A Great Place to Live
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4/20/2022
I have lived in Ocean springs for 25 years now. I am a Yank by birth (Michigan), but a Mississippian by choice. I was a career military person and I was pretty upset when I heard I was going to be stationed in Mississippi. I am in a mixed race marriage and I heard about how bad it was in the South. Well, here I am 25 years later and I love it. We have a great, not perfect, school system that is so much better than I grew up with. My daughters were challenged here and I thought the school system prepared them well for college. One moved out of MS after college and one moved back to Ocean Springs. The downtown area of Ocean Springs is small, but fun and active. The city works very hard at keeping it relative with lots of weekend events and great places to eat. If you don't believe me then go downtown some night. It's shoulder to shoulder packed every weekend because people enjoy going downtown. People are friendly, but you do have to make yourself friendly. I laugh when someone says they are bored because I just don't seem to have enough time in the day to get everything done. You just have to get out of the house and do things. I have never found life boring, but I do get out of the house and have extended friendships. There is so much to do, and New Orleans is 2 hours away, while Mobile is less than an hour drive along I-10. Housing is going up everywhere, so cost it's relative to what you think. You can get a nice home for under $300,000. Home taxes are cheap while home insurance is high due to us being a hurricane prone area, but overall I pay less than 5,000 for both. Just to prove we aren't perfect I'll give you some bad. Mississippi has a very high car licensing rate that is due annually, some (not all) southern states do the same thing, I'm not sure why.
Pahl | Ocean Springs, MS