Hendersonville - Top Place to Live

[hendersonville]

Hendersonville (and Asheville) is known to be one of the best places

to live, work, raise family, have fun and retire in all of North America. Here are 20 reasons why:

1. Good climate, not perfect, but nice nearly perfect: 40s to low 80s.

2. Hurricanes don't reach here usually and when they reach - it's just minor damage.

3. You get a fair share of dry and moist weather, not to moist and not to dry.

4. Virtually safe from tornadoes.

5. Virtualy no earthquakes.

6. Landslides unknown or rare.

7. Forest fires very rare.

8. Fresh air.

9. Very green, lots of woods.

10. Extremely beautiful views.

11. Pretty safe to very safe.

12. Real estate still affordable, but compared to Europe is dirt cheap!

13. Cost of living pretty low, but compared to Europe is dirt cheap.

14. Pretty good communications for business.

15. Pretty large population of young and medium aged people, not only retirees.

16. Proximity to NYC and FL as well as Chicago and Texas etc.

17. Fast to medium fast growth which is accelerating somehow allowing

good profits in Real Estate investment.

18. Lots of outing, camping, sporting opportunities.

19. Plenty of land to purchase and enjoy still quite affordable.

20. Just a 3 hour drive to the beach, if you're a good driver. Still

the beach is within one short day's drive: Myrtle Beach, Wilmington,

even Florida's Panama City etc. is like 6-7 hrs. drive.

Anyone who is not convinced yet to pack and move to Hendersonville -

Asheville please post your comments, opinions and experiences.

There's also an e-group for Hendersonville that you may be interested

to join: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hendersonville/

[JDC]

I drove through there once during a weekend trip to Asheville. It's very beautiful, but all I got to see was the main drag: lots of retail, grocery stores, fast food etc. before getting on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I'm a big Asheville fan and I'm driving out there again this weekend from Durham. Western NC should have it's own subcategory on the NC forum.

[GSP Tiger]

I am considering driving up to the Hendersonville and Asheville areas tomorrow to conduct some shopping. It would be neat to live in Hendersonville. The additional of several midrise condominium structures in the future would help boost residential living in the downtown area.

As for western NC having its own subforum, it would be a great idea. There's so much to discuss on that region.

[jaxpalmer]

Hendersonville (and Asheville) is known to be one of the best places

to live, work, raise family, have fun and retire in all of North America. Here are 20 reasons why:

1. Good climate, not perfect, but nice nearly perfect: 40s to low 80s.

2. Hurricanes don't reach here usually and when they reach - it's just minor damage.

3. You get a fair share of dry and moist weather, not to moist and not to dry.

4. Virtually safe from tornadoes.

5. Virtualy no earthquakes.

6. Landslides unknown or rare.

7. Forest fires very rare.

8. Fresh air.

9. Very green, lots of woods.

10. Extremely beautiful views.

11. Pretty safe to very safe.

12. Real estate still affordable, but compared to Europe is dirt cheap!

13. Cost of living pretty low, but compared to Europe is dirt cheap.

14. Pretty good communications for business.

15. Pretty large population of young and medium aged people, not only retirees.

16. Proximity to NYC and FL as well as Chicago and Texas etc.

17. Fast to medium fast growth which is accelerating somehow allowing

good profits in Real Estate investment.

18. Lots of outing, camping, sporting opportunities.

19. Plenty of land to purchase and enjoy still quite affordable.

20. Just a 3 hour drive to the beach, if you're a good driver. Still

the beach is within one short day's drive: Myrtle Beach, Wilmington,

even Florida's Panama City etc. is like 6-7 hrs. drive.

Anyone who is not convinced yet to pack and move to Hendersonville -

Asheville please post your comments, opinions and experiences.

There's also an e-group for Hendersonville that you may be interested

to join: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hendersonville/

i dont think so!

[Lithuania]

Wow, Hendersonville ain't scared to toot it's own horn!

[hauntedheadnc]

Hendersonville (and Asheville) is known to be one of the best places

to live, work, raise family, have fun and retire in all of North America. Here are 20 reasons why:

Let's take these one at a time.

1. Good climate, not perfect, but nice nearly perfect: 40s to low 80s.

Not true. It gets much colder in the winter and much hotter in the summer. Cold snaps of single digit temperatures are not uncommon, nor are heat waves that nudge the highs into the 90's or above. Granted, they don't last long, but Hendersonville is nevertheless not a temperate paradise.

