CarrboroWeb- Carrboro and Chapel Hill, North Carolina- Layman's Guide to Real Estate- Living in Town or out

The The Layman's Guide to Buying Real Estate in Chapel Hill-
A Quick guide to get you started!

4- In or Out of Town

Prior to purchasing the home in Carrboro I lived in Orange County but in the Chapel Hill Schools. Carrboro is surrounded by Chapel Hill and as you head west from Carrboro you re-enter Chapel Hill zip codes but you are now in the county- not the town of Chapel Hill). Taxes where I lived in the county are about half of what they are in Chapel Hill/Carrboro town limits but you have the advantage of sending your children to the Chapel Hill school district, arguably the best schools in the state. My sister lives about 3 miles further west from me and although she has a Chapel Hill address, her son has to take a 50 minute bus ride to Hillsborough where he his attending what could possibly be an inferior school than if he attended Chapel Hill. I don't want to offend anyone here by rating schools, but I will say that there is a movement to integrate county and Chapel Hill schools through revenue sharing and busing! Read into that as you wish, but you may also want to talk to your agent about it.

We were relatively happy here since it was inexpensive to live and was less than 5 minutes of driving time to get to the center of Carrboro. A lot of the area around where I live is a protected water shed so building(and traffic) has been kept to a minimum. As you travel north, east and south out of Chapel Hill, building and expansion is rampant, but west is occurring at a much slower rate.

On April 10, 2005 many things changed with the arrival of our daughter. We live on a dirt road in a development that only has 3 short streets, so walking was never a very exciting option. Although we had been looking a new home for about 6 months, with the arrival of Anastasia, it became evident that we would need to find a new place with a little more urgency.

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