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My mother was thinking about taking a job at the Coast Guard station in Aguadilla.. she seems excited to move and be able to finish up her career on a nice island, but me personally I don't know much about PR but have only heard a lot of negatives about the high crime rate and high housing prices.
Has anyone ever lived or visted this area of PR? Any opinions positive and negative appreciated
It all depends on your preferences, Aguadilla is a small town out of the metropolitan area and for a coastie if you like a sedentary place it is good but the main Coast Guard Base is at old San Juan bay area. The only disadvantage up in that area is after 7pm or so all is dead calm only a few bars and fast food chains are open until late at night. Crime is low in this area and house pricing is more affordable like I told you is way off the metro area. If you need any help you can pm me or post your comment I will reply I live here and can help you out. best of luck!
It all depends on your preferences, Aguadilla is a small town out of the metropolitan area and for a coastie if you like a sedentary place it is good but the main Coast Guard Base is at old San Juan bay area. The only disadvantage up in that area is after 7pm or so all is dead calm only a few bars and fast food chains are open until late at night. Crime is low in this area and house pricing is more affordable like I told you is way off the metro area. If you need any help you can pm me or post your comment I will reply I live here and can help you out. best of luck!
Thanks a lot, that info is really helpful, I will try to pm you with more questions for them because they're a little 'pc illiterate'
i didn't know about the CG base at old san juan area, as far as i knew Ft. Buchanan(army) was in san juan area and Borinquen (sp?) CG station is in Aguadilla. I mean I don't know, I'm just going by the military school list they gave her.
By your description Aguadilla kind of sounds like it would suit them, they don't get out much after 6pm.
2. Show them the area using Google Earth. You can zoom in and give them an excellent bird's eye view. This will give them a sense of the size of the area, the proportion of green areas to built-up areas, and there are quite a few bonus photos that will show up and can be clicked on. Also, if you click the "Gallery" option in the Layers side-panel, info points will be presented on the map that can be clicked on for additional details.
Hope those help. By the way, although this is second-hand and obviously one person's opinion can be quite different from another, I remember reading on some other forum postings from a lady real-estate agent who lived in Puerto Rico and was considering moving to Aguadilla because she thought it was the nicest area in all the island. Coming from a real-estate agent (and the experience that brings with it), I thought this carried a good amount of weight. Anyway, good luck to them if they decide to relocate and please keep us informed of their experiences if they go.
Yeah, the west part of the island is pretty nice indeed.
Even though the economy is all messed up right now in the island, your mom will be fine with a federal paycheck under her belt. Besides the obvious differences in the infrastructure and language, Puerto Rico has been "Americanized" in many ways. Shopping and eating will be the same as here: Same chain restaurants, same clothing stores, etc.
Although I'm not sure about the Coast Guard, at least with the Army Puerto Rico is considered "over-seas" for some asignments, so with the extra cash you should be able to live in a very nice place for little money.
Don't you wory about crime rate, it is all about how statistics are manipulated. PR is very little and over populated, that's what makes the crime statistics rate so high. Crime rate is measured by regions and incidents per sq2 mile, not by total population. Put 3.5 million people in a box 100x35. We should be first in everything. Actually our crime rate is mild from that perspective. Have someone ever told you that PR has the largest number of roads per sq2 mile in the world, seems impossible but is the truth. Now you see how statistics are played. Go there, you will find the naciest and happiest people in the world, per sq2 mile.
I'm afraid you have the statistics lesson backwards. It IS relevant to measure things in density rather than absolute because it establishes a benchmark against places where the geography is substantially different. What makes the statistic high in PR is that it is HIGH. 780 murders for a 100x35 island is high. What makes it dangerous is that if you were to compare it to Chicago (which had 599 that same year, highest for the CONUS for that particular year), in PR you don't have the ability to avoid it, whereas in chicago you can drive yourself away from it. It's that simple. And you're also wrong on the unit of measure, murder is reported in per capita NOT per square mile. So there is no gimmick to PR having a higher per capita murder rate, they earned it, they have less people and yet have more total murders than what chicagoland has. It would be one thing if PR had less total murders but came up with the same density because of lower population than chicago, but when you have more TOTAL murders with less people, crime rate better be on your cross-check. Per capita numbers are supposed to benefit big population centers, where if not for a normalizing density figure people would think cities are hell on earth because the total numbers can be scary to suzie midwest suburban. But when you have an island exceed TOTAL murders over a big city of twice the population of the island, there is no statistical gimmick in the book to fudge that, it's a straight up bad place to be crime-wise. Crime is NOT mild in PR. Fact check that one.