2. Hurricanes don't reach here usually and when they reach - it's just minor damage.

True enough.

3. You get a fair share of dry and moist weather, not to moist and not to dry.

True enough.

4. Virtually safe from tornadoes.

True enough. The major weather threats are floods, storms, and the occasional blizzard.

5. Virtualy no earthquakes.

True enough, although this could apply to virtually the entire eastern United States.

6. Landslides unknown or rare.

True enough. You need a major flood to initiate one, and we had the flooding with the attendant landslides last year.

7. Forest fires very rare.

True enough. We can thank our nearly 50 inches of rain per year for this.

8. Fresh air.

Absolutely not. Western North Carolina's air is filthy, and the mountains vanish behind a veil of dirty haze every summer. Coupled with Hendersonville's slavish devotion to pollution-generating sprawl, this will likely get worse even as the state works to improve its air quality. When a community is as hell-bent on paving its every last square inch as is Hendersonville, your air quality is going to literally stink.

9. Very green, lots of woods.

Acreage covered by woods, farms, and orchards disappears in Henderson County at the rate of 1,000 acres a year. Those 1,000 acres are lost to soulless vinyl-sided subdivisions, poorly-constructed strip malls, and parking lots. Hendersonville is working very hard at becoming the suburban bridge between Asheville and Greenville. It seems to figure that if those two cities won't sprawl toward it fast enough, it will pick up the slack. Therefore, "lots of woods" is not accurate. Few and getting fewer would be a better decription of Hendersonville-area forests.

10. Extremely beautiful views.

Also not true, unless you enjoy looking at mountains covered in houses, or at mountains speckled with pretentious McMansions whose owners have cleared an odious "viewcut" so they can look at other people's McMansions across the valley. So, to sum, you can either look at houses densely packed or at gigantic houses sparsely packed, with an apron of clearcut land spilling away downhill from each one.

11. Pretty safe to very safe.

Somewhat true, although what crimes are committed here tend toward the sensational. There's the recent story of little Naomi Ruth, the baby who was born alive but murdered and thrown in a Dumpster. By the time she was discovered at an Asheville recycling plant, scavenging animals had torn off her limbs. Then, there was the sordid tale of the Horse Shoe fire chief, whose wife killed him, dismembered him, set him on fire, and scattered the pieces along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Then we have the tale of the man whose throat was slashed by another man wielding a broken bottle in the men's department at JC Penney. And we also have the cult killings of the 1960's that were never solved, among many others.

12. Real estate still affordable, but compared to Europe is dirt cheap!

Not true. Real estate in the area is only affordable to wealthy retirees. Everyone else is doomed to live with their parents until they're in their 30's or else move away, or live in poverty on their own, basically. Skilled professionals may be able to afford a nice place but Hendersonville is not hospitable to blue collar workers. Besides, most anything is affordable compared to Europe, so I fail to see why you brought it up.

13. Cost of living pretty low, but compared to Europe is dirt cheap.

Unless you're a rich retiree, you will spend at least half of your income on housing, but most everything else costs the same as it would anywhere else in the state. And again, what does Europe have to do with anything?

14. Pretty good communications for business.

Indeed, with the end result being that Hendersonville is a better place to do business, and an even better place to park one's car, than to live. Natural beauty and area history are offered freely to any business willing to destroy them.

15. Pretty large population of young and medium aged people, not only retirees.

Not really. Henderson County's death rate far exceeds the birth rate, and yet the population continues to grow. Who is moving in? Retirees. The city and county market to them relentlessly, and they make up the largest segment of the total population. This is a city of, by, and for retirement.

16. Proximity to NYC and FL as well as Chicago and Texas etc.

This applies to many other places. Hendersonville is not special in this respect.

17. Fast to medium fast growth which is accelerating somehow allowing

good profits in Real Estate investment.

The "fast to medium fast" growth is wiping out everything that was ever beautiful about this county. No one cares. In fact, they couldn't be happier about it. Hendersonville wants nothing more than to be Gwinnet County at a higher elevation.

18. Lots of outing, camping, sporting opportunities.

Few and getting fewer, thanks to the sprawl that is destroying the environments that hosted them.

