10 Reasons Nobody is Moving to Atlanta Georgia – Response Video The World According to Briggs recently put out a video stating that no one is moving to Atlanta. This just isn’t true – Atlanta is growing and more and more people are moving to Atlanta every day. Watch this video where I talk about where Briggs is right and where he is wrong about Atlanta. Watch World According to Briggs’ 10 Reasons Nobody is Moving to Atlanta Georgia video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5yN6qKCpoM&t=13s
So is Atlanta a good place to live? Well I think so! We’re going to talk about the pros and cons of living in Atlanta.
Number one- Atlantans are friendly! You may feel a little awkward the first time a complete stranger smiles at you and waves at you, but that’s how it is here. It’s a very friendly environment, and people are genuinely curious about who you are and where you’re from and your life story.
Your neighbors will invite you over for dinner. It may seem a little strange at first how friendly people are, but you’ll get used to it pretty quick.
Pro number two: Atlanta’s cost of living. Atlanta has a much lower cost of living than many other metropolitan areas around the United States. If you go to Nerd Wallet’s cost of living calculator, you can put in your current city and income and see how it compares with Atlanta. In this case I’m checking out Los Angeles, and you can see that Atlanta is 30 percent less expensive and housing in particular is 56 percent less expensive in Atlanta.
Nerd Wallet’s cost of living calculator is a great tool if you’re interested in comparing your current situation with what life would be like if you move to Atlanta.
Pro number three: travel. Atlanta is a great place to live if you love to travel! Most Atlantans probably take it for granted, but we’re spoiled by having one of the busiest airports in the United States and you can get to almost any place in the world non-stop from Atlanta’s international airport. Add to that you’re less than two hours from the lovely Blue Ridge mountains in North Georgia, or you can hop in the car and head down to the Atlantic Ocean, and you’ll be on the beach in less than five hours!
Pro number four: job opportunities. If you’re looking for great job opportunities, Atlanta is the home to many fortune 500 companies, including Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Home Depot and UPS. Atlanta has also become a center for high-tech investment from companies like Microsoft and Google. Georgia Tech has a small business incubator which has done a tremendous job bringing high-tech industries to Atlanta.
You may not realize this, but so many films and television shows are produced in Georgia that is now called the Hollywood of the South. Every week when I’m driving around town, I see film production sets film and tv production.
In Atlanta healthcare is also big business. In fact, four of our top ten employers in Atlanta are in the healthcare sector. Right now all of these hospitals are aggressively recruiting doctors and nurses and they’re paying big signing bonuses. So, if you’re looking for great job opportunities Atlanta is the place to be.
Pro number five: the weather! The weather here is really enjoyable – for most of the year it gets a hot in July and August, and gets a little cold in January. But for most of the year, the weather’s pretty fantastic. It’s very easy to get outside and do outdoor activities pretty much year round.
Pro number six: there’s lots of things to do in Atlanta. As I said the great weather makes it very easy to get outside and enjoy yourself whether you like hiking, biking, tennis, golf. You can do those activities pretty much year round. The Chattahoochee River is a great recreational resource. We love to go tubing there every summer, and one of our other favorite things to do is to visit what we call dog island, where all the dog owners bring their pups to splash around and play in the river.
If you’re a gardening aficionado, you’re going to love the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. They have an indoor rain forest, an orchid house, they have a chef’s kitchen, an edible garden and a children’s garden. They have sculptures made out of plants – it’s really a wonderful place. If you’re into gardening and you’re into plants you’ve got to go to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.
If you’d like to stay busy, whether you like professional sports leagues, sports, the opera, art museums, art festivals, the symphony, swimming, fishing, music and small clubs or large arenas, Atlanta is filled with great cultural activities. Add to that thousands of restaurants serving every kind of cuisine imaginable and I promise you you will not be hungry or bored living in Atlanta.
And finally pro number seven: the green space. One thing you’ll notice when you see images of Georgia is that there are trees everywhere. Atlanta is a big city in an enormous forest and the city hasn’t scared off the wildlife. My backyard is like a nature special on PBS there’s bunny rabbits and foxes possums and dozens of birds including hawks and falcons – which is why we have the Atlanta hawks and the Atlanta falcons. The trees give us some great colors in the fall.
So now let’s talk about our cons. Fortunately there aren’t many cons to living in Atlanta, but I’m going to go ahead and give them to you here.
Con number one the traffic. Atlanta is notorious for having some of the worst traffic in the United States. I always tell people if you’re moving to Atlanta you really need to get a home close to where you work. I will say one thing that has improved traffic in Atlanta is the new work from home paradigm it’s really taken a good chunk of cars off the road and I think it’s made a big improvement and hopefully it will continue. But again if you’re moving to Atlanta the number one thing you can do to improve your quality of life is to live reasonably close to where you work.
