Need ADVICE!! Moving to Texas! (El Paso, Corpus Christi: apartments, lease, health insurance)

[anayra]

Hello-
My mother and I are currently living in Northern Virginia. We have been here for the past 20+ years.
Everything is getting so EXPENSIVE and that is making everything worse. To live in a good area with low crime rates you have to pay at least 1,500/month for rent (for a 2 bedroom). The "bad areas" are almost the same too!

We have come to a decision that we want to relocate to Texas. We have in mind the cities of Del Rio, Corpus Christie, MacAllen and El Paso. (we are a little more in favor of Del Rio beacuase we have some family members there) We are originally from Mexico, but I have lived in the US all my life.

Can anyone recommend where it would be better for us? Reasonable rent fees, maybe even buy a house there?, Low crime, good employment opportunities?Decent public schools? The night life and all of that doesnt really play a factor in this move. We are pretty down to earth and can be entertained easily. It will be great to finally be somewhere quiet without sirens and so much talk about terrorists, (we live about 2 minutes away from D.C).

We have until the middle of August to go, that's when our lease is up. So we would like to have a good idea of what to look for and what to expect.

THANKS!!

[TexasNick]

Hi, sure, if you stick around those cities you had in mind, you will have no problem renting something for lower than 1500/month! Good luck and keep us posted on your progress.

[allie_countrygirlatheart]

Well I live in El Paso and I've been to Corpus Christi it's beautiful but I dont know much about it.

El Paso is a great place to live it has great schools, and I'm sure there are plenty of nice apartments that are lower then $1500 a month. I would recommend the West side because it honestly has less crime. El Paso is hot and you do get rain occasionally well actually theres no telling when you'll get rain. I've fallen in love with El Paso but I'm not much of a city girl so i'm actually wanting to leave to go somewhere less crowded. Well good luck!
If you need to know anything else just let me know!

[mitchdd]

The Del Rio area is a very small metro area of just 50,000, so job opportunities are much more limited than the others. The El Paso area has almost 800,000, and the McAllen metro area of Hidalgo County close to 720,000 people, so there's more job options. McAllen has the warmest winter weather, much like south Florida, and palm trees are common. El Paso has mountains and much colder winters. Del Rio has brutally hot desert-like summers, although the other cities are hot in the summer as well. Although I like Corpus Christi, I prefer a border city in order to have access to inexpensive medical care and other services in Mexico. This is a big plus for someone without health insurance, and who don't qualify for medicaid or medicare. Housing is cheap in all the areas mentioned. I'm 10 miles from McAllen, in a safe neighborhood, where my 8-year old 3/2/2 goes for just $72,000. Clearly housing is cheap here, and it's now a buyers market. A house like mine rents for $675/mo. A decent 2/2 apartment goes for $450-$550 or so. I never hear sirens around here, and people don't talk about terrorists much. I don't know much about the public schools here or elsewhere, except that they keep on getting worse all over the country.

[samiecake3]

I am new to this forum, and I do have a suggestion that you can try, if you have Google.com. You can type in the search bar the population of a city that you are willing to look into, and it gives the City-Data.com, where it shows the population, the crime rates, the ethnic ratios. I hope this helps out in some way. Good Luck on finding that right place, if I were the one to choose, I would pick closer to my family.