Here is everything you might not know about Pensacola being out of state:
White flight out of anything within five miles of downtown core. Very very bad neighborhoods. Some investment coming there. But only some. You will see many homes intentionally burnt down to collect insurance.
Lots of suburbs built without basic infrastructure as it would be imposing on people's rights to require them to follow basic building codes.
This causes new suburbs to be built further and further out from urban core.
Very high crime and large uneducated population. Not in that they haven't graduated high school but in that they are entirely unproductive members of society that are actually higher destructive.
Very high cancer rate in Pensacola from the type of limited industry it has attracted through time. The drinking water is also no good here. Very large portion of city actually just on septic as part of basic infrastructure package.
That shiny new townhome will look like the rest of Pensacola very soon because the weather will rip it apart. The insurance company will take a year to fix it many times. Hopefully they actually send you a competent contractor. This depends of the competency of your unpaid HOA president.
If this townhome has no HOA, then several of the connected units will fall into complete abandonment and disrepair. Very weak communities in Pensacola. The reality is Ensley is very rundown. People will try to defend it. There's no benefit to living anywhere in Pensacola other than it's not insert other rundown place. Eastern side of town on original street grid where you have some actual elevation would be my recommendation. Gulf Shores also nice. But don't do Gulf Shores. It gets cut off from the rest of the city very often. It's also built on land that belongs to nature. They are nice because they will almost match the level of basic services you expect out of an area of 500,000 people in the United States. There will be parks, sidewalks, trendy shops (kind of). Unique building designs others than what's cheapest. Some semblance of a community.
Much of street grid is awfully run down or overpriced for what you get and if you are off street grid you are in automobile dependant sprawl with no zoning laws or urban planning applied at all. You will have a trailer park on the other side of a fence from your shiny new townhome almost undoubtedly. If a grocery store is a block away, you'll still have to drive there.
If this is all ok with you, then it is a great area to invest in cheap real estate and pay no income tax. Also you are investing in an area where people hate cities. Every young person I've met here that is from here wants to go live in the countryside. That's because if Pensacola is your only exposure to a city of course you'll hate them. All the negatives few positives.
