older home? New? Do you want to be able to walk to things (and, if so, what sorts of things)? Maximum commute time?
Falcon Heights is a nice area; Gibbs Farm is there and offers a lot of fun events for families. It's right by the St. Paul campus, so your husband could hop on the campus connector (or take Metro Transit, or even bike) to the east bank. The suburb of St. Anthony has good schools and is pretty close. Some of the NE Minneapolis neighborhoods out that direction seem very family-friendly and relatively affordable, too. The neighborhoods right by campus seem to either be really loud and student-oriented, or else more expensive (i.e. Prospect Park). Somewhere along the Hiawatha Line could be an easy commute as well as family- and budget-friendly; Longfellow, for one. I'd also take a close look at St. Paul neighborhoods. St. Anthony Park is incredibly nice, and it looks like there are a few places there for your budget. And I just looked at Macalester-Groveland area and see there's actually a number of listings for under 200k. Very nice, family-friendly area. Same thing with Merriam Park. I'm not familiar with the specific schools in that area, but St. Paul has some excellent schools.
You'll still have some limitations with your budget, but really, now you can be a lot more choosy about what specific type of neighborhood you want and just how far you want to commute.
$200,000 budget will open your opportunities significantly. I would look in the Eagan area to start. It's a very easy commute to the East Bank, gives you the safe neighborhoods you are used to without having to worry about petty crime, etc. like you find in many of the urban neighborhoods. There are parks everywhere for the kids, top schools, etc. There is a large transit station there with free parking or when the rail is done, a quick hop over to Fort Snelling or one of the park and rides for the lightrail.
Also, if you haven't discovered them already, I would sign up for the Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE) classes. They are a fantastic way to meet people with kids the same ages. Every school district in the state has a program so where ever you end up you can find one.
I would say don't move to Eagan unless you hate yourself. I lived there for way too long and it's tied with Woodbury and Eden Prairie as the most boring places in the world. The idea that crime doesn't happen in the suburbs is nonsense. Crime happens everywhere. As the cities are becoming more gentrified, poor people are being pushed out to the suburbs. I'd look in Mpls, St Paul, Falcon Heights, Lauderdale and Roseville. The middle class is moving back to denser, walkable neighborhoods and spurning sprawling suburbs filled with cookie-cutter houses on unwalkable, unbikeable, unsafe collector roads. You're 7x more likely to get hit by a car on a 50+ mph collector road than robbed in the city. And your kids will be essentially trapped in your home like a prison, unable to walk or bike to the library, to pick up milk from the corner store.
"Suburban Sprawl's many victims: children, utterly dependent on parental transportation if they wish to escape the cul-de-sac; the elderly, warehoused in institutions once they lose their driver's licenses; commuters, stuck in traffic for two or more hours each day; the urban poor, isolated in deteriorating cities without access to jobs or services."
I live in southern Roseville which north of MN-36 is kind of a sprawling mess but south of that is nice, fairly walkable (check out www.walkscore.com), and easily get to Minneapolis and St Paul without taking freeways!
Several good suggestions here, but I'm going to stick up for the neighborhoods near the U. I live in Marcy-Holmes, which straddles 35W adjacent to the East Bank. It's true that the part of the neighborhood east of the freeway (the Dinkytown side) is all about underclassmen, fraternities, etc. But on the west side, it's a greater percentage of graduate students, University staff, etc. While there's a lot of rental, there are also lovely historic homes, and there are more and more young families moving in, who are drawn by the easy, walkable lifestyle, access to parks, coffee shops, the riverfront, etc. Petty crime comes and goes, but that's true most everywhere, and I've never been worried about my own family's safety for a minute. We certainly enjoyed raising our two kids in our neighborhood, and now that they're teenagers, they have a million things to do right outside their doorstep, as well as easy access to buses and bike trails. I will also say that when I was at the U, we were able to economize by going down to one car since I could easily walk to campus everyday, which helped a lot. That being said, it's a funky neighborhood with a lot of diversity, and if you're looking for something more traditional and suburban, I wouldn't recommend it.
I also really like Marcy-Holmes; only reason I didn't mention it was because I thought it was impossible to find a single-family house under 200k, but admittedly I have not searched the listings there recently. It's one of my favorite Minneapolis neighborhoods, though! I lived there while in college, and walked to school, or took the bus when the weather was bad. When we thought about buying a place in Minneapolis that was on our neighborhood to consider list. It depends on what the OP wants in a neighborhood, but I agree that it (at least the non-Dinkytown side) would be a great place to raise a family.
Over the years I've heard that partying college kids create lots of problems for people living nearby. For a family, I'd choose almost anything else. As for access to the U, it has buses running from every corner of the Twin Cities. You don't have to live in the shadow of the U to get there.
Over the years I've heard that partying college kids create lots of problems for people living nearby. For a family, I'd choose almost anything else. As for access to the U, it has buses running from every corner of the Twin Cities. You don't have to live in the shadow of the U to get there.
Marcy-Holmes is split into two; the part on the opposite side of the freeway from Dinkytown has a VERY different feel than does the Dinkytown portion of the neighborhood. This is the area I was referring to, and is, I assume, the part of M-H where MarcyHolmesMaven lives. There are still students, including some undergraduates, but it's heavier on grad students (our next-door-neighbor was a med student with a baby), faculty, and downtown professionals. There are some incredibly beautiful historic houses, too; even if those are out of reach, budget-wise, I always appreciated viewing them on evening walks!
The area with loud partying drunk college kids that you're likely thinking about is the portion of Dinkytown (and nearby Como) on the east side of the freeway and more directly adjacent to campus. The other part of M-H is more oriented to the river and to the commercial core by Hennepin/Central/University. It's very convenient to the U, but it's far enough removed that it does not feel like a campus neighborhood. I still like Dinkytown (but would not want to live there), but yes, you would have to worry a lot more about drunk college kids vomiting in your yard.
Well, I do like St. Anthony and the river. Those are two amenities I'd gravitate to.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $53,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 1.5 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
