Why North Carolina? Why Holly Springs?

A friend on the West Coast reached out yesterday asking about Holly Springs. Instead of rattling off some Chamber of Commerce bulletpoints, I figured it was better to try to set some context for our decision.

So… how did we find ourselves moving to Holly Springs, NC?

Arriving in California.

I was reluctant to move to California when LinkedIn first cold called me in 2013, but once I visited for my interview, I was sold. I'd always been a Silicon Valley kid growing up, I just didn't realize it at the time. My first NorCal apartment was 5 mins from where Atari was founded, 10 mins from Google, and every workday for 2 years I drove right past the garage where Steve & Steve started Apple. At work everyone EVERY-ONE was so freaking smart! I drank from that engineering firehose and learned more in the first quarter than the preceding five years.

Settling in.

I negotiated 3 months of corporate housing (standard is 1) from LinkedIn to give me a chance to be picky about a place to live. (p.s. Yes, these things are negotiable). We looked at a lot of bad houses (that were still >$3500 a month) in that time and then lucked out with the home we'd be in for 6 1/2 years. Three bed, two bath, 1600sf. Very average home. Our rent started at $3400/mo in 2013 and ended at $4300/mo when we moved out in 2020. These were below-market rents for the area and we were happy to get them. Fortunately, employers know this and pad salaries accordingly, so it mostly netted out for us.

The NorCal housing market is f'd. COVID will correct it a little, but not enough.

Moving on.

We wanted something else. I needed more space in general, plus an office. I was using part of the garage for office space, which was OK-ish in the summer, but untenable in the winter. The kids needed more neighborhood friends. The adults needed a wider social circle. We were tired of paying rent. We knew the Bay Area wouldn't work for us, as we didn't want to put $600K down on something that could drop 10% in the next correction. So: out of state.

We actually started our search pre-COVID, so some of our criteria doesn't make sense in a work-from-anywhere environment. But this seemed safest.

1 - Tech jobs. If LinkedIn doesn't let me work remote, then there needs to be a local market for technology people. For US cities, this would be places like LA, Austin, Colorado Springs/Boulder, Seattle, Raleigh/Durham, northern Virginia, Boston, NYC. 

2 - Mild weather. I grew up in Florida, and wife is from Nova Scotia. I'm done with the relentless Florida heat, and she doesn't want to deal with snow. So north of Georgia and south of Philly.

3 - Proximity to family. CA was too far for family to visit regularly. New place should be close to where family lives or passes. 

4 - New housing that isn't too Edward Scissorhands. All new developments look cookie-cutter but try to find a place that is a community and not just houses stamped out.

5 - Catch-all. Well-funded school district (this was a severe problem in CA), close to decent airport, close to things to do, growing housing market, growing community, people with our age and family composition.

All of this lead us to either Asheville or the Raleigh area. I think Asheville satisfies all of the above except #1. I'd much rather be somewhere with mountains, but #1 is best served by Charlotte or Raleigh. 

Why Holly Springs?

We'd decided on the Raleigh area, then, and needed to narrow it down to town and subdivision. We started looking at Holly Springs for no other reason than we had some Sunnyvale friends who had moved here two years prior. Wife and I made a visit together last November during a Thanksgiving trip to the East Coast, and then I made a solo trip in February. We did drive-bys in Chapel Hill and Cary, but ultimately Holly Springs had a few things going for it:

1 - LOTS of new development. The major builders are here, and there's a wide variety of price ranges to choose from. We literally got 2.5x the house for 1/3 the price. It's brand new, in an established community, with adults our age and kids our kids' ages.

2 - The toll road. There's a brand new toll road that ends in Holly Springs and goes up to Durham and the airport. I can be at the airport in like 20 minutes. Since the toll road is new, nobody uses it yet. It's great.

3 - Planning for the future. Compared to NorCal or LA traffic, things are a breeze here. And the govts have planned well for future growth. The toll road is part of that, but other surface streets seem to have lots of capacity. 

4 - Wake County School District. Schools are well-funded, class sizes are smaller, and there are lots extracurricular programs. Counter this with the elementary school in CA we moved from, where the parents need to pool $400,000+ extra a year out of pocket to fund things like music and art. Our CA school district had a deficit of millions and millions of dollars, and that was pre-COVID.

5 - A mix of small and large. All the big box stores are here, but there are also mom and pop stores with charm as well. Hoping they survive COVID.

Looking back, I feel we made the best decision we could given the data at the time, and I have no regrets about moving here. Once COVID restrictions lift (next summer?) we’ll start to participate more in the wider community.