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Old 11-28-2018, 09:45 AM
 
Location: South Park, San Diego
6,109 posts, read 10,835,827 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl View Post


I tend to gloss right over that info on the right side of the header sometimes.

T. Damon: You may ignore that question and answer this one instead:

in your travels around disgustingly sunny San Diego, have you run across a woman by the name of Ellen Brenner?
Nope. In what circles does she run in that I may have?

And thankfully, our months long run of disgustingly sunny weather is about to come to an end tomorrow with our first significant rain since April! Woo Hoo!

The locals are starting to panic and the newscasts are all cueing up the ominous Storm Watch graphics and music as the upwards of 1" !!! comes bearing down on us...

It'll last all of a few hours and whiff on out of here by Friday. Back to the sun.
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Old 11-28-2018, 04:57 PM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
14,019 posts, read 8,889,691 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by T. Damon View Post
Nope. In what circles does she run in that I may have?
I don't know. She's a foodie par excellence and a journalist manqué; she wrote for a website called SanDiego.Eats.It for a while.

I don't know how active she is in the city's officially visible LGBT community right now.

How active are you, while I'm at it?

She and I know each other from college. We were both on the campus radio station; she was Class of '79, I'm '80.

Quote:
And thankfully, our months long run of disgustingly sunny weather is about to come to an end tomorrow with our first significant rain since April! Woo Hoo!

The locals are starting to panic and the newscasts are all cueing up the ominous Storm Watch graphics and music as the upwards of 1" !!! comes bearing down on us...

It'll last all of a few hours and whiff on out of here by Friday. Back to the sun.
Boy, sounds like San Diegans react to a trivial amount of rain the same way Washingtonians react to a trivial amount of snow.
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Old 11-30-2018, 12:20 AM
 
Location: SW Florida
5,586 posts, read 8,367,481 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kyb01 View Post
I often make the wrong assumptions when people leave the Phila. area. That they're mostly negadelphians who left because they hated the area. It seems more true, though, that many of those negadelphians are still in Philly.
I don't know, I don't hear a lot of negativity about Philly from Philadelphians. I'm not talking about the complaints about specific things in the city like trash or the snake line at the Trader Joe's , but in the metro area as a whole. Doesn't seem like people are itching to get outta there, unless it's something like "the cold", which is not a Philadelphia-specific issue. When I meet fellow Philadelphians down here, everyone is excited to talk about home. Many of the folks I worked with who transferred to other parts of the country ended up coming back to Philly, including myself after two years in California. When I was interviewing out there, one of the executives told me "Philadelphians don't do well here." I was kind of shocked and asked why. He said "Philadelphia has a sense of community that we don't have here." Now this was not in San Diego where the OPs live, but in the Los Angeles County area. It's just one big sea of humanity, one town blending into the next town. It's too massive to have a "Los Angeles" spirit, you know what I mean? Example: One time I asked a consultant who was visiting our Philly corporate offices where he was from in CA. I knew he was from one of the many towns within LA County. Instead of saying "LA", he said "Southern California". I thought that was weird!

Last edited by Avalon08; 11-30-2018 at 12:26 AM.. Reason: added something
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Old 11-30-2018, 01:36 PM
 
10,787 posts, read 8,702,288 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Avalon08 View Post
I don't know, I don't hear a lot of negativity about Philly from Philadelphians. I'm not talking about the complaints about specific things in the city like trash or the snake line at the Trader Joe's , but in the metro area as a whole. Doesn't seem like people are itching to get outta there, unless it's something like "the cold", which is not a Philadelphia-specific issue. When I meet fellow Philadelphians down here, everyone is excited to talk about home. Many of the folks I worked with who transferred to other parts of the country ended up coming back to Philly, including myself after two years in California. When I was interviewing out there, one of the executives told me "Philadelphians don't do well here." I was kind of shocked and asked why. He said "Philadelphia has a sense of community that we don't have here." Now this was not in San Diego where the OPs live, but in the Los Angeles County area. It's just one big sea of humanity, one town blending into the next town. It's too massive to have a "Los Angeles" spirit, you know what I mean? Example: One time I asked a consultant who was visiting our Philly corporate offices where he was from in CA. I knew he was from one of the many towns within LA County. Instead of saying "LA", he said "Southern California". I thought that was weird!
Interesting commentary. I think many New Yorkers have the same sense of " place" and community pride inspite of how big it is.
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Old 11-30-2018, 02:46 PM
 
Location: SW Florida
5,586 posts, read 8,367,481 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kyb01 View Post
Interesting commentary. I think many New Yorkers have the same sense of " place" and community pride inspite of how big it is.
Yes, probably. New York and Los Angeles are certainly nothing like each other.

