Wichita Falls Crime Questions (Houston, Dallas: low income, appointed, real estate)

[braves31]

My family and I (7 & 5 yr old) are looking at WF for a possible relocation from CA due to an awesome job opportunity. Houses are cheap compared to Northern CA, job is awesome, found good schools, but the CRIME RATE IS UNBELEIVEABLE! I have done some research by calling real estate offices, chamber of commerce etc to try and get the real scoop, sounds like it is primarily isolated to the east side low income area, drugs & gangs.

If anyone who lives there would give me an HONEST opinion of the area related to crime, can you please respond to this post.

TIA!

[lilypad]

I am female and lived in WF for about 6 years. Is a very nice place for raising a family. I never felt unsafe, but did live on southwest end of town near Fairway and Barnett. And would not be in the downtown area after dark. The East side is the rougher side of town and you don't want to be there probably day or night. Otherwise, I did not see crime as a factor for not moving there or for leaving. I had to leave WF for a job situation, but keep thinking about moving back!

[johnson111]

lived in the falls, and still do for 25 years. There are bad sides of every town, including drugs and gangs. If you have nothing to do with these areas, they will have nothing to do to you. Stay out of eastside, there are no stores or anything there to see. Wichita Falls is a nice place and is definitely safe, remember compton is in Ca. not North Tx.

[NOTAM]

I am a single female, worked in Wichita Falls and lived about 30-45 min drive southeast of there, and I also did some shopping/dining out/clubbing there. I never felt unsafe there. Surely there must be some bad parts of town, just like any city.
It's a conservative city with deep roots in ranching/farming. Great folks. Lots of rodeos, FFA, 4H stuff. Very family oriented.
But why do you have to live IN Wichita Falls? There are so many quaint small rural country towns surrounding WF!!!! There is no real congestion/traffic, so commuting will never be a headache!

[CollegeDragon]

I actually lived in Burkburnett and just moved closer into wichita falls by like five minutes. If you don't want to live in
Wichita Falls itself the surrounding areas are amazing and like previous posters stated the commute isn't bad. I commuted from Burk to the Vernon College Century City Campus which is right near Midwestern State University for two years without a problem. It is a twenty five minute drive when it's busy. Like any place you don't go certain places after dark. Plus Wichita Falls has the sheppard airforce base and there are lots of nice places to live right around there and most of the schools are pretty good. My best friends mom used to drop us off at the mall to watch a movie without worrying about our saftey when we were in Junior High (and she was a mom who worried and excepted us to be were we said at the appointed time).

[Huckleberry3911948]

i remember WF as a young man some 40 years ago, a beautiful town then.

[smccull]

I grew up in Burkburnett (70's-90's) and my parents still live there, I would strongly suggest you consider Burkburnett rather than WF - its a nice bedroom community with a super easy commute to WF. Look at the west side of Burkburnett - very neighborly, a lot of Air Force retiree's, just a nice little (13,000) town.

WF has some rough stuff on the east side of town, I guess you could say there is a bigger social/economic gap from the east to the west side than a lot of towns, that probably skews the data, plus my guess is that people in WF actually report crimes, as opposed to larger towns where things just go "unreported"

WF used to have a lot of oil money, there are some huge mansions over in the country club that rival some you would see in Dallas/Houston, but there is a lot of blue collar as well.

Again, take a serious look at Burk, I went to all 12 years of school there and I think I did pretty well, I still keep in touch with a lot of people from my graduating class, and that was nearly 20 years ago.

Steve

[GayleTX]

I spend time in WF and have realtives there. Downtown and east are nowhere you'd want to live or be after dark. We have a relative who works at a nursing home in the medical area downtown - a nice facility....he says people get mugged in broad daylight in their parking lot. And my son was mugged and kidnapped at gunpoint at an ATM machine at Denny's one night while in college there. However....the west part of WF seems to be quite safe and have very few incidents and the small towns are good places....just a few minutes out of town and good schools that give more individual attention to the kids.