​All right, you're watching Boomtown, a podcast about Huntsville's explosive growth, both on and off the Arsenal. I'm Cameron Walker, your host. I'm the broker/owner of Cameron Walker Realty, located right here in Huntsville, and you're joining me and my co-host, Megan. We love that you guys are here. We ask that you subscribe so we keep you informed of everything that's going on in Huntsville. The other thing that I think is amazing about this area is your access to nature and the outdoors. There are about 10,000 acres of land trust land that is set aside, and this really goes to the planning of the community. They're not just, you know, building everywhere helter-skelter in an attempt to make more money; they are protecting lands and keeping our green spaces and making it livable as it grows, right? And you know, if you live in downtown Huntsville, within 10 minutes you can be at Monte Sano State Park. I know that as a local—as a non-local—I am probably not pronouncing that right. I was told I was to say "Monte-So" like I'm talking to a guy named Monty. Is that right? But anyways, I say "Monte-Sano" because I just don't know how to say it, so feel free to correct me. But that is a world-class state park. It's got vistas, hiking, waterfalls—multiple waterfalls that you can hike to. You can camp up there; there are little cabins you can rent a space and have a birth... you can even have your wedding up there. It's amazing. I actually did a video previously, so depending on where you're listening or watching us at, my YouTube channel has a video there of Monte Sano. I do a drive-thru of the neighborhoods that surround it because it is a mountaintop community, and it's one of those places that is truly a community, like everybody there is on the same newsletter, their kids go to the same school, they're all part-owners of the same community-wide amenities. So, it's really cool. But then also, half of that video is in the state park, and I pulled up and I started walking around. I was videotaping where there's a big shaded area just off a huge playground and field, and there's picnic tables all over. And while I'm walking through there, there's just deer there, and they had no care that I was there. They're obviously used to people. You walk back and there's like a low brick wall and there is a stunning vista, and it's not even the best one in the park; it's just the first one you get to. My neighbors recently moved in about six months ago across the street; they're ex-military. He loves to camp, and he likes to primitive camp, so they're up there anytime the weather's about 70 degrees. I know I'm not going to see my neighbors; they're up doing the primitive camping up there. And when it's hot, it's often like 10 degrees cooler up there because of the elevation, and it's not that high, but it's high enough to make a difference. It's also the place of... nowhere else is humid, too, yup. If nobody else gets snow, it gets snow, so yeah, really neat. And then you go down maybe 15 minutes further south and you're at Blevins Gap, where you've got another 17 miles of hiking trails. And to the point you were just making a little bit ago, I was in a broker meeting about six months back and they had the head person from the land preserve there, and they were just inking the deal on two more parcels of land that was going to connect them all the way from Blevins Gap down to Ditto Landing. So, I have a client moving here in a couple years—they're waiting on their kid to get out of school—but he's a big-time mountain biker, like I mean just avid, like that's his deal. And so, he was in the know about that before he ever even came down to visit from Colorado. He's showing me on his app, like he's got GoPro footage of the trails that already exist because I guess, going back earlier, we're talking about nerding out in Huntsville—there are all these different communities. While we don't have such a huge population, you do kind of have to fish around a little bit to find these things, but once you do find that community, it's there. So, like he was in the know on where to go here for meetups and all that kind of stuff, because he had all the apps, he was on all the forums. So, even before he arrived, he already knew what he was looking for, where to be, and all that. So it's really cool. I think these smaller communities can be a huge advantage because you know, you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Chicago or New York, there's everything there, but it's very difficult to access. Most people have to work so much they can't do it, or else it's very expensive. Here, it's a smaller community. If your kid wants to be in a play, they can be in a play that's bigger than their school play. They could join/go to Children's Fantasy Playhouse Theater and take acting classes and be in a play that everybody sees. You have to be in a very small group of people to get that in a bigger place. Here, you just have to be interested and want to commit your time. Sure, and maybe you're a little talented, I guess, but if you have those qualities, you can do that. It all ties in together—what we've already talked about this whole time is you have the disposable income now because it's so much less expensive to live here than elsewhere, you have the time that you can get there—you're not stuck in traffic all the time trying to get there—and you've got these small, tight-knit communities. Despite us sending everything into space here, right—rockets, missiles, shooting down missiles, satellites, whatever it may be—we do have this really thriving art scene. We were mentioning a moment ago about Lowe Mill, but you've got art festivals throughout the city. I mean, one of our biggest festivals, until this last year when we brought in a big music festival, was the Panoply Arts and Crafts Festival, right? You've got a huge arts and crafts show that goes on at the Von Braun Center every year. And then I recently had somebody move here that was into quilting, and right before she did, I had some other clients that had moved here, rented for about a year, and so they had really got into the community. They're retired, but they're super active—retired only from work, not from life. And that was a big part of why they moved here, because they are so active, and they got in with this quilting community that I had no idea existed. They got this huge workshop where you can come; it's almost like