But really, have you heard of people from Philly who hate the metro area and want to leave? For reasons other than weather?
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Old 11-30-2018, 09:36 PM
 
Location: South Park, San Diego
6,109 posts, read 10,835,827 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl View Post
*ahem*

I know a lot of the houses I feature skew upmarket and more suburban from where T. Damon and his partner want to be, but I also feature houses in the city in their price range.

And I think the Neighborhood Guides I post on alternate Thursdays (when I get an agent to comment on one) offer decent overviews of the various neighborhoods in this city.

To the OP: If this hasn't been said before, if you want a detached single-family house with a yard, your pickings will be very slim within the city limits and nonexistent within walking distance of Center City. Rowhouses make up a larger share of the total housing stock (north of 60 percent) in Philadelphia than they do in any other city in the country (only Baltimore comes close), and much of the rest consists of semi-detached twins. Most rowhouses lack yards in front, and many in the closer-in neighborhoods have rear patios the size of postage stamps. Builders of newer houses, and rehabbers of some older ones, compensate for the lack of outdoor space with roof decks and balconies.

There is one in-city neighborhood that offers lots of grass and trees and mostly semi-detached houses along with a very charming main shopping street with a number of very good restaurants, an outpost of a popular regional brewpub chain and a French bistro with live jazz downstairs courtesy its co-owners, the most accomplished African-American restaurateurs in the city. That neighborhood, however, lies at the city's far northwest corner, so walking to the heart of the city is out, but two Regional Rail lines and a heavily used bus line that connects to the Broad Street Subway provide good service into the city center. Chestnut Hill also happens to be the second-wealthiest neighborhood in the city after Society Hill, and it has house prices to match, but you can find houses in your price range on its less expensive east side (a phrase that applies to all three of the Northwest Philly neighborhoods located in the pre-consolidation Germantown Township). Given the quality and extensiveness of our mass transit system (yes, the locals love to b **** about it, and SEPTA management gives them plenty of grounds for complaint, but it really is one of the better systems in the country on those scores), you might want to put some of those outlying neighborhoods on your house-hunting list. I live in the least affluent of the three Germantown Township neighborhoods, and you can even find lots of cool old twins with loads of charm on tree-lined streets here that you can definitely afford. Community spirit runs high here too.

Where on the West Coast do you live, T. Damon? Should I find myself out that way, I'll definitely look you up. And if you want someone engaging who knows his way around this city to show off some of its neighborhoods to you, please do the same with me.
Hey, where are these neighborhood guides? I’m looking for something similar to eschaton’s Suburb of the week in the Pittsburgh forum (another city we finally explored last year and love - but it’s no Philadelphia) and I’m not seeing a frequent posting similar to that.

Germantown looks lovely, but expensive!, and not all that exciting- but again, I know nothing. We would totally be fine with a train or bus into the city if that neighborhood (township?) provided at least a decent slice of village vibrancy- a few good restaurants, shops and pubs where you receive a warm welcome yet don’t become too familiar and also allowed us to maybe acquire a beautiful (modest) stone or brick house and garden.

The neighborhood we are at now was hopefully “transitioning” (RE agent speak) and still rough around the edges when we arrived and has solidly planted itself as one of the premier urban adjacent areas in the city, let’s just say you can add a 1 in front of the price we paid for the place 20 years later. So we are all about a charming and interesting area with a few scruffy corners and characters much more so than anything approaching the sterile country club and good schools sect. As we think about it, maybe a small cottage in a township on the line or pied a terre right in the heart of the city for half the year and keep the paid off place in San Diego for the other, as pretentious as that may sound (and we may very well not be able to afford that) is the dream that we are looking for.

The sense of community we have here and is now an angle in this post is a powerful driver in our assessment and is honestly the most important parameter to us.

We were welcomed by the octogenarians as neighbors on both sides of us as the slightly nervous gay couple buying our first house when we moved in as warmly as with the Navy pilots across the street with their fun and beautiful wives with whom we all became fabulous friends.

