Help!Moving to Chicago soooooon!!!

[chicago103]

Originally Posted by vp78

Well we live in a quiet little town in Greece, where there is no need to use public transport. You either walk to a place, or if it is further away, you take your car. And to tell you the truth I feel I would be overwhelmed with my baby and my 4-year old trying to figure out which train to catch,where to get off, to carry the stroller around and so on. You see public transport isn't the strongest point of Greece- with the exception of the Metro in Athens.But I guess that it is all a matter of getting used to everything.My biggest worry is how my 4-year old daughter will adjust to this 'adventure'!

If you are used to walking then I would recommend living in the city near the place of work near 4800 North Milwaukee Avenue you mentioned. In the United States it is pretty rare for a place to be walk able but not public transit accessible, here they tend to go hand in hand. The northwest side of Chicago has many nice family friendly areas that have IMO (and certainly compared to almost all of America) that nice balance between walk ability to day to day shopping and errands, public transit access and car accessibility. In that part of the city it is common for families with kids to own a car but you could probably get by with owning just one car and not using it that often thus saving lots of money on gas. A suburb like Mundelein on the other hand would be a place where you live the typical suburban American lifestyle of driving everywhere.

The city in general is also a better place for finding housing for people of different incomes. As others have said places like Park Ridge are much more income exclusive and even making $70K your options might be limited there but in the parts of the city of Chicago just south and east of Park Ridge are a bit cheaper and have more multi-family options and affordable options. It really depends on what kind of lifestyle you want, if you want as big of a house and yard as possible than suburbs are better, if you really want the urban lifestyle you can just live in a smaller house with a smaller yard or in a condo/apartment. Really anyone with a living wage can afford to live in Chicago, the subjectivity comes when people start arguing about their own personal sense of "creature comforts".

[vp78]

My husband and I are aware that at least the first few years are going to be hard for us,not only economically but also culturally. Imagine having to start up a household from scratch, to find schools- in a completely different educational system-, doctors, ...even the simplest errands will be strenuous at first. Of course, we're looking for something affordable. As I mentioned in a previous post, owning a car is in our plans.

It's just a scary and intimidating period of adjustment.But exciting at the same time!

I will look up the areas south and east of Park Ridge as well. Rent at Des Plaines for a two bedroom apartment seemed pretty affordable too.