Nice place BUT...
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6/28/2010
I have lived in Alpharetta for the past four and a half years. Alpharetta is a very beautiful suburb north of Atlanta. Everything is immaculate, perfect and spotless! You can buy incredible homes with large lots for relatively little money compared to other parts of the country. People used to come here primarily for the good schools, as in the Atlanta area is almost impossible to send your children to decent public schools. The crime rate is very low, which is wonderful, but the traffic on Georgia 400 (which connects Alpharetta to the city of Atlanta) is horrendous! In the elegant Alpharetta subdivisions you will find a very cold, superficial mentality. If you are a woman, you will probably meet a bunch of stay-at-home moms whose only interest is to play tennis and go to the mall. Conversations tend to be very limited as these people, despite their wealth, have no cultural curiosity, don’t read books or newspapers and have never travelled past Georgia or Florida…basically there is no interests in anything other than buying bigger homes/cars and shopping. In Europe they call them “nouveau riche” in the South they just call them “rednecks with money”. I also want to dispel the myth that life here is cheap. North Fulton where Alpharetta and Milton cities are located is a very expensive county to relocate to. The sales tax is 7% and the property tax is higher than in Fairfax County Virginia which is just outside Washington D.C.! Now with the recession things are getting worse. They will increase our property tax again (mine has almost doubled in a little over four years) drastically reducing the quality of services. Fulton County is in red of $115 millions dollars. As a consequence of this, they have laid off a huge amount of teachers and removed the law that used to sets a limit to the numbers of children in the classrooms. It is very likely that very soon our children will be squeezed in a classrooms of 40 kids! They are also considering adopting the 4 days a week school schedule.
Please consider all of these factors when deciding to relocate here. Also, rent before you buy! The real estate market is very depressed and it may take over a year to sell a house…
Monica | Milton, GA