hindsight2020's post is correct. Furthermore, to say "PR is very little and over populated, that's what makes the crime statistics rate so high" is not a valid cause and effect theory and merely serves as an excuse for Puerto Ricans to blame the situation as if it's beyond their control or something. The fact is there are plenty of other examples of places that are "very little and over populated" and yet have far lower crime rates than PR. Take Singapore for example - they are also an island and they have a population density FIFTEEN TIMES higher than Puerto Rico yet only 3% as many murders and only 2% as many rapes. Have a serious think about that people - 15 times the population density and yet only a tiny percentage of the crimes. That is unequivocal proof that a small/highly-populated island does not automatically equal high crime rates!
Having said all that and now getting back to the subject of this topic (Aguadilla), the one thing to keep in perspective regarding crime is where it's happening. If you look at a geographic breakdown of crime on the island, you will see that the vast majority of it is happening in the metro areas (e.g. San Juan/Ponce). To be precise, the stats actually breakdown to only 3.15% of all violent crimes in PR are from outside metropolitan areas. And if we're talking solely about murders (although I think the violent crime stats are better - since getting stabbed or shot but not actually murdered isn't exactly nice either :-) then it's only 2.57% in non-metro areas. In short, I don't think anyone is going to suggest that living in Aguadilla is nearly as risky as San Juan or Ponce. To use an analogy, you wouldn't write off living anywhere in the entire state of Illinois just because of higher crime in Chicago... or the entire state of California just because of LA... or the entire state of New York just because of NYC. I think anyone can visualize the difference but if you've ever traveled within any of these states, then you really know there is a world of difference between the big cities versus the small towns and rural areas elsewhere throughout the state. Likewise, there is a world of difference between Aguadilla and San Juan or Ponce. Anyway, hopefully these past few posts have more than covered the crime situation - if not, it has certainly been discussed elsewhere on this forum. So, let's all try to get back to providing helpful information to the original poster specific to the area requested - Aguadilla.
I used to live in the neighboring town of Moca. Gato2's post is right on, I'd like to add.
Crime happens in the west, as it does everywhere, but it's not very often that you hear of anything really major. It is indeed the metro area that gets to claim that... From what I've seen, it is mostly drug-related, so if you don't look for it, it usually won't find you.
Basic things- don't leave valuables (or even pocket change) out in your car where someone would be tempted to steal it, common sense stuff like that.
I've seen prostitutes a few blocks down from Parque Colon, going towards the town center, but that was at night of course, and there's no other reason to really be down there unless youre driving through or live there.
All-in-all, beautiful area, great beaches, reasonable housing, it pretty much has whatever u might need. You are close to BQN airport and the Mayaguez airport, other Caribbean islands and South America if u want to venture out a little... San Juan isnt all that far if you're ok w the traffic...
Do you speak Spanish? While many Puerto Ricans speak Spanish, the west is a little more genuinely 'Puerto Rican', and you have more of a percentage of non-English speakers in the area. You'd need Spanish eventually...
We would live in Moca right now if we had the choice. Our jobs and our kids are in a good place right now and I wouldnt want to uproot it all at the moment.
Aguadilla has a lot of positives compared to other parts of the island. Having a more reasonable cost of living is a plus. My sister plans to settle down there. There are nice people everywhere on the island. But, of all the places I've visited on the island, I think the Aguadilla-Moca-San Sebastian area has the largest concentration of nice down to earth smart people.
Can't beat the beaches or the great sunsets, either!
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aguadilla
. Besides the obvious differences in the infrastructure and language, Puerto Rico has been "Americanized" in many ways. Shopping and eating will be the same as here: Same chain restaurants, same clothing stores, etc. 
