Greenville NC vs Charlottesville VA (live, best, better, crime)
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What's up Everybody, its been a while since I've been up here & posted anything. I decided to compare my Hometown Greenville NC & Charlottesville VA to me these cities have similar economy sectors such as Healthcare, Education, & Finance. But besides that which of these two towns are more built up & more up & coming.
No not moving no time soon I just moved back to Greenville march of last year from Petersburg VA, I'm pushing towards Raleigh in the future I just found it interesting to see if these to towns compare
Hi. I lived in Charlottesville for ten years, and now have lived in Greenville, NC for six years.
The funny thing about it is this: the two towns have almost exactly the same land area and the same population size (if you count the whole metro regions; Charlottesville's city limits are smaller), but beyond that they've got pretty much nothing in common.
First, Charlottesville has much more money. MUCH more money. Greenville is an island of not-doing-too-bad in the middle of one of the poorest regions in the USA. That difference determines pretty much everything else. Charlottesville, for instance, has not one but two of the best specialty cheese shops in the USA (Flora and Feast). Greenville? Can't even get a Whole Foods. Of course, there are plenty of poor people in Charlottesville, and not a few rich families in and around Greenville -- but in general, the money around C'ville means that there are a lot more choices for leisure and consumption. OTOH, Greenville is cheaper -- the farmers' markets, for instance, are ridiculously cheap for high-quality produce, compared to C'ville. Housing is MUCH cheaper. Those can be good things.
Secondly, Charlottesville is much better educated than Greenville. UVA is a serious school; while not all of its grads are geniuses (trust me, there are some idiots), it's still very selective. ECU barely has admissions standards at all. It's mostly a vocational school. There's nothing wrong with that -- the world needs all kinds of people. But the average person you'll meet in Charlottesville has read much more than the average person in Greenville. Greenville is a college town that can't even support an independent bookstore. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
Third, it's pretty easy to live in Charlottesville without a car. Lots of stuff you'd want to do is located Downtown or on the Corner; most of the other stuff is in fairly easy biking distance; the bus systems aren't bad, either. Charlottesville's Downtown Mall is one of the most successful pedestrian zones in the USA; Greenville ripped out its pedestrian street in the Nineties. Greenville is a strip-mall-and-car town.
Both towns have pretty convenient airports, but Charlottesville has more airlines and destinations. Charlottesville is, in general, just much less isolated than Greenville -- you can drive to D.C. in 2.5 hours (vs. 5+ from Greenville), or you can take a train, or even the Starlight Express bus directly to NYC. From Greenville, it's much harder to get away.
On the flipside, although Charlottesville is obsessed with its Jeffersonian history, Greenville is actually much more fully integrated with its past. Old families and rural culture are still around and still important. The average person in Greenville speaks with an accent that's not far from the local accent of 50 years ago. That's really not true in Charlottesville.
Physically, Greenville is much harder to love than Charlottesville. In C'ville, every time you look up you see the Blue Ridge or Carter's Mountain. In Greenville, you see...another strip mall. The weather in Greenville is quite a lot hotter and more humid (though C'ville can do hot and humid sometimes, too). In C'ville you've got hiking year-round in gorgeous mountain scenery, whitewater paddling, cold spring-fed swimming holes in the summer. You can even go XC skiing, sometimes. In Greenville, it's too hot and buggy to do much of anything outdoors in the summer. The rest of the year, the paddling is excellent in the creeks and rivers, but there's really nowhere to hike, and nowhere to swim that's actually refreshing in the middle of the summer.
On the other hand, in many ways Greenville has more opportunities than Charlottesville. It's a rapidly growing town, and it needs lots of stuff. C'ville is pretty established. Because C'ville is so pretty and popular, you'll be competing with a zillion over-qualified people for every job. Not so in Greenville -- it's pretty wide open. I can't tell you how many businesses I miss from C'ville and wish somebody would open something similar in Greenville. Anybody who opens a really good bakery (on the level of Albemarle Baking Co.) or a good sandwich shop (on the level of Take It Away) in Greenville will get rich. I'm pretty optimistic that Greenville will start to get better in the next few years, as more and more businesses and developers are investing downtown. Good luck to you!
Greenville is absolutely horrible. Horrible weather. NO culture. Crime. Boring. SO very boring. Do not go there. You will regret it.
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