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I live in Natick and it is a great town. For your budget, you will have no problem getting a 4 bed, 2.5 bath house, although you will have to move quickly when you see one you like. Natick is definitely more than the mall and route 9 area. All of the elementary schools are pretty good, but I have found people are dry loyal to their school. I live on the north side and my sister-in-law lives in South Natick, so I know a good it about those areas.
Feel free to send me a PM if you have any specific questions.
I returned your DM, and go into more detail in that return DM, but something I'm still trying to get a handle on is how much "city" you still want to have around you after your move to a place where you can have a yard and your kids can attend good schools. I look back at your opening post, and see where you say you might be kind of bored in a bedroom community defined mainly by families with children in schools. We all have our own picture of what this description means, but to me, other than Arlington, which several people have suggested, all the towns which have been discussed on this thread fit my image of a bedroom town where the populace is made up largely of families with kids in school.
Natick is a nice town for someone who likes the suburbs. It's also true that Natick has commuter rail service and an attractive little downtown area with a collection of local kinds of small shops. However, downtown Natick is really nothing like the kinds of commercial districts you'll often find in residential districts within cities. You'll find few if any of the ethnic shops or little of the generally eclectic feel to the collection of businesses that you'd find in one of those urban-residential commercial districts. I don't know Sharon really well, but if hearsay is correct, Sharon has less commercial activity than Natick, and is another town that would most likely fit the families-schoolchildren-bedroom-town description. From what I've seen and heard of Sharon, it's very nice for that kind of town, but it is that kind of town.
I believe that in one post you asked about neighborhoods in Natick other than South Natick. If your interest in Natick holds, I'd suggest looking around Natick Center as well. From much of the Natick Center area you could walk to the downtown local shops, and the commuter rail station downtown. You'd probably still have to drive, though, to get to the grocery store or drugstore for the everyday needs, but the Natick Center area is probably as close as you're going to get in Natick to being able to walk places the way you've been able to do in NYC and Jersey City.
Which gets us back to the reality that living near the Natick Center commercial district would still be quite different from living in a city, because of the differences in the kinds of stores you'd find in Natick compared to urban business districts. This gets back to the question of how much "city" you'd still prefer to have nearby. How important is public transit? How important is it to be able to walk to public transit, and not have to drive to a station? How important is it for you to be able to walk to stores? How important is it to be near a business district with the eclectic feel, ethnic shops, etc., you'd find in many commercial zones located in the outer districts of a city but still in the city? Answers to questions like these can help people here narrow down the possibilities for you.
How important is public transit? Scale of 1-10 i'd say 4 if my husband can drive to work and 8 if he's taking the train.
It's ok to drive to the station if I can drop him off or if there's commuter parking. In New Jersey you're waitlisted for years before you can get a parking spot in the commuter train parking lots. How is it outside Boston in general? Do they sell parking permits for reserved spots or you just see what you can get? do people carpool to the train station?
How important is it to walk to stores? 3 out of 10. It would be good to have a little diner or something walkable, and maybe a corner store like a 7-11. Otherwise it's fine to drive.
Would be nice to have a few decent restaurants in town. I don't mind at all driving to neighboring towns for stores, restaurants, etc. But sometimes nice to have a few good ones very close by.
I'm enjoying this post because I am trying to move to the area from Brooklyn and I've got two kids entering elementary school. I grew up outside Boston but have been in NYC for almost 20 years. I'm getting close to picking Arlington, myself, but am still unsure. I think we will rent when we move to be sure we like it there. Towns in Mass each have their own distinct micro-culture and children especially are very focused on their individual town community. There isn't the porous feeling of city schools where kids in the neighborhood go to a variety of schools and they are all used to that- each town is its own private world, in my experience. So the feel and the culture of a town really matters. Growing up, I felt trapped in suburbia, because I couldn't do anything without an adult driving me. My husband in NYC went to a candy store on his walk home from elementary school and I couldn't even get to a mini-mart on my bicycle till I was older because it was too far away. So that enclosed us all even more- into people's basements, basically.
For me, that suburban problem puts Natick totally out of the running, too far out and too disconnected from the city. It's really my problem, I know there are great things about Natick and parts of it are really lovely, but I have my own childhood suffering to think of! I'd like them to get to Cambridge and Boston on their own.
Just drove around Needham on my last visit, and it has a vibrant downtown area, with the commuter rail right downtown being a big plus. And lovely neighborhoods near the town center. But they are expensive. Even grandma's fixer-uppers are really steep (to me at least, and I've got about your budget.) I think it's just out of reach. But worth a look for that right "compromise" property.
Winchester is lovely- green and quite amazingly victorian in residential architecture, cute and quaint downtown (not nearly as big and vibrant as needham, but functional.) Again, great commuter access. I have heard great things about the community of young families there who are very happy, but I've also heard it's very homogeneous. My suburban angst flares up and I feel squeamish- and the parts of town that are affordable are not near downtown. Though I could be wrong because I'm not looking hard there and I think I probably should.
So Arlington is what I get to. I don't love the big mass ave flow of cars right through the middle of town, but I do like the density (with trees,) proximity to Cambridge and the red line, public bus, the vibe of the people I know who live there. Lots of interesting and smart people who don't happen to work in finance, medicine or biotech- (hey, I love those people too, but they make more money than teachers and architects and music people and postal workers and everybody else.) I feel that Arlington's schools will give my children a strong enough base to pursue whatever they want, and I already assume that I'll be adding to their education myself no matter where we live. Boston does make that easy, with many programs at places like MIT and the museums.
