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WTF kind of ignorant crap is this. "Turned over to the blacks"....Really. Keep that bull**** to yourself. Birmingham has never been bankrupted. That was Jefferson County. The water works company isn't owned by the city either. So both ignorant points are 100% false. You are entitled to an opinion and I hope the OP can see that what you said is totally out of line and borderline bigot. There is no place for that. We all get it. You dislike Birmingham. Get in line with the rest of them. You want to point out flaws about Birmingham, but don't do it for Huntsville. Why?
Why does people that lives in and around Huntsville feel the need to bad mouth Birmingham?
I'm sorry, but that's how it seems to me as well. White flight happened a long time ago in Birmingham. I won't say it was "turned over" to the blacks, the more truthful comment was the whites headed for the hills and left the poor, mostly black residents behind. Just look at the Census data, in 2000 62% were black, that increased to 73% by 2010. On the news the other day they predicted that the percentage of black residents for 2020 will be over 80%. The city has an almost entirely black leadership. None of this is a negative in anyway, it's just facts. I drive into downtown everyday for work, and yes there is allot of construction going on, but the number of abandoned buildings makes it feel like a movie set for a zombie movie.
I would ask the OP how far is he willing to drive. When my wife and I looked at Birmingham, we were disgusted by the clear battle lines drawn in the school system. You either have to overpay to live in one of the southern suburbs, or you have to deal with the horrible school system in Birmingham. We chose option 3, and purchased a home an hour north in a small community with an excellent, small school system. I am more than willing to deal with the commute. There are some really nice small communities within an hour of Huntsville as well, with Cullman being a nice little gem with one of the best school systems in the state. An added bonus is property around Cullman is dirt cheap.
I would also like to add that vaccination is required to enroll in Alabama schools, we just went through all of that last summer when we relocated with our 4 kids.
Why does people that lives in and around Huntsville feel the need to bad mouth Birmingham?
Well, as someone who has lived in both, I'll say it started out as jealousy. When I lived in Huntsville, I liked it, it was growing/thriving/alive, but I always wanted to live in Birmingham just due to size. Then I moved there and noticed how stagnant it was. Here pretty soon (over say 20 years), Huntsville may catch Birmingham and have the best of both worlds. I will say that Birmingham is more making the best of a big urban area, while Huntsville is legitimately growing. Birmingham is fractured, while Huntsville is united (in a macro sense). Yeah, yeah I know the mayors in the B'ham area get together but the citizens are still VERY fragmented on what they really want the metro to be, and it generally devolves into an us vs. them fight.
I'm sorry, but that's how it seems to me as well. White flight happened a long time ago in Birmingham. I won't say it was "turned over" to the blacks, the more truthful comment was the whites headed for the hills and left the poor, mostly black residents behind. Just look at the Census data, in 2000 62% were black, that increased to 73% by 2010. On the news the other day they predicted that the percentage of black residents for 2020 will be over 80%. The city has an almost entirely black leadership. None of this is a negative in anyway, it's just facts. I drive into downtown everyday for work, and yes there is allot of construction going on, but the number of abandoned buildings makes it feel like a movie set for a zombie movie.
I would ask the OP how far is he willing to drive. When my wife and I looked at Birmingham, we were disgusted by the clear battle lines drawn in the school system. You either have to overpay to live in one of the southern suburbs, or you have to deal with the horrible school system in Birmingham. We chose option 3, and purchased a home an hour north in a small community with an excellent, small school system. I am more than willing to deal with the commute. There are some really nice small communities within an hour of Huntsville as well, with Cullman being a nice little gem with one of the best school systems in the state. An added bonus is property around Cullman is dirt cheap.
I would also like to add that vaccination is required to enroll in Alabama schools, we just went through all of that last summer when we relocated with our 4 kids.
None of that is about what that particular poster said. Don't defer away from what was said. This isn't about schools, kids, commute time, the precentage of races in Birmingham, none of that. That poster said what they said. And it was a terrible comment that the mods should delete. Speaking of percentage, stop giving out misinformation as well.
Birmingham as of today is 70.5% african american, 25.3% white. The city was 74% african american in 2010 census.
That nice little "gem" you speak of, Cullman, is 95.9% white and 1.3% african american in 2020. So much better, huh.