There has been the typical changes, deaths, divorces and moving away that is inevitable in any neighborhood over the years but we are still in contact with those Navy pilots and families over 20 years later. The family a couple doors down (it turns out our house was built as the wedding present for the daughter of the original owner) with the four girls, the youngest, six, when we moved in - she was in our business immediately - now in her twenties with her photographer boyfriend are still super close with and all of her sisters. We regularly brought over meals to the elderly neighbors for years who now have died off, now, new fun neighbors have just moved in- we are still bringing food over. I recruited a cute couple I met at an open house 10 years ago, telling them that the canyon cul-de-sacs were the magical places to be. I revealed to them the house a few doors down from ours, custom built in the early fifties by a couple now in their 90s and failing, they listened and bought the house 18 months later and now we are the best of friends and we are best buds with their 18 month old son so much so that we just installed a verboten lawn in the back just to have him come over more often. We are also best friends with the former marine and his adorable wife two doors down that moved in 10 years ago, I designed their kitchen and lower level, he built us a deck- trade. The couple with whom we were great friends with divorced and we took under our wing the husband who ended marrying a wonderful woman and now have two kids that we have grown up with and are “Guncles” to. We went to their wedding in Mexico, he married us in our garden( in the ‘08 window, 21 years after we’ve been together), I designed for them a master bedroom suite off their small, but beautiful 100 y.o California Craftsman just to ensure that they would stay as our neighbors as their family overtook their house.

I’m leaving out so much, that would only bore you all the more, but that’s where we are at here, a ridiculous nirvana of fun folks, canyons, friendly pubs and restaurants and beautiful historic houses. But, we may want some more city and weather in our lives- will we though be able to find a similarly welcoming community there? That is the question. Pennsylvania is known as a place of locals who never move away, don’t feel the need to nor meet anybody that they didn’t already meet in high school - a somewhat ridiculous stereotype to be sure but one borne out to some truth, right?

Last edited by T. Damon; 11-30-2018 at 11:05 PM..
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Old 12-01-2018, 06:06 AM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
14,019 posts, read 8,889,691 times
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Before I go any further, let me say that it sounds like you've built a fabulous live in San Diego - and that you two are very much statistical outliers among Americans for wanting to leave a land of eternal sunshine and warm temperatures for a place that has winter.

But I salute you for doing so. I saw this T-shirt on a bum on 12th Street more than 20 years ago, and should I ever run across a shop that has it, I'm buying one. The legend on the T-shirt read:

"Those who cannot handle winter don't deserve summer."

Quote:
Originally Posted by T. Damon View Post
Hey, where are these neighborhood guides? I’m looking for something similar to eschaton’s Suburb of the week in the Pittsburgh forum (another city we finally explored last year and love - but it’s no Philadelphia) and I’m not seeing a frequent posting similar to that.
You may note by now that I'm pretty prolific on this forum. Another old head here, kyb01, once said about me that writing comes as naturally as breathing to me. (We know each other from when we both worked at Penn. I don't; I believe she still does.)

Here's where I write for a living:

Homes, Real Estate and Development | Property | Philadelphia Magazine

I've written for the mag since 2013, full-time (its first full-time African-American editorial staff hire) since 2015, and have edited the real estate section (as well as written most of its content) since February 2016. I also contribute to Next City, an online magazine devoted to the development of more equitable and sustainable cities worldwide that's also based here and turned 15 this year.

You'll find the Neighborhood Guides I referred to on Phillymag. Search on that phrase using the site's search feature.

Quote:
Germantown looks lovely, but expensive!, and not all that exciting- but again, I know nothing. We would totally be fine with a train or bus into the city if that neighborhood (township?) provided at least a decent slice of village vibrancy- a few good restaurants, shops and pubs where you receive a warm welcome yet don’t become too familiar and also allowed us to maybe acquire a beautiful (modest) stone or brick house and garden.
Germantown expensive? Sure you aren't confusing it for one of our up-the-Avenue neighbors?

According to the latest Zillow Home Value Index* figures, the median single-family house value in Germantown ($254,800) is about $100k above the citywide median of $154,400, but I haven't yet seen a house go on the market here for more than twice that figure, and a good chunk of the neighborhood has houses priced at about half that figure. I live on that side of the neighborhood. Its west side is more affluent; this can also be said of our up-the-road neighbors, Mt. Airy and Chestnut Hill.

As you head north on Germantown Avenue - the "Great Road" along which this part of the city developed starting with German settlement in the 1680s - both the elevation and the house values / sale prices rise. Chestnut Hill, at the top of the city, is its second-most-affluent neighborhood after Society Hill in Center City. "The Avenue" in Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy has the shopping districts you describe above. Our weekly Northwest Philly LGBTQ Chat 'n' Chew discussion group meets at Earth / Bread + Brewery on Germantown Avenue in Mt. Airy, and Chestnut Hill has a slew of very good restaurants and boutique shops. Germantown's seen better days, but there are a lot of people here working diligently to bring them about again - and there's a coffeehouse and bookstore right on Market Square that's way cool and busy all day with a mostly black middle-class clientele, including me from time to time.

