Where do Park Slopers go after Park Slope?

I have been wondering about the same thing... it's a tough question. Vermont?

It probably doesn't qualify as a rural town - more like a suburb - but a lot of Park Slopers seem to move to Montclair NJ.

i know it's lovely, but can hanover, nh really be considered a small city at 10,000 people?

park slope is 62,000 people, afterall.

i'd say it's probably more of a town.

nice list of places, although whenever i hear of people leaving new york city, i usually then hear about how they wish they never left. i guess it's a different story, if we're talking about retirement though....

Take a serious look at Tarrytown in Weschester

...right on the Hudson line. Same politics and income bracket.
Lovely views and crime free town.

I'm not retiring... I work from home, and I figure I can work from home just as well in a small town or small city as I can here. And there I won't have to contend with the traffic getting in and out of town that drives me batty here.

I don't like white bread. All of the towns we've looked at (excluding Hanover) have a funky, artsy quality to them (as the Slope did when we moved here in '76) that we really like.

The other think I like is white snow. Here in NY snow stays white for about 20 minutes before it turns either yellow, gray or black.

It will also be nice to be able to get to a ski area in 20-45 minutes rather than 2+ hours.

Greenwood Cemetery, if you're here that long ...

Yeah, I also don't get the "I love Park Slope but am going to leave" aspect of thsi question.

But, anyway, I hear a lot of people move from Park Slope to Montclair, NJ or Maplewood<,Nj when they have that desire to mow a lawn and pay outrageous property taxes. I have been to Maplewood, it's cute for a suburb, though, I am not a suburb type of gal

"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."

the problem i have with this mindset is if these same people who plan to only live in neighborhoods for 4 or 5 years, come in and also want to make changes so that those of use who are life long residents and do own homes and want to remain here for many many years are forced out.
Higher prices, more transient type stores and fancy restaurants and shops. Ugly condos, less neighborhood charm. Just a reminder, if you only plan of being around a few years, remember those of us who actually live here and call it home.

If you have or might want kids, check out the Yahoo group Brooklyn Vs Suburbs and Beyond: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bklynvsburbsandbeyond/

With reference to doldrums’ post, as someone who just moved here from New Haven, I have to say that the elm city's reputation for criminality is wildly exaggerated.

New Haven is a city surrounded by suburbs with virtually no violent crime. Many of these people have zero appreciation for the pleasures of urban life and zero capacity to put the risks associated with urban crime in any context whatsoever. They are literally like the cartoon teeth-chattering pilgrims in Bowling for Columbine.

In New Haven, there are about 20 murders a year in a city of 120,000. Every shooting tends to garner comparatively heavy media attention, often front page treatment. It is de riguer that the local news does a breathless post incident interview with a terrified looking resident, expressing her/his concern about how “scary” it is that someone was murdered a half mile away, and how things are getting so much worse, etc. etc.

This often leads to a semi-hysterical, hothouse atmosphere with respect to people's notions about the actual incidence of crime.

Imagine transporting a suburban neighborhood where a rash of car break-ins is major news into Brooklyn, and then watching them react to the occurrences of the typical weekend police blotter.

Here, a murder that occurred a week ago only 20 yards from my apartment came as a complete surprise to my co-workers who live a mile or three away when I told them about it . As did the recent murder on Prospect Place near where I looked at an apartment a few weeks ago. People didn’t even hear about it, it just blended into the background noise.

In New Haven, it would’ve been a headline and more grist for the mill of the suburbanites bleating “Build a wall around it ”.

Having said that, with respect to the OP, as a “rural” alternative to Park Slope, I don’t think so. JO518 certainly has a point though about relative real estate costs.

"The number of people falling into poverty in New Haven jumped from 22.1 percent in 2007, to 27.3 percent in 2008, while the number of children living in poverty last year was 34.1 percent. Significant increases also were reported for Norwalk and Stamford."

http://www.newhavenregister.com/articles/2009/09/30/news/a3-nepovertyup.txt


***
"In 2007 and 2008 combined, New Haven reported 2,690 violent crimes for every 100,000 residents, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports. This number is comparable to the crime rates in two of Connecticut’s other major cities, Hartford and Bridgeport — 2,377 and 2,338 respectively. (As defined by the FBI, violent crimes include murder, forcible rape, robbery rape and aggravated assault.)

The average U.S. city of comparable size to New Haven had only 1,246 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — less than half as many."

southofsouth wrote: the problem i have with this mindset is if these same people who plan to only live in neighborhoods for 4 or 5 years, come in and also want to make changes so that those of use who are life long residents and do own homes and want to remain here for many many years are forced out.
Higher prices, more transient type stores and fancy restaurants and shops. Ugly condos, less neighborhood charm. Just a reminder, if you only plan of being around a few years, remember those of us who actually live here and call it home.

=D>
Well said!
=D>

A few years ago there was a NY times article about a couple that sold their 4 story park slope brownstone and moved to NJ. The couple had a young son and the wife said that she felt great relief when she left because it was really hard going up the long stairs in the 4 story building.

However, one year after they moved to NJ they missed park slope a great deal and decided to sell again and look to buy back in park slope. I believe they said that they sold their brownstone for 1 million back in 2004 and in 2006 tried to buy back into the area. Im not sure if they found anything they could afford but at the time of the article they were looking.

They listed all the things they missed about park slope. Things that they did not even think they will miss. I guess the grass does look greener on the other side.

That is another factor, of course, many Yalies are from rural areas and have little experience of city life. I've known many of them who've blundered into taking an apartment "near campus", in a drug-infested neighborhood, whereas if they were a mile away they'd be in a nice, safe, affordable area (sounds like what happened to me here in Brooklyn but I'll save that for another time).

The article quoted also says that:

"as it happens, there is a gulf between perceptions and reality — these incidents are aberrations in an relatively safe college town. Although statistics suggest that New Haven as a whole is still more dangerous than other cities of comparable size, the area around Yale is no more dangerous than those that surround other schools."

Obviously, New Haven as a city is regularly compared to bucolic Ivy towns such as Ithaca or Dartmouth, and has much more crime than those places.

Every incident affecting a Yalie yields a huge hue and cry among the Yale community and in the local (even national news). Three murders of Yale students in 20 years (two of which were likely crimes of passion) over the course of which probably a million people were in and out of the place constitutes a crime-ridden environment? Talk about a gulf between perception and reality.

Since my subjective impressions are as good as anyone else's, I'll say that after a decade of living in New Haven, my wife and I are finding our BK neighborhood "congested and a little bit dangerous". Hopefully we can move to Prospect Heights soon.

I'll leave it at that.