208,940
Population
Sunny Days: 213
95100 Affordability
75100 Schools
65100 Diversity
60100 Safety
Birmingham, Alabama
Magic City
Birmingham Skyline
Birmingham Downtown
4th Avenue District
Birmingham Artwalk, Credit: Larry O. Gay Photography
LookyLOO Review of Birmingham
The Buzz
Cheap housing and short commutes to a buzzy little city. There are baseball games, breweries, art, old theaters, and a foodie scene worthy of national attention.
Birmingham is located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, which lends itself to some pretty incredible scenery, and there’s lots of good, live music being played in the plentiful venues, juke joints, and festivals.
Local, county, and state governments are messy. While Birmingham is a liberal bastion and has reinvented itself after a painful and ugly past, politics and corruption can still be problematic, and transplants are not as common as in some other southern cities, so the welcome may not be quite as warm. But the summers certainly are hot and humid. If you get even just a little bit outside the city, life is going to slow to a Pabst-swilling crawl.
Lifestyle
B’ham is a city of distinctive neighborhoods—the bustling Southside with its towering buildings and the UAB campus; industrial downtown, now being renovated into lofts and cool restaurants; hipster-centric Avondale with its artisanal breweries and coffee shops all accessible by foot.
With about a million people in the metro area and just over 200,000 in the city itself, Birmingham’s big enough to have an international airport, The Birmingham Museum of Art, and its own version of the High Line, Railroad Park, and a bustling food hall, The Pitzitz. It’s small enough to be much more affordable than Atlanta or New Orleans. A five to fifteen-minute commute is about all you need to live, work, and play in Birmingham.
Homewood is the best of liberal Birmingham but more expensive, and the housing market there is very competitive for renters and/or buyers. A similar vibe can be had in Crestwood, Forest Park, and/or parts of Avondale.
If you want to check out all the shenanigans locals get up to, here is the calendar of festivals and events.
We highly recommend visiting Birmingham and staying in the community in a VRBO rather than a hotel to get a feel for what it's like to live among the locals. You can receive discounted fares on travel via our partnership with Expedia as well.
Why You Should Move Here Now?
Threading The Needle
Birmingham threads a tight needle: It’s small, but diverse. Charming, but sophisticated. The city hasn’t grown so fast that there’s outward sprawl. Entrepreneurs and residents can still grab historic downtown factory space and other creative space affordably.
Reviews of Birmingham from Locals
heythisispaul
3y ago
🦉🦉🦉
my wife and I moved here from a large city from elsewhere in the country earlier this year. We're early 30's also non-religious, and don't have any children. Thought I'd share my experience (good, bad, and general) with moving here as it relates to some of what you've brought up and just living here in general:
It's by no means how it's portrayed in popular media, but it's definitely the most religious place I've lived. Everywhere else I've lived I just assumed that anyone I met that was my age was not religious, that strategy has failed me pretty consistently here. That being said, I'd say religious people in the millennial-and-younger age bracket are still the minority and we've met plenty of like-minded people as ourselves. I wouldn't say it's different enough from the rest of the country to be a major decision-making factor. Take this with a grain of salt, this is all anecdotal.
Despite AL's political position at large, Birmingham is pretty blue. Like most metropolitan areas in the country, you'll find a pretty diverse mixture of political beliefs but urban areas tend to trend more liberal and Birmingham is no different. You'll find this less true the further you go from the city.
Everything is closed on Sundays and Mondays? Pretty much other than breweries and all the normal national chains, it's difficult to find a fun place to go hang out on a Sunday or Monday.
The city is big enough so that you can find pretty much anything you're looking for here, but not so big that it feels incredibly spaced out and disparate.
Each day Birminghamsters and the roads they drive continue to impress me with how terrible they can be. This city by far has the worst drivers and roads I've ever experienced. I have primarily lived on the west-coast where roads and highways feel bigger and newer, so maybe I've just been spoiled.
The weather is pretty nice, you get all four seasons which can be a pro or a con depending on your perspective. Coming from the west, I was not prepared for how much it rains. I don't know why this isn't talked about more, but it rains a lot here. People complain about the heat but I don't think it's that bad, but I was not mentally or physically prepared to deal with so much rain.
For more reviews of what living in Birmingham is like from locals, check out: The Reviews.
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Living in Birmingham
Neighborhoods in Birmingham
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The Area
Snuggled inside of the Jones Valley, Birmingham is its own urban oasis in northern Alabama. Although there are just over 200,000 people within the city limits, the greater Birmingham area is home to roughly a million total people living in a wide variety of neighborhoods and suburbs that stretch up into the mountains around Magic City. Birmingham is at the crossroads of a number of state and interstate highways that lead locals directly to cities like Nashville (north), Atlanta (east), Montgomery (south) and Chattanooga (northeast) in a straight shot.