military moving to San Antonio, where to live? (houses, neighborhoods)

[blaxican1424]

The wife and I are both active duty Air Force. We have a four year old son and plan on having a couple more in the next few years. We will be arriving in Jun and have been looking for houses for a couple months. We are an interatial couple(she's spanish & I'm Black/Mexican) both E-6 and wantg to feel comfortable where we live. Most important, we want our son to go to a good school and be able to have a good childhood. She will be stationed at Randolph AFB and I'll be going to Lackland. I would like about a 20 minute drive for her and up to a 35/40 minute drive for me. Where do you think we should look? I've been looking at the 78259 area code.

[majormadmax]

You'll have to be in the north/northeast side of town to meet those commute times, there are plenty of neighborhoods that meet your other requirements (although it would help if we knew what price range you are looking for).

I strongly recommend a good realtor, that would help you tremendously. We had an outstanding one when we PCS'd here from Belgium. He concentrates in that area of town, I will DM you his details. Before we ever left Europe, he was in constant email contact with me and my wife, asking us a lot of questions on what we were looking for in a home. We went out looking at houses our second day in San Antonio, and had a deposit on our house before lunch! He was recommended to us by a bud who was at Randolph at the time, and we have since done the same to numerous friends who PCS'd here. He's really good at working with military families, and has an excellent success rate.

By the way, I still work on Lackland so if you have any specific questions about the base, feel free to shoot them my way.

Good luck with your hunt, and welcome to San Antonio!

Cheers! M2

[TXsurburbanmom]

78259 has excellent schools and will probably put you in the driving range you are looking for. I'm not as familiar with the Lackland drive but I used to have to drive from close to 78259 over near the Lackland area and it was about 30-40 minutes. I live in 78258 and absolutely LOVE the schools. The area is very diverse regardless of what other people will tell you. After reading on here how anglo my area was from people who don't live here, I checked out the various races at my son's elementary school play--I concluded I was right and they were wrong. You will be just fine in either of these zip codes--that's one of the reason we only stayed away 8 months before moving back to San Antonio!

You will propbably get feedback from people who hate this part of town. Get a realtor, check the TEA info on the schools (78258/78259 are both part of NEISD, SA has multiple school districts), and decide for yourself. We love it in this part of SA and wouldn't live anywhere else!