Well, as someone who has lived in both, I'll say it started out as jealousy. When I lived in Huntsville, I liked it, it was growing/thriving/alive, but I always wanted to live in Birmingham just due to size. Then I moved there and noticed how stagnant it was. Here pretty soon (over say 20 years), Huntsville may catch Birmingham and have the best of both worlds. I will say that Birmingham is more making the best of a big urban area, while Huntsville is legitimately growing. Birmingham is fractured, while Huntsville is united (in a macro sense). Yeah, yeah I know the mayors in the B'ham area get together but the citizens are still VERY fragmented on what they really want the metro to be, and it generally devolves into an us vs. them fight.
Again, this is not about metro vs metro. Not about what's each city is doing or not doing. It's about why the need to talk negative about a place just to make another one look good. No matter if you "once" resided around Birmingham, there is still no point to bash the place because of your experience or what you think. I wouldn't go to the Mobile forum and comment negative about the place when someone not from alabama is considering moving to Mobile. I don't live in Mobile, so there is absolutely no point for me to do that. If someone is considering Birmingham and you don't currently lives there, why comment about it. Yeah, we have a right to an opinion. But the OP ask about the Birmingham area. Not Huntsville.
We just recently moved outside of Huntsville, and are trying to get a handle on the community. We previously lived in Nashville and Atlanta and inherited a home in Birmingham's prestigious Mountain Brook (Cahaba Heights) community.
Nashville's doing great in many ways, but they're overwhelmed with too many non-English speaking people moving in. Home prices have gone out of sight, and our old Williamson County neighborhood is now unaffordable. 200,000 people in the area work in healthcare worldwide.
Montgomery's a very dead place except for the couple of months when the state legislature comes to town. I would never suggest living there.
Birmingham's a place with two separate societies. The affluent live mostly south of Birmingham--in three parallel valleys south of town stretching down into Shelby County. B'ham itself has essentially been turned over to the blacks, I hate to say, and the politicians there ran the city into bankruptcy over corrupt water system construction (and other spending). The city's got better leadership and is presently on an upswing in many ways. But the city still has a bad reputation.
Mountain Brook is one of the premier luxury communities in the U.S.--on par with Atlanta's Buckhead. There are no more homes going to be built there, and it's beyond expensive. Hoover, Vestavia and parts of Shelby County are other great places to live, as are the communities going out Hwy 280 south of I-459.
Huntsville's a whole different place and somewhere we've found to be very livable. Home prices are decent here, but there are 4500 FBI employees coming and another 4000 Mazda-Toyota employees' jobs to fill in the next two years. Homes are being built as fast as they can be built, and existing homes are sucked up fast. We moved into a beautiful home about 10 miles northwest--out in the country. The county here still has vast agricultural lands so it'll never be a congested city.
Huntsville is billed as one of America's Smartest Cities, and we often run into engineers, rocket scientists, missile designers, etc. The name is earned. And it's truly one of the most dynamic middle size cities in the U.S. University of Alabama-Huntsville is almost a secret with an extremely high level of students taking engineering and other very specialized courses offered in few colleges.
We like Huntsville because it's large enough to service all our needs. But we can be anywhere in town in 20 minutes. It's got a fine medical community, and all the culture we really need. You can be in Nashville, Birmingham and Chattanooga in 90 minutes so it's centrally located. And the fabulous Tennessee River is on the south end of town with magnificent lakes and fishing within an hour. The area is also somewhat mountainous with beautiful green lush valleys and residential areas.
Madison County schools are on par with our previous private school academically. They're offering post-pandemic schooling of traditional schools, hybrid electronic schools where students talk with local teachers online and another online school where students take an online national curriculum. I know nothing about the homeschooling community here.
But don't think that your kids will get into any school program without required children's vaccinations.
Wow. Such an uninformed post. Where do I begin? Well, a good start would be the "B'ham itself has essentially been turned over to the blacks, I hate to say." Holy smokes, what an incredibly stupid thing to write for an entire host of reasons, raw bigotry aside. Dude. Check your calendar. It's 2020, not 1920.
