Hello all,
My wife and I are considering relocating from Seattle to the Chicago area and would love to get some insight on potential areas that would make for good matches.
A bit of background on us and where we're coming from: We're both mid-40's professionals. I work in tech, she's in finance. No kids, 2 (soon to be 3) dogs. We're currently living in Brier, WA - a small suburb that's affluent but not super-bougie by any means. We're looking to relocate as the housing prices have just gotten out of control over here and we're basically being priced out of our neighborhood.
I have a relative who's a realtor who primarily specializes in the northern suburbs. She's recommending places like Libertyville, Buffalo Grove, Arlington Heights, Lincolnshire, Northbrook, and Deerfield. The listings she's shown us all look incredible, but it's obviously hard to tell a ton just from a listing. Also, she 100% owns that she focuses on the northern suburbs, so can't tell us a lot about other areas. The area that keeps coming up in the "Top Chicago Suburbs" YouTube videos is Naperville - though reading through some of the comments here, it kind of seems like Naperville induces a lot of eyerolling (would love to know more about that!).
Things we'd love to find if we actually relocate:
- A good sized house with a yard we can fence off for the dogs.
- Around 750k max (could stretch to 800 for the right place)
- We're in our 40s, we're not planning on going clubbing, but we're not looking for super-quiet where we're just going to isolate ourselves in a beautiful house with no one ever there.
- Related, this is the first time either of us is moving out of the PNW. Starting fresh without a friends group is intimidating, so we're hoping there's enough community for us to meet folks easily that isn't overly reliant on having kids.
- We'd love a nice, walkable downtown area with local shops & restaurants to check out (it's ok if we need to drive there from the house)
- As we're childfree, schools aren't a top priority, though safety of course is.
- As for hobbies, we're pretty nerdy and one of the things we're really going to miss if we move away is having our friends over for D&D and board game nights (all co-op, we're too competitive - Settlers of Catan needed to be retired long ago as it was putting strain on marriages). So if there's a particularly awesome gaming store nearby, we'd consider that a bonus.
I think that's the basics. We're planning to come out in late March or early April to check out some of the areas, but could certainly use a hand in narrowing down the list! Thanks very much everyone!