Con number two: lack of mass transit. This goes hand in hand with Atlanta’s traffic problems. Atlanta’s mass transit system is called MARTA and to be honest it kind of sucks. Unfortunately MARTA wasn’t very well designed to begin with- it uses a very large rail which requires excessively large stations unlike the lighter platforms that you see in Chicago and New York City. It also doesn’t cover much area, in fact many of the stations on the north side you actually have to drive to get to the station, which kind of defeats the point of mass transit. Atlanta is very spread out geographically and MARTA just doesn’t cover much area. So if you’re planning on making a move to Atlanta and you’re thinking you want to use mass transit, you really need to do your homework and make sure it’s going to be a viable solution for you.
Con number three: the rain. As nice as the weather is most of the year, sometimes it can start raining and you honestly wonder if it’s ever going to stop. Atlanta actually gets much more rain than even a notoriously rainy city like Seattle. Seattle for instance averages 38 inches of rain every year Atlanta actually averages 50 inches of rain. The difference is in Seattle, it’s rainy and drizzly all the time. In Atlanta the thunderstorms pop up and you get these incredible downpours. I can’t tell you how many times i’ve been on the highway and had to pull off because I just simply couldn’t see 10 feet in front of my car because of all the rain.
I hope this gives you a little bit more insight what it’s like to live in Atlanta. It’s a lovely town – friendly people, great cultural activities, so much to do, wonderful weather. It’s just a terrific all-around place to live.
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!!!
Is Atlanta a good place to live? I think so! I moved to Atlanta after college and have lived here ever since. I feel really lucky to live in Atlanta – It’s not the biggest city in America, but it’s big enough to have a lot of opportunities and things to do.
Atlanta is great if you love to travel. Most Atlantans probably take it for granted, but we are spoiled to have the busiest airport in the US in Atlanta. If you want to get out of town, you can get to pretty much anywhere non-stop. New York and Chicago are just a few hours away, you can get to Cancun and the Caribbean in a couple of hours, and you can get to London in 7 and Paris in 8!
Our great airport is part of what attracts companies to the Atlanta area. There are many Fortune 500 companies in Atlanta, such as Coca-Cola, UPS, Home Depot, Delta Airlines. Atlanta is also a growing tech hub.
Atlanta has become a technology hub as well, attracting established tech companies as well as start-ups to headquarter in Atlanta. Georgia Tech has a tech incubator program, which has been a big part of tech growth in Atlanta.
Atlanta also has a large film and tv industry. Several years ago, the state of Georgia put a bunch of incentives in place to attract the film industry to Georgia. There’s a good chance that a tv show or movie that you’ve watched recently was filmed in Georgia. Two of the most popular tv shows, The Walking Dead and Stranger Things are filmed just outside Atlanta. If you happen to be in area that was a filming location, you will probably see a fan taking a selfie there!
What I also love about Atlanta is that it is large enough to attract lots of cultural events.
We have first-run Broadway plays at the FOX Theater. We’ve had Hamilton, Wicked and The Lion King come to Atlanta, just to name a few of the great shows you can see.
Atlanta also has a fine Art museum, the High museum, which attracts major art exhibits.
We have one of the largest botanical gardens in the southeast, The Atlanta Botanical Gardens. The gardens have a glass conservatory with rainforest and desert gardens, a rose garden, a newly renovated children’s garden and a kitchen garden where chef’s give cooking demonstrations. It’s a really fun place to spend an afternoon.
Atlanta also has a great music scene, whether you like to see bands in small clubs, or large amphitheaters, Atlanta is usually on a bands tour list.
Also, Atlanta has major league teams for football, basketball, baseball and soccer. The Atlanta United is the most recent addition to Atlanta, but they have a rabid, enthusiastic fan base! During soccer season, you see Atlanta United banners hung all over the city! Also, college football is huge in Atlanta (and Georgia) We have 2 college football teams that have a big rivalry – University of Georgia and Georgia Tech – the UGA/Tech game is one of the biggest ones of the year!
One of the best things about Atlanta is that you can spend pretty much all year outdoors. Most years, you don’t even need to wear a heavy winter coat. You can usually get by with a light jacket or puffy vest. So that means, you can grill out all year, eat on restaurant patios all year, do things like bike and hike, and play tennis and golf all year. Seriously. You can play tennis all year. There is a USTA winter league and they play. It never gets too cold there than maybe once or twice a decade when we get an ice storm, but that’s about it for cold!
Another perk of Atlanta being a larger city is that we have great shopping! We have everything from high-end shopping such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Cartier to stores such as Zara, Top Shop and Ikea. Atlanta is a very food oriented city, and we have the grocery shopping to support it. If there is something exotic you want to buy you will find it in Atlanta! We have the big chains like Kroger and Publix, the smaller chains like TJs, Aldi and Lidl, as well as several large farmers markets where you can find things like dragon fruit, durian, cilantro and baby bok choi! If you love to cook or eat, Atlanta has the food for you!
Speaking about gourmet food, you may not know it, but Atlanta is the home of Coca-Cola, Chick-fil-A and Krispy Creme! That is a meal right there for you! For fun, you can take your family to the World of Coca-Cola museum, go to the Krispy Kreme on Piedmont Road and see the donuts being made, or you can eat at the original Chick-fil-A south of the city, near the airport.
In the end, I think the best thing about Atlanta is the people.
If you are looking for a safe, stable and affordable place to live, Atlanta has a lot to offer.