St. Petersburg, Florida

GreatThingsTB
2y ago
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Housing market is likely on par or better than where you're coming from in the northeast.

Florida is the land of hidden expenses currently. So while property tax may be same or slightly lower, Homeowners insurance is likely to be $3000-$5000 / yr for a single family home and your car insurance will be $1000 every six months.

You may think homeowners doesn't apply to apartments, but the property management will always pass the exact same insurance increases they have to pay along to you, and more.

Main difference is going to be the heat and humidity. It should only extremely rarely get down to 32F (Tampa Bay and Gulf are huge heat sinks). Might get a frost and need to throw a sheet over a plant once a year but certainly don't have to worry about pipes bursting in St Pete.

The tradeoff is that late May through November will be some of the hottest, wettest, stickiest, and sun blasted temperatures ou will likely experience :). St Pete holds records for most consecutive days of sun, so it's much different experience than the northeast. As an added bonus ever summer afternoon there are 30 minute thunderstorms that look like the end of the world is coming.

But yeah, people are nice, a lot do do. Not a lot of hiking, you'll need to drive an hour to find some ok stuff. We don't have hills really, and the 'forest' is in Ocala. There's a few closer but wilderness in Florida tends towards swamp, not forest.

chefbarnacle
2y ago
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No state income tax and relatively low property tax (in comparison to NE states).

We have a lot of restaurants but most are just okay and not great. The people are for the most part friendly (although this is changing too. For some reason we have honking horns like I have never experienced here). We are a very dog friendly community. St. Pete is very welcoming to all walks of life and genders. We have a large Asian community with good restaurants and Asian grocery stores. We have a large black community as well and there are many black owned businesses and restaurants.

Good or bad deepening on how you look at it but, FL. didn’t keep everything locked down as long as other states for Covid which helped our economy keep running.

Housing is definitely crazy but still much cheaper then many NE or out west cities. Auto and HO Insurance is absolutely insane and now the state is forcing everyone with Citizens insurance to get flood insurance even if not in a flood zone. It’s not a bad idea to have it outside a flood zone because most insurance considers sewer backup flood. I still don’t like being forced to get it. If you do buy a home be sure to get as much “ordinance and law” and “loss of use” coverage they will give you. Trust me on this I was an adjuster for many years. Basic insurance coverage doesn’t cover code upgrades (you’ll need many) also if you home is uninhabitable you will not find a place to rent while your home is uninhabitable and insurance will only pay “month to month” on a lease which greatly increases the cost and once that coverage is gone it’s gone. If/when a big hurricane hits St. Pete it will be complete destruction to our old housing stock. When a hurricane does come you may not even be able to get out of town because there are only a couple ways out.

Anonymous
2y ago
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The good news:

It's quite pretty

The people are relatively interesting here compared to most of Florida

I moved back to the area recently after a few years away (work relocation) and it really is a different place. I don't know that I can justify staying in St Pete. There's a lot to like, but it's a lot of money to take forever to get anywhere outside of St Pete.

Lots of good, but…I don't know if it's for me.

If you're looking at apartments, there's a cluster of complexes near the bridges that cross the bay. There's over priced, but it would let you get to other parts of the Tampa area more easily and still be close. Some are absolute dumps, but some are perfectly comfortable.

The bad things:

The housing market is disproportionately driven by retirees and people who "winter" here, which means wages haven't kept up. It's not an especially affordable place to live if you're relying on local employment

The traffic is abysmal, especially during the winter/spring due to the influx of vacationers and "snow birds" who live here a few months a year. Pinellas is a narrow strip of land with a relatively high density (not many "tall" buildings, but there's very little open land). The end result is that there just isn't a way to make traffic flow truly functional

It's also surrounded by a few areas with lousy traffic. I recently drove out of state from St Pete and it took me almost as long to get out of the Tampa area as it did to get out of the state. There were accidents, so it's not every day, but just realize it's not necessarily easy to get to the rest of the state

There is some public transport, but not as much as you may be used to in New England

St Petersburg Florida Pros & Cons