Moving to Atlanta? Living in Atlanta Ga – 5 things I hate about Atlanta.

Hey everyone it’s Parker your favorite Atlanta realtor, and today i’m going to tell you the five things I hate about Atlanta. Welcome to my channel, which is where I share information about moving to Atlanta, about having fun in Atlanta, and insider information about how things really work in Atlanta.

Let’s get going the number one thing I hate about Atlanta is the pollen. Atlanta is the city of trees and every spring those trees make unbelievable amounts of pollen. If you have pollen allergies, you may want to think twice before moving to Atlanta. At the peak of spring pollen season, you can watch the pine trees and literally see clouds of pollen blowing out. It covers your car in a thick layer – if you have a black car, you might as well go ahead and sell it and get something silver or gold, because all it does is show off the pollen. Even for those of us who don’t have allergies if you get a few days without rain to wash the pollen down you can really start to feel the symptoms of hay fever. Pollen season is a big old mess in Atlanta.

Another downside of all these trees is the sap that comes out of the oaks in the spring – you’ll get in your car and you’ll see on your windshield like there’s this fine mist and then you turn on your windshield wipers to try to clean it all off and it’s like maple syrup just being smeared across your windshield. It’s bad! And, the oak trees make tremendous amounts of these little seed tassels in the spring and in the fall. I mean there’s just billions of pounds of leaves and all of that ends up on your roof. If you don’t clean that off, it’ll rot your roof it’ll get down in your gutters, it’ll clog your gutters, rot out your soffits – it does create a significant amount of home maintenance.

Now those gripes being set aside, I actually love all the trees in Atlanta. I could never live out west and if you’re coming from New Mexico or Texas or one of these arid climates where they don’t have any trees, it’s actually astonishing when you get to Atlanta and you see it’s a forest. It’s a gigantic forest!

Number two of the things I hate about Atlanta: ice storms!!! Atlanta has these incredible ice storms where freezing rain falls from the skies for hours on end, it piles up on the power lines, on the tree branches, all of that gets dragged down and your power’s out for the next three days! Back in 2014, Atlanta experienced what has come to be known as Snowpocalypse. Some people call it Snowmageddon, but i really prefer Snowpocalypse.

Now this will all seem quite amusing if you’re from the north, but here’s the nutshell version of what happened in Snowpocalypse. Late in January 2014, we had several days of sub-freezing weather, and on a Friday, it started to snow very heavily and started to stick to the roads, which is very, very rare in Atlanta. It was the middle of the day, and the schools all said, hey let’s send the kids home, and so everybody that’s at work who had kids had to head home to get their kids, and the bosses said, hey it looks like it’s starting to stick, why don’t we just send everybody home? So you had a classic Atlanta traffic jam combined with a ton of snow!!!  There were 800 traffic accidents that day people – ended up sleeping in their cars, people ended up sleeping at work, people ended up abandoning their cars on the side of the highway and just getting out and trying to walk home. It was a total mess, and then what happened is over the next several days it was still right around freezing, it got just enough above freezing that the snow melted a little bit and then overnight it froze super hard again and two days later this entire town was glazed with ice. It was five days before you could go anywhere on the roads, so it’s not so much that Atlanta gets snow and gets ice like every other state, it’s that it happens so infrequently that we’re just really not prepared to handle it.

We saw what happened in Texas just last week –  they had a major storm move in, everybody lost power, they’re freezing in their homes. Similar things have happened in Atlanta, so be prepared.

Number three – we have roaches!!! Not just any kind of roach, we have palmetto bugs – these giant freaking roaches – you’ll see them in your house and they’ll suddenly take flight and land on you and terrorize you. A few years ago I was having a dream that I had a roach on my face and I slapped my face in the middle of the night, and I said, oh that was funny I was dreaming I had a roach on my face, and I slapped myself. Well, I look in the bed next to me and there’s a dead roach!!! There was a roach on my face, and that’s what these roaches do, they’ll get on you, they’re not afraid of you.

Mosquitoes – okay, combined with the roaches, we have mosquitoes. Atlanta’s great I’d say 10 months out of the year, July and August roll around, forget it – tons of mosquitoes.

Black widows – now if they all look like ScarJo I wouldn’t mind, but these are real black widows. A couple of years ago my son’s teacher was reaching into her mailbox to get her mail out, and she got bit by a black widow in her own mailbox!!!! Another time my son had an old Bob the Builder hat that he loved to wear and it sat out in the yard for a few days, and he went out there and picked it up, and he was about to put it on his head, and he looked down, and there’s a giant black widow that had built a nest inside of his hat!!!  You’ve got to keep your eyes open!

We also have brown recluses or at least i think we have brown recluses. Honestly if I see a spider anywhere, I just kind of step on it and squish it.

Number four of the things I hate about Atlanta:  the wild animals!!! We have copperheads that have been making an appearance over the last several years. Snake bites have gone way up! We’ve been seeing a lot of these copperheads on the trails where we like to hike and bike and walk, and just last summer we went down to the new Peachtree Creek park, and my son wanted to go down and splash around in the water. Well my oldest son says Dad, there’s a snake there, and I look down and there’s a copperhead that’s as big around as a baseball bat!!!!  Just a huge snake sitting right there waiting to bite somebody!

Atlanta also has an increasing population of coyotes. Normally you don’t see them during the day, although the last few years it’s becoming more and more common. They do come out at night, and I gotta warn you if you have cats, you want to keep them indoors after dark. That’s not an exaggeration – this is for real!!! Coyotes love to go after cats, so keep them indoors.

And number five of the things I hate about Atlanta!!! I should have actually made this number one, I should have done these in reverse order, but number five –  we’ll say five is the greatest, the most hated thing in Atlanta. You probably know the traffic here is awful, but the thing I hate the most about it is that they never stop working on the roads. You’re always out trying to get somewhere, and they’ve always got a road closed because they’re trying to improve the roads, but their improvements never actually make anything better!!! Up in Sandy Springs, which is one of the busiest parts of Atlanta, they have been working on the I-285 perimeter interchange with Georgia 400 since 2017!!!! Back in October, after nearly three years of work, they finally opened one section of the new road! So my advice to people moving to Atlanta is always know where your work is, and live very close to there you don’t want to spend a lot of time on the highways in Atlanta. So I hope you found that fun and informative if you’re making the move to Atlanta, please give me a call I’d love to talk to you, I’d love to help you find a house, Thanks!!!