The big big problem is knowing where you will work. It cannot be overstated what a problem it would be to live in the wrong orientation to your job via. car or train commute. You need to know if you're downtown boston, east cambridge, 128, 495.... many old and too-small roads everywhere here, water with bridges in all the wrong places- it can be a real drag. There is no subway or train that can get you to all the main places of employment- all of them go some places, but none of them go to all. Very different from NYC/NJ in terms of commute in that way.
So on the whole I think Boston is a great city with top notch opportunities and culture and incredible nature. It's really family oriented in many ways and things do seem just a few notches easier and calmer than metro ny. I also think despite the high prices of RE the taxes are all much lower than the NY burbs (on all sides) and educational expectations are high all around.
Cato, I'd like to rep you, but have to spread some. Good idea to make comparisons to towns in the state the OP is coming from, which may be familiar to the OP and can give a good general picture.
SallyHally, good point about the work location as an important factor in choosing where to live. Now that I think about it, I don't think that issue has been discussed on this thread. Melissa, it's true that the location of your husband's work can affect the decision about a what is a good place to live. One general rule about home and work locations in the Boston area is that you don't want to live either north or south of Boston while working on the opposite side of the city. Commuting through Boston to the other side, or all the way around on 128, is something most people try to avoid. From the western suburbs it's more of a case-by-case basis how the commute would be from a home in a Metro West town to a particular work location.
As SallyHally points out, the transit system in Boston also can make commutes to a given workplace significantly more or less convenient from different suburbs. There are a couple of reasons for this: commuter rail lines ending at two train stations in Boston, so the rail line you use can affect how convenient it is to get from the train station to work once you're in the city; the fact that Boston's subway system has a hub-and-spoke layout, so that if you don't figure in the most convenient commuting routes, it's possible to arrive in town on the commuter train and still have a couple of transfers and/or have to travel in toward downtown at the point where the subway lines crisscross, then have to transfer and travel back out on another line.
What all this adds up to is that your husband's work location may well be a factor to consider in choosing the right town to live in.
How important is public transit? Scale of 1-10 i'd say 4 if my husband can drive to work and 8 if he's taking the train.
It's ok to drive to the station if I can drop him off or if there's commuter parking. In New Jersey you're waitlisted for years before you can get a parking spot in the commuter train parking lots. How is it outside Boston in general? Do they sell parking permits for reserved spots or you just see what you can get? do people carpool to the train station?
How important is it to walk to stores? 3 out of 10. It would be good to have a little diner or something walkable, and maybe a corner store like a 7-11. Otherwise it's fine to drive.
Would be nice to have a few decent restaurants in town. I don't mind at all driving to neighboring towns for stores, restaurants, etc. But sometimes nice to have a few good ones very close by.
How are the restaurants in Natick? Any favorites?
The train:
The train stations vary as far as how packed the parking lots get, cost of parking, etc. I'm hoofing it these days, so I'm not really familiar with the parking at particular stations, but I've never heard of reserved spaces or waiting lists for parking at commuter rail stations in the Boston area. At the stations where parking is an issue, the general rule seems to be to get there early if you want a spot.
Dining:
There's not so much in the way of fine dining right in Natick. That's probably in keeping with the point I made last night about how the Metro West area is very suburban, and lacks the eclectic flavor of businesses found in city commercial districts. The economic lifeblood of the local area in Natick's vicinity is a big mall and office park area on rt. 9. As is often the case in such areas, there are plenty of chain restaurants, but less in the way of eateries with a local flavor.
Depending on how far you want to travel, you can probably find some nice, or at least reasonably nice, restaurants in neighboring or nearby towns. A few years ago I lived next door to Natick in Framingham, which has a significant population of Brazilian immigrants. I don't know whether this place is still open, but at the time I lived there Framingham had a nice Brazilian restaurant. There was also an Indian restaurant there at the time which was pretty good. Whether these places are still there, Framingham is a large enough town that you're likely to be able to ferret out a few decent non-chain places at any given time, if you look around and ask around.
If you ended up in Natick, you might also want to look for dining a couple of towns to the east in Newton. Newton borders the western edge of Boston, and while Newton is largely residential, it does have several good-sized commercial districts which have some of the variety of small shops and restaurants found more in city business districts.
If you want something more low-brow in the vicinity of Natick, a place worth checking out is a breakfast/lunch restaurant called Mel's just over the line from the north side of Natick, in the town of Wayland. Mel's has been around for fifty years or so, and is something of a neighborhood institution. Nothing fancy. Strictly plain, simple, and solid, but good for that kind of place, and generally a pretty friendly place.
The general idea is that there are lots of chain restaurants in very suburban Metro West, with fewer distinctive local kinds of places, but you can still find the latter scattered around here and there.
If you settle down in Natick, another place to go for local dining is Waltham. Our friends live there and we meet in town for dinner frequently. Some of our favorite places include Il Capriccio, Elephant Walk, New Mother India, Ponzu, and Erawan.
Good call on Waltham, Cato. Waltham is not right next door to Natick, but close enough to still be a local trip, and there is a good restaurant scene there. Probably the best concentration of non-chain restaurants within local travel distance from Natick, so definitely a place to check out for foodies who settle in Natick.
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