What's more, over the past ten years, the City of Birmingham itself has thrived with a downtown going through a dramatic renaissance, lots of multifamily being built between the northern slope of Red Mountain and the downtown area. Both William Bell and the current mayor have been instrumental in reshaping the city. Read the national press, and we're getting high marks for restaurants, livability, and a good deal more. Maybe that's why you're seeing all kinds of infill in places that had been neighborhoods that were on the outs. Avondale. Crestwood. East Lake. Woodlawn. And the list goes on.
Second, the City of Birmingham did NOT go into bankruptcy. I mean, good grief, you can't even get your facts right on that score. Jefferson County went through bankruptcy, not the city of Birmingham. And that happened because the JeffCo Commission got cute financing an ill-advised sewage project. The county emerged from bankruptcy more than seven years ago and is in good financial shape.
From a fiscal standpoint, Birmingham is rather well-run, enjoying a sizable surplus at the end of the last fiscal year. Of course, with coronavirus running amok countrywide, it's hard to say how that will effect the solvency of just about any city anywhere, but lots of research indicates Birmingham and its metro area will prove to be in much better economic shape than most cities around the country.
I agree. Saying/suggesting that Birmingham's problems are due to the city being "turned over to the blacks" is racist and offensive. Segregation of neighborhoods, schools, and funding have created the problems. White people with money left Birmingham, and the city suffers because of widespread poverty that continues in a vicious cycle. This is, of course, not a problem unique to the city of Birmingham by any means, but it is a big one here because the metro is so balkanized into suburbs, and the core city was almost entirely abandoned by anyone with funds. if there is one change this country need to make, in my opinion, it's inequitable funding of public schools. Only the exceptional have a reasonable shot of breaking out of the poverty cycle if their formative years are tied to poor education.
I agree. Saying/suggesting that Birmingham's problems are due to the city being "turned over to the blacks" is racist and offensive. Segregation of neighborhoods, schools, and funding have created the problems. White people with money left Birmingham, and the city suffers because of widespread poverty that continues in a vicious cycle. This is, of course, not a problem unique to the city of Birmingham by any means, but it is a big one here because the metro is so balkanized into suburbs, and the core city was almost entirely abandoned by anyone with funds. if there is one change this country need to make, in my opinion, it's inequitable funding of public schools. Only the exceptional have a reasonable shot of breaking out of the poverty cycle if their formative years are tied to poor education.
But even that is a snapshot of forty years ago. The Birmingham metro recorded one of the highest rates of HHI growth in the nation during that period. Why? Because in 1979, with the shutting down of USS, the city was forced to diversify its economy. Before covid-19, the city's unemployment rate was 0.1% higher than Huntsville's and among the country's lowest.
The balkanization is indeed an issue, but the metro area's mayors have begun discussing ways to ameliorate the problems caused by that, ways large and small. You won't see any merger of municipalities, but you can say the same thing about any metro in the country.
It's pretty apparent to me that you haven't spent much time here over the past twenty years, unless it's driving through on the interstate.
Birmingham's a place with two separate societies. The affluent live mostly south of Birmingham--in three parallel valleys south of town stretching down into Shelby County. B'ham itself has essentially been turned over to the blacks, I hate to say, and the politicians there ran the city into bankruptcy over corrupt water system construction (and other spending). The city's got better leadership and is presently on an upswing in many ways. But the city still has a bad reputation.
good lord that is an incredibly racist statement. please stay out of birmingham.
I'm sorry, but that's how it seems to me as well. White flight happened a long time ago in Birmingham. I won't say it was "turned over" to the blacks, the more truthful comment was the whites headed for the hills and left the poor, mostly black residents behind. Just look at the Census data, in 2000 62% were black, that increased to 73% by 2010. On the news the other day they predicted that the percentage of black residents for 2020 will be over 80%. The city has an almost entirely black leadership. None of this is a negative in anyway, it's just facts. I drive into downtown everyday for work, and yes there is allot of construction going on, but the number of abandoned buildings makes it feel like a movie set for a zombie movie.
if it's not negative, then why was it presented as such in his post? what was the point of mentioning this statistic if he wasn't trying to imply that a large black population was a negative?
Nashville's doing great in many ways, but they're overwhelmed with too many non-English speaking people moving in.
not to mention this gem... you certainly aren't portraying huntsville in the best light by opening your mouth in this thread.
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