Moving to Austin from Boston with kids - good towns near husbands work?

[readymade]

Originally Posted by Jennibc

I lived in Circle C back in 99 and didn't really like it all that much but that's before we had children. After moving away and living in an in-city Seattle neighborhood and then having our son, I have more appreciation for a neighborhood like Circle C, which is why we moved back. But no, your post didn't offend me at all. It did make me snicker a little though.

It's interesting you should say that because I'm sort of the same way with Boston. After I moved away, I swore I'd never move back... mostly because of the snow/cold. But now, 9 years later, I look back on it with fondness and realize that it really is a great place to raise a kid (hey, sledding is fun!). Plus, I want them to grow up around a big family like I did. But, now that I've made the decision to move back, I think about all the great stuff that I didn't appreciate back then.

Man, kids really do make a difference in a person's life and their decisions, huh! I haven't even had mine yet and I'm already moving back to the place I grew up and swore I'd never go back to!

[Jennibc]

Originally Posted by atxcio

I'll bet a lot of out-of-Austin forum readers must be wondering to themselves,

"What the heck is this Circle C and why does it come up in like 75% of posts on this forum?"

Seriously, it's got to be one of the most boring things we discuss endlessly. And lots of things are discussed endlessly here

Well, there are so many angles to Circle C if you think about it:
Environmental concerns
Californian Bashing
Cookie cutter houses
Master planned community hating
conservatives (although I think this is a myth)
development issues
Good schools
Affordability close in (although that depends on what one considers affordable)
Lack of diversity
Austin becoming more like Dallas
Austin growing too much
and so on.

[homeinatx]

I know this is an ancient thread, but readymade your comments made me laugh out loud. I had a very similar reaction the first time I saw a master planned community and it just happened to be Circle C. A colleague I really like invited me to dinner at her house and I drove down and was completely horrified when I saw "the neighborhood," thinking OMG, this looks exactly like projects for middle class people. Miles of what to me looked like what in England are called "council houses" - cheaply built public housing - each one identical to the one next door. Not an urban amenity in sight, and primed to be future slums. Now that I have been in Austin for 8 years, and have realized that almost everything outside the small central core looks similar, I have lost some of my aesthetic repugnance. Lots of good folk live there and love it, and the houses look a little better on the inside, and are pretty functional, but my first response was this is the most boring if not the ugliest residential architecture I have ever seen! Its not just Austin though - the north side of Dallas and the west Side of Houston are arguably worse (there's more of them!), and driving from the Denver airport into Denver proper, identical houses sprout like mushrooms! I suspect Victorian terrace houses in parts of London looked similar when they were first built, but they have real craft value and have aged pretty well. I hope the same for the suburban sprawl of Austin, but most of those houses look like if you blew hard they would fall over, and I still joke that I feel the pain of the earth for having such soul destroying monotony erected upon her. If you are coming from a city with a huge stock of older houses with what realtors call character, much of Austin can be a very unpleasant shock.