Very disappointed
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9/15/2006
I moved here about a year ago after hearing how great this area is and how affordable it is to live here. I even visited here, albeit very briefly, prior to making my decision that this would be the place to move to. At this point, all I can say is that I made a mistake coming here. I'm not saying that I hate this city, but there are definitely other places I would much rather be. This city has NO identity or character. NONE. The main reason why I came here is because of the financial industry. I have securities licenses and financial education coming out of my @$$, but it still took me EIGHT months to find a halfway decent job that pays a liveable wage. And yes, I was looking very hard. The cost of living here is pretty bad too, and it literally seems like it is getting higher and higher every month. I'm sorry, but $1100 for a 650 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment is way too much to pay to live in uptown(downtown) Charlotte. Aside from a few skycrapers uptown isn't impressive at all, and it is more often than not pretty dead outside of the weekday business hours. It's not like the other areas are any better either. The area I am living in is nothing special, just a mall down the street, but my when my lease expires my rent will be going up by approximately $175. I guess that's because I live in one of the few areas here that isn't plagued by non-stop crime. Charlotte is not in any way a 'world class city' despite the almost pathological attempts by the city elite to dress it up as one. What it is is a very small city (Uptown, and Dilworth to a lesser extent) surrounded by very large, sprawling series of suburbs (South Park, Ballantyne, University Area). However, there are two things here that really bother me the most, and are the main reasons why I will probably not be staying here much longer if I can help it. First, this is an extremely cliquish place. If you don't already know people here it will be very hard to get to know anyone. Second, I don't know if it is a Southern thing or what, but it is impossible to get anything done quickly and/or efficiently (that's as much as I will say about that). I don't want anything to think that Charlotte is somehow a bad place to live, because it most certainly isn't. But it is in my opinion the very definition of a cookie cutter city; a wannabe "big time" city. The problem is that you will be paying major metropolitan area prices to live in what is essentially a glorified big town.
Frank | Charlotte, NC