the Lowe Mill of quilting. It's like you wouldn't know that stuff exists if you don't dig into it, but it's here, it's available to people, and you have the time and the money to get there and do it. There's all these little worlds that you can pop into if you meet the right person, or if you get interested in something, you can really go deep. That's amazing to have that opportunity; I think it makes your life better. Absolutely. And for us, my wife—I always joke she should be the realtor; she's the social arm of our family—like, I'll talk to a brick wall, but she'll have your whole life story out of you in five minutes. But that brick wall won't enjoy it sometimes. There might be a hostage there, but she's super involved in our schools. We have a lot of different school districts here, and that isn't something that Alabama in general has a great reputation for. But locally here, and the way I just kind of jokingly tell people is, the folks from NASA that came here in the '50s and '60s, they wanted their kids to be able to read, so they made sure we had good schools. My kids are in the Madison City School District, which has a great reputation, and I'm just going to say from personal experience with my kids, it has absolutely lived up to it. But it doesn't really matter where you are here; there's so much parental involvement and there's a lot of support from different corporations here, whether they're headquartered here or they're a national or multinational that just has a large presence here. You can't open a news app or a webpage without seeing some story like "Boeing gave money to this" or "Northrop gave money to that." And then you see a lot of local stuff, like we had a friend that was a head football coach in the Madison area; we'd go watch their games, and every week at halftime, they had a different organization out there awarding something either to the school or to some other organization in the community. So, even these smaller businesses are really involved. With the school system, with my experience, especially going through COVID with two young kids—one of my kids was exposed, and this was back when nobody knew if they were going to live through it or not, right? So, you had to take two weeks off from school. My kid's teacher stayed after hours, did a Zoom class with her, an hour and a half, three nights a week for two weeks—no extra pay, no expectation—and she would do that just to make sure my daughter stayed up with the class. When we talk about her being an awesome human being, all their teachers have been like that. My daughters are in competitive cheer; they do a send-off every year before they go to their Summit down in Florida, their teachers come watch them do their send-off, they come to birthday parties. My wife does balloons as a side thing; she does them super cheap for friends and family—don't call her, it's a great way to promote my wife's business—no, we don't make any money off these things, but she does, you know, if there's like a birthday party for a teacher, baby shower, retirement, she's always there doing that. The probably the coolest thing that goes on the school is they do something called "Rock Your School" every year. So there's a theme. This year it was about exploration. They have a librarian who's retiring; she's always wanted to do an underwater-themed Rock Your School. So, when you walk into this school on Rock Your School day, 20, 30, 40 parents have been there for 24 hours in advance, staying there till midnight, 1:00 in the morning, decorating the school. All the teachers have decorated their classrooms. There was a life-size blue whale on one of the walls in the hallway, life-size orca, there was a treasure ship. There's a big rotunda when you enter that's probably 50, 60 feet wide; they put a net up and they have balloons up underneath the lights. So, when you were underneath it, there was white, blue, and teal balloons, and when you're down on the ground level, it was like walking underwater. It even had that shimmery look on the floor because of the balloons and the light diffusing the light up above. It is absolutely every wall in the school covered with something, and the kids, they just come home and—I would have never experienced anything like that growing up anywhere. So it's really cool to see that. There's a hundred meetings going into that. And I don't do life-sized whales... well, you're not 'momming' hard enough. Yeah, my wife does the balloon art, she doesn't do the life-sized whales either. But there's so much involvement, and the teachers are really involved, and it's a unique experience. It's a different theme every year, and it just seems like it gets more bombastic every year, too. But when we were moving back, we knew about the Madison City School District, particularly my wife, because she competed academically and in sports with them. I wasn't quite as studious and involved in high school as she was, so when we moved back, that was kind of her target for a school district, and I didn't understand why until we got there. I wanted mountain views and pastoral stuff, so I was more of an Owens Cross Roads kind of guy, and funny enough, they have just as good schools there, so we wouldn't have lost out by going there. But yeah, now that we're in Madison, we're involved and all that; it's really cool. I agree, this area is great for people with children. I don't think I would have moved here for the nightlife, no. Everything shuts down at 9:00 unless it's Friday or Saturday, and a couple things are open till 11:00. I mean, we do have the Orion Theater now, and I do think we have a pretty cool little music scene. It's under the radar, yes, but we're pretty close to Nashville, so we do get—and the Orion, if you haven't been there, is an amazing theater. I worked in music venues for a bit in the Bay Area and I've seen lots of shows, and that theater is world-class. It's great, you don't get any complaints about it. I'll make one kind of caveat to that: I see people complaining about not enough Ubers when they leave. Oh yeah, there's never going to be enough Ubers around here. And it's funny, I think once self-driving cars happen, I think Huntsville will jump on it. But we're not an Uber-heavy area. I don't have the app on my phone anymore because I never use it, but I'm also a dad of two kids under 12, so I'm at home every night anyway. We're not Uber-heavy, and if you're coming from a