19. Plenty of land to purchase and enjoy still quite affordable.

Your inclusion of this is the epitome of Hendersonville's business community mindset. "It's beautiful here! Destroy an acre of your very own!" What better way to enjoy natural beauty than by crushing it underneath a house? The most despicable example of this mindset is the commercial for the Carriage Park megadevelopment where they're bragging loudly and proudly about building on the ridgeline and about "carving out" new neighborhoods. This is the same subdivision that advertised when it built a new "neighborhood" in the middle of "one of Hendersonville's last old-growth forests." It's enough to make me wish for one of those rare forest fires. I'd like to see Carriage Park wiped off the face of the earth.

20. Just a 3 hour drive to the beach, if you're a good driver. Still

the beach is within one short day's drive: Myrtle Beach, Wilmington,

even Florida's Panama City etc. is like 6-7 hrs. drive.

So what? You can say the same about a lot of places, some of which are bona fide hellholes. Proximity doesn't mean much. It means less when the best thing about a place is how close it is to somewhere else.

[archiham04]

4. Virtually safe from tornadoes.

What?

This area will NEVER be safe from tornados!!!!!

Brevard Tornados

[MR-2]

I've never seen any pictures of Hendersonville. Does someone have some?

[rooster8]

19. Plenty of land to purchase and enjoy still quite affordable.

Your inclusion of this is the epitome of Hendersonville's business community mindset. "It's beautiful here! Destroy an acre of your very own!" What better way to enjoy natural beauty than by crushing it underneath a house? The most despicable example of this mindset is the commercial for the Carriage Park megadevelopment where they're bragging loudly and proudly about building on the ridgeline and about "carving out" new neighborhoods. This is the same subdivision that advertised when it built a new "neighborhood" in the middle of "one of Hendersonville's last old-growth forests." It's enough to make me wish for one of those rare forest fires. I'd like to see Carriage Park wiped off the face of the earth.

I cringe whenver I see that commercial. He brags as if leveling a mountain is a good thing to do. Ridiculous.

[davidals]

Let's take these one at a time.

2. Hurricanes don't reach here usually and when they reach - it's just minor damage.

True enough.

4. Virtually safe from tornadoes.

True enough. The major weather threats are floods, storms, and the occasional blizzard.

5. Virtualy no earthquakes.

True enough, although this could apply to virtually the entire eastern United States.

So what? You can say the same about a lot of places, some of which are bona fide hellholes. Proximity doesn't mean much. It means less when the best thing about a place is how close it is to somewhere else.

2 - Never say never, as Ivan and Hugo both demonstrated in different parts of Western NC.

4 - Ditto. April 3-4, 1974 a series of powerful tornadoes and severe storms pounded Western NC, with 1/2-mile wide tornado destroying parts of Murphy. The same storm spawned 3 other tornadoes in Cheroke Co, and an additional tornado that moved from Robbinsville in Graham Co to the southrn part of GSM National Park. Other tornadoes were reported in Transylvania and Burke Counties, with yet another destructive tornado passing just south of Granite Falls in Caldwell County. Softball-sized hail fell near Greenville SC and between Gastonia and W. Charlotte. Statistically, Appalachia is less prone to extreme severe weather, but far from unknown.

This tornado outbreak affected a wide area of the East, in in Appalachia, parts of Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee and West Virginia were also affected. Other Appalachian tornado outbreaks in WV-VA-MD-PA (1944) and PA-NY (1985) were also extremely destructive.

5 - Virtually, but again never say never, with faults in the New Madrid area of Missouri (1812-1814) and offshore from Charleston SC (1886) prducing quakes that were felt strongly across all of both Carolinas.

[goodbye]

Donald Trump is on the Hendersonville condominium scene. He wants to build a 64-unit luxury condominium project in the heart of downtown. With Gary Player moving to northern Greenville County, and bringing his well-known celebrity/charity golf tournament to the area (which Trump has been involved with in the past), plus the BMW Charity Pro-Am (which annually brings the rich and famous) this region is really becoming a haven for wealthy businessmen and retirees.

Read more here

[hauntedheadnc]

I wish the wealthy businessmen and retirees would stay down there in South Carolina. All they do up here is run the property values up to the point that normal people can't afford to live here.

[goodbye]

I wish the wealthy businessmen and retirees would stay down there in South Carolina. All they do up here is run the property values up to the point that normal people can't afford to live here.

I wouldn't say that is all they do, but I understand what you meant.

[Jerseyman4]

I've never seen any pictures of Hendersonville. Does someone have some?

I do. Ill load some up