*Many in the industry deride the ZHVI as inaccurate, and it's nowhere near as widely cited as the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. But the latter cover only 20 cities, Philadelphia not being one of the 20, and it doesn't release data at the neighborhood level over time. ZHVI does both, and it's at least internally consistent.

Quote:
The neighborhood we are at now was hopefully “transitioning” (RE agent speak) and still rough around the edges when we arrived and has solidly planted itself as one of the premier urban adjacent areas in the city, let’s just say you can add a 1 in front of the price we paid for the place 20 years later. So we are all about a charming and interesting area with a few scruffy corners and characters much more so than anything approaching the sterile country club and good schools sect. As we think about it, maybe a small cottage in a township on the line or pied a terre right in the heart of the city for half the year and keep the paid off place in San Diego for the other, as pretentious as that may sound (and we may very well not be able to afford that) is the dream that we are looking for.
The sentence I boldfaced is a not-all-that-inaccurate description of Germantown. Mt. Airy fits it well too, though it has fewer scruffy corners.

Your ideal setup sounds pretty good to me, if you can swing it.

Quote:
The sense of community we have here and is now an angle in this post is a powerful driver in our assessment and is honestly the most important parameter to us.

We were welcomed by the octogenarians as neighbors on both sides of us as the slightly nervous gay couple buying our first house when we moved in as warmly as with the Navy pilots across the street with their fun and beautiful wives with whom we all became fabulous friends.

[...]

I’m leaving out so much, that would only bore you all the more, but that’s where we are at here, a ridiculous nirvana of fun folks, canyons, friendly pubs and restaurants and beautiful historic houses. But, we may want some more city and weather in our lives- will we though be able to find a similarly welcoming community there? That is the question. Pennsylvania is known as a place of locals who never move away, don’t feel the need to nor meet anybody that they didn’t already meet in high school - a somewhat ridiculous stereotype to be sure but one borne out to some truth, right?
Yes, Pennsylvanians are more rooted than residents of many other states, but that statement describes Philadelphia less well now than it did when I moved here nearly 36 years ago.

And I'd say the bit about not feeling the need to meet anyone they didn't already meet in high school is no longer true if it ever was. After all, they've accepted me here, as far as I can tell.

I do count several born-and-bred Philadelphians among my friends, including one I met while we both attended college in Cambridge and who serves as assistant pastor at the church I attend here in Germantown. (We're both "family" and African-American as well.) The city has become a good deal less insular and more cosmopolitan (in the sense of having a presence of people from around the world) than it was in 1983. (It's also more "cosmopolitan" in the sense of "sophisticated" too, but Philadelphians prize their grittiness - Exhibit A for the moment: Gritty, the hideous new Flyers mascot that the city has taken to its bosom [the City Council resolution honoring him said in part, "He's a hideous monster, but he's our hideous monster'] - and will likely continue to do so for aye and evermore.)

tl;dr: Don't worry about feeling unwelcome here. There are plenty of people here who will make you feel right at home.
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Old 12-01-2018, 07:37 AM
 
Location: South Park, San Diego
6,109 posts, read 10,835,827 times
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^^^
MarketStEl

This is great! And yes I was confusing Germantown with Chestnut Hill

I’ll look further into some of the deep resources of information you are and have been providing.

Thanks!

We are celebrating a wonderful rainy storm in San Diego, so much so we made a fire in the fireplace after a walk in the sprinkles last night - both of us excitedly texting each other during work yesterday and Thursday about the waves of rain as it made its way through - that’s how much we miss weather lol.
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Old 12-01-2018, 09:54 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Avalon08 View Post
Yes, probably. New York and Los Angeles are certainly nothing like each other.

But really, have you heard of people from Philly who hate the metro area and want to leave? For reasons other than weather?
Have I heard that personally? No. But there are transplants who post here who swear that all the native Philadelphians they meet, who still live here, hate the area or don't support it in the way they do.
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Old 12-02-2018, 01:10 AM
 
Location: SW Florida
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kyb01 View Post
Have I heard that personally? No. But there are transplants who post here who swear that all the native Philadelphians they meet, who still live here, hate the area or don't support it in the way they do.
Yeah, I'm not buying it. I mean what is there to hate? The weather is fairly moderate, the city is big but not TOO big, the healthcare is top-notch, great restaurant and arts scenes, it's a passionate sports town, has a lot of history and beautiful architecture, is not all that expensive compared to other areas of the country, is right in the middle of NYC and D.C. and only two hours to the Jersey shore. I'll have to be on the lookout for any of these Negative Nellies to see what their gripes are.

Oh, MarketStreetEl, I love the featured property in Philly Mag, but could you make it longer? There are never enough photos of the renovated properties. So please work your magic!
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