bigger city or even some cities this size, like going out—the nightlife thing I just mentioned—you go out, you have a couple drinks, you have to just stop drinking, or it's hard to get a taxi or an Uber. Are there still taxis here? I just saw one the other day, so yes, there's at least one. So that, and there's not much public transportation; there's a bus, but you need a hotel downtown and hang out and then make it home after drinking. It's just not there. That's true. You need a hotel room or something downtown, which, when we lived in Northern Virginia, that was kind of the Alexandria thing—people would go down there and party and then stay at a hotel without much in the way of driving and stuff to help you if you've been drinking. But if you do go downtown, one of my wife and my favorite date nights is to go downtown and do a progressive dinner across downtown. That's fun. We start off somewhere with appetizers and drinks, go have a real dinner, go have dessert and an after-dinner drink. But again, we're not plowing through the booze, but you have restaurants like Sip—not a restaurant, but it's more of a whiskey bar and cigar lounge. So you do have these cool little pockets downtown, but again, you've got to drink in moderation down there, have your DD, or have a hotel room. It took me a really long time to get my bearings here. I think because it's very spread out, and because you're not walking the whole thing—it's not that walkable—and something about not walking makes it harder for me to remember where everything is. Sure, okay, fair enough. When you walk a city, you get it on a visceral level; you start remembering directions and where that was. But when you're driving all the time, I think it takes longer. I think it depends on what part of the city I'm in. For me—and I'm actually probably the most directionally challenged realtor anybody's ever going to meet; I need GPS to make it from my neighbor's house to mine—downtown to me is super easy to navigate. It's mostly a grid and there's Big Spring Park right there in the middle. You walk downtown, you know, you do. You're right. But yeah, if you get into like Southeast, that can take a little while to learn that area. But what I feel is probably a little more difficult for some people is transitioning from one area to another. But once you're there and you spend a little time there, it's not too hard. So we've been really nice to Huntsville. I think before we wrap up, we need to... it can't all be good, right? That's true. So what was something that you found, I don't want to say disappointing, but sure? For me, it is the lack of diversity in the restaurants and stuff. So while I've been able to dig and find more, there's no... like, one of my favorite cuisines is Afghan food, and you can find kebabs here, but they're more Mediterranean style. They're going to have hummus instead of this, and all that. So I do miss that. I know Bonchon came in the last year, so that was a big one for me. In Northern Virginia, I really enjoyed working in Annandale, and if you're not familiar with Annandale, it has a large Korean population. Even if you're not at a Korean restaurant there, the menu might be in Korean. So, when I worked in banking there, a lot of my co-workers were from Korea, so they really exposed me to a lot of different cuisine there. While we do have some Korean food here, nothing like there. Our Vietnamese is much more like Americanized Vietnamese food. So even the kind of ethnic cuisine that we have isn't as authentic in some cases as what you can find elsewhere, and certainly not the volume. That's true. And also, I noticed this: in San Francisco or LA, there's a big diversity of food that's cheap, like ethnic food, and you can go grab something fast. Here, there are a lot of good restaurants, but that lower price point of just grabbing something—it doesn't exist as much. It's very limited; it's in a food truck. That's where you're going to find it, or Publix has really good sandwiches; they're very good. Speaking of, all right, so there's another one I hadn't thought of, but I'm glad you mentioned it. We used to go on Wegmans dates in Virginia. Wegmans is a big East Coast chain and has a huge buffet in it with all different types of food—different ethnic cuisines, but also pizza, Americana stuff. So you could just go load up in there, and that was a big thing for my family on a Friday night—we would do a family date and go to Wegmans. Who goes to the grocery store for a family night? I think it has to do with the way people live here, too. You're in a bigger city, you're going to live in a smaller space, so you're going to spend a lot of your time outside just eating out and hanging out and being out. Here, you have a big house, probably with a dining room and a large kitchen, so you're going to cook. It just doesn't accommodate that as much. That's true. Probably one other thing for me, personally, because I did wind up buying in Madison, and people don't realize this: if you draw a line down the center of Huntsville and you go east, you're going to have more mountainous, hilly terrain, more trees. If you go west, outside of like Rainbow Mountain and maybe Wade Mountain, it's flat and it's all old farmland. So it's almost impossible to buy a house with a lot of trees once you get over to Madison, Athens, things like that. If you buy an older house, they may have grown up there, but if you're buying a newer house—even like 15 years old—you're just going to have a wispy tree in the front yard and the back yard because it was, even if the developer didn't clear-cut it, the farmer that owned the land before did. There's just not a lot that way. Now, we're in an area where our temperate climate is very conducive to trees growing, so you can make it happen. But you know what they say: the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second best is now. It's kind of the situation you're running into. It's like the best time to buy a house is five months ago, yeah, exactly. How about you, what were some other things like for you that were a little disappointing when you made...? I wouldn't say disappointing, but I don't like tornadoes. Oh yeah. You know, the weather here is aggressive, I would say, absolutely. And I always compare it: I'm afraid of tornadoes, and the locals will just look at you like you're the dumbest person. They're just like, "You just deal with it. You might die." I've