Huntsville Alabama Path of Progress

[Account Closed]

Good Morning Everyone,

I'm interested in purchasing property in the Huntsville Metro. The area looks safe and rent/price ratio is fantastic. Does anyone know where the path of progress is heading in Huntsville and who the major employers are? Are there plans for more jobs/growth in the area?

Thanks

[James Wacenske]

Added a large number of local places and their relevance to the map.

@Gorden Lopes Hey, that data center may indeed be headed into that area but I assure you that 100 jobs are not going to turn around that neighborhood, plus Toyota Mazda is so far away it is likely to have no bearing on it for this community versus other opportunities like the other nearby Toyota plant. The two largest problem areas in Huntsville proper are where Memorial Parkway and I-565 meet, and 35810. This is where the vast majority of SFH with lower class neighborhoods exist, and where you can find duplexes if you have your heart set on them, plenty of rehabs, Cummings Research park largely acts as the dividing line between this working class area and Madison where so many engineers live. That being said everyone here seems to be chiming in about the future as to what will happen but I would rather point towards the past.

Huntsville has never come out from under it's desegregation order the courts put onto it's school system, which it has tried to escape for decades. Why is this so difficult? It's being a victim of your own success, the downtown and 35810 areas are the old sections of town, but not historical like 5 points. Each section of the old building booms are there. Every time that a new school would be built you would have white flight away from the previous boom, leaving only African Americans in the old school zone, and then property prices and quality of life take a hit. To be blunt they can't build the schools fast enough to accommodate the desegregation order before the whites flee again. With that you should keep in mind that even though Huntsville does well (because it is so driven to expand geographically, it is actually the largest in the state by square mileage of city limits and only getting bigger and encircles Madison) that this does not mean your area will continue to. Literally every area before almost that was prosperous and the hot new thing before passes by rather quickly since there is such a continuous building of new neighborhoods outward that attract the higher incomes. I would give areas like Madison and South Huntsville a couple more decades tops, after that the interesting places will be like the riverside community of Triana.

Fun fact! Triana is the only majority black community in Madison County, and is also where the highest levels of the poison DDT were ever recorded in humans. This was because it was downstream from the Arsenal where they manufactured it, and the locals were a fishing village. I mention this because this area has never been through the boom and bust cycle, there are only a few hundred people living there, it is prime riverfront property, in comfortable commute distance to the Arsenal, and they send their kids to the good local school system, Madison, through an agreement between the municipalities. Some might argue they expect the most growth to go either North, West, or East but my bet would be to the South and Southwest after this cycle finishes up. Triana simply has the educational credentials, distance to employment, and the area is cheap, and though the Triana locals remember the crisis from 40-50 years ago, Huntsville residents do not. 

A very, very vast majority people who live in Huntsville, are not from Huntsville originally, nor have deep familial ties here. I do, and that connection did real estate for 3 decades, and did well I add. Huntsville, is nowhere near a normal market, it is absolutely a fantastic one, and one that has been getting far more notice lately for large out of state REI's.

Some of those qualities have already been mentioned but to be blunt again the economy is not only driven by Government spending, but is also in continuous growth due to it. We haven't felt real pain from a recession since the 1970's when the Moon Mission finished up. That is the nature of the beast, it seems like it is perpetually expanding until the rug gets pulled out from under you. Same as anywhere but it's much more seldom and hits far harder when it occurs. This may be lessened now however, I base that off of the fact that Huntsville has diversified a bit now as not just a cog in the military industrial complex but also an industrial and tech center in it's own right, and just over the past year we had over 300% tech job growth.

The dynamic you have at play with the constantly shifting population is a strong reason why I advocate to people that while Madison is certainly doing well now, it only really started to do so with a combination of BRAC and the creation of their own well funded school system 2-3 decades ago. Lately what I've noticed is crime rates growing up as well in Madison, a lack of investment in expanding roads, a decision to build a costly stadium instead of addressing the cost of their breakneck pace of population growth. In Huntsville traffic is a breeze compared to any nearby major metro area, Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Nashville, you name it. But in Madison that quality vanishes in rush hour, but of course this is true too for places like Harvest or Hazel Green as well. 

Final weird note is the environment, Huntsville lies in the middle of what is known as Dixie Alley, the only place in the word with more tornadoes than Tornado Alley, the most recent example of what kind of extent it can be was in 2011 when the city was shut down for a week straight with no utilities. They seem to occur every decade or so, the previous really big ones being in 1989 and 1974. Beyond that Huntsville lies in what's called the Tennessee Valley, and in this area of it the Native Americans named it Death Valley due to springtime when the pollen gets trapped within it and coats absolutely everything, lakes turn yellow, and so do cars. People move here never having had allergies and develop them.