I'm Moving to Georgia but not sure what city... (Atlanta: motels, house)

[FreshStartMama]

Hello. I am an African American woman and I currently live in Indianapolis with my 13 year old son. I have a dream of moving to a diverse, friendly small town. Imagine Stars Hollow but with brown faces or BlueBell with more brown faces, lol. I have lived in Charlotte, NC also and it was very much like Indy, in the sense that it had the feeling of a BIG small town. Not too fast and not too slow. I want a house with a front porch on a picturesque street. Ideally not in a subdivision. I want to be a car ride away from a big city. I want neighbors to be friendly. I want a town that has no overt racial issues. I want a town where everybody is at the football game on a Friday night. Does this place exist? Possibly. I am thinking of Stockbridge or McDonough. Thoughts? Recommendations? Looking to move this summer.

[Born 2 Roll]

Originally Posted by FreshStartMama

Hello. I am an African American woman and I currently live in Indianapolis with my 13 year old son. I have a dream of moving to a diverse, friendly small town. Imagine Stars Hollow but with brown faces or BlueBell with more brown faces, lol. I have lived in Charlotte, NC also and it was very much like Indy, in the sense that it had the feeling of a BIG small town. Not too fast and not too slow. I want a house with a front porch on a picturesque street. Ideally not in a subdivision. I want to be a car ride away from a big city. I want neighbors to be friendly. I want a town that has no overt racial issues. I want a town where everybody is at the football game on a Friday night. Does this place exist? Possibly. I am thinking of Stockbridge or McDonough. Thoughts? Recommendations? Looking to move this summer.

What will be most important will be living in an area that will be relatively convenient and close to where you will be working.

Find out where in the state you will be working and then proceed from there in looking for a place with a small-town environment where you will be comfortable.

With that said, McDonough might be a slightly better candidate for the small-town feel that you are looking for than Stockbridge. Though both McDonough and Stockbridge likely will not be the absolute best candidates for the type of small-town lifestyle that you are looking for because both towns are in an area in Henry County that has basically been swallowed up (and continues to be swallowed up...and overrun) by the intense suburban sprawl and heavy suburban development and growth of the Atlanta metropolitan area/region.

Though McDonough (as the seat of government for Henry County) has the traditional historic town square surrounded by a historic downtown area, both Stockbridge and McDonough are basically once-rural small-town areas that have transitioned into an almost endless collection of suburban subdivisions, roadside motels, restaurants, strip malls and big-box stores connected to Atlanta by an extremely busy and often severely-congested superhighway (Interstate 75).

To put it in terms that you might better be able to relate to as a resident of a Midwestern city/metro like Indianapolis, areas like Stockbridge, McDonough and Henry County are kind of like Johnson County, Indiana (the southern outer-suburb of Indianapolis) on steroids, with much, much more diversity and much, much, MUCH more traffic.

If you are talking about looking at diverse small towns (or smaller towns) where everybody is at the football game on Friday night, some places where you could look are towns like Covington, about 35 miles east of Atlanta along I-20 and Gainesville, a small, but extremely politically powerful city about 55 miles northeast of Atlanta along I-985 in the foothills of the Blue Ridge and Southern Appalachian Mountains on the shores of Lake Lanier.

Covington (a small-town where past popular TV shows like "In The Heat of The Night" and the "Dukes of Hazzard" were filmed) has become an outer-suburb/exurb of Atlanta but has not quite been swallowed up, devoured and overrun by the suburban sprawl of Atlanta like towns like Stockbridge and McDonough have been in Henry County.

Covington is diverse in that more than half of its population (about 55% or so) are minorities. The town also seems to give much support to its highly competitive sports teams (especially football and basketball) at Newton High School.

Gainesville is an even more diverse small city (with a population that is about 55-60% minority (large black population and very-large Hispanic population)) with a small-town atmosphere that is extremely supportive (if not fanatical) of the extremely competitive Red Elephants football and basketball teams at Gainesville High School.

Gainesville is so supportive of the Red Elephants that it often seems like the entire city comes out to support the Red Elephants football teams during their home games at Bobby Gruhn Field at City Park during the fall.

Gainesville would also probably be one of the better candidates (if not the best candidates) of the smaller cities and towns in Georgia outside of Atlanta because Gainesville itself (along with surrounding Hall County) has a relatively very large base of industrial and commercial jobs for a city its size. Also, because Gainesville is on the heavily-developed north side of the sprawling Atlanta metropolitan region, Gainesville provides access to areas of industrial and commercial jobs closer to Atlanta (in the heavily-developed northeastern Atlanta suburb of Gwinnett County).

You can also check-out other outlying small cities with a small-town feel like Newnan, Cartersville and Douglasville....Though Newnan and Douglasville have some very heavily suburban elements to them.