Need Opinions: Moving to Milwaukee from Charlotte Due to Housing Costs (West Allis: real estate, apartments)

[WizComp]

I currently live in Charlotte, NC and have been here a good while. I am at the point where I would like to have my own place instead of renting a room, but the Charlotte real estate and rental scene prices have exploded.

I noticed one of the big benefits for Milwaukee is that they have a lot of older housing stock, where Charlotte has a massive shortage of housing. In Charlotte standard 1BR apartments are around $1300/mo after they bake in the non-optional extras. Basic one story mid-century houses are like 250K-300K, totally not affordable for me.

I work in general IT, make a little over 50K a year. I'm hoping I wouldn't take a massive hit to pay if I were to move to Milwaukee. I saw Milwaukee has quite a few listings for houses under 200K, even houses around 100K exist. Anything house 150K or below in Charlotte is non-existant, or it's a partially burned down fixer-upper.

I wanted to get some opinions if I am making a huge mistake moving. Charlotte is a growing city no doubt, but it is getting really hard to keep up with the influx of New Yorkers and other people moving in with high salaries who consider Charlotte to be cheap. The only way for me to make Charlotte make sense is to increase my salary to 65K-75K at least.

My main concerns:
I see houses listed for under 200K in Milwaukee, but how much does someone really have to spend to get a decent 2+ bedroom house in a decent neighborhood?

Milwaukee seems to have a lot more crime than Charlotte. Is this noticeable to you?

Is Milwaukee walkable?

[sub]

For sub-200k houses in reasonably good neighborhoods, you might check out inner-ring suburbs like West Allis, Cudahy, and South Milwaukee. They're all pretty urban and are much like Milwaukee itself. Maybe Greenfield and Saint Francis will have a few in that price range.
Also, areas of the city of Milwaukee bordering those suburbs will be decent as well.

I'd stay away from anything cheap on the north side or the near-south side of Milwaukee. It does get very rough, but generally isolated.
Not sure about Charlotte, but I'm from another part of the south and the crime situation is totally different in Wisconsin. It's not nearly as widespread, just mostly confined to bad neighborhoods of larger cities.

50k seems like it would be easily doable in Milwaukee, depending on what your job is.

By southern standards, Milwaukee is very walkable but you'll still want a car. Sidewalks line both sides of most streets and situating yourself by buying a house near a few basic services can be done easily enough.

The streets can be atrocious. Third-world quality. Start a car suspension repair fund.
I would blame the climate, but well-run communities up here don't seem to suffer from this problem.

If there is one thing that would cause me to think twice about moving to Milwaukee it's not the crime, it is absolutely the driving culture.
Milwaukee's feral drivers are something to behold. The rest of Wisconsin isn't much better.

Also, beware of taxes. Income taxes are on the high side but property taxes are just absurd and you don't get much for it in return.
At least there is no tax on groceries. How kind of them.

Hope this helps. It's really not that bad and has a lot of redeeming qualities.

[brrabbit]

Totally doable. Look for crime statistics though and taxes. I would also recommend checking the neighborhood, if it doesn't have the ghetto feeling. The Milwaukee schools are probably not the best in the world, but if a child has desire to learn, he will do well in any school. I mean, people tend to say they are terrible, my children go and play chess tournaments in many schools there, and some schools have strong chess programs and lots of kids in them - and they cannot be really too bad. It's those kids who don't have time, or support at home to learn, read books, etc - that brings the school grades down, but your kid does not have to follow the same path.

[brrabbit]

My in-laws bough a nice house in Thurston woods (that is around Silver Spring and 40ies) - 2BR + 1BR, both units in one house, stone walls, garage, fenced with a nice backyard. They had no issues living there for 5 years. It's a mixed neighborhood, both black and white neighbors. Some drama goes around, but in the end - no one ever bothered them and they bother nobody. Their neighbor said he lived in his place for 20 years and was robbed twice on the street, pretty much for spare change. But that could happen in any neighborhood really, if you sit in your car on the street long enough. So - it's kind of less safe both in feel and crime stats than other areas maybe... But stay out of trouble (don't look for trouble), watch around, be aware of your environment, and you'd be more safe than if you are careless in a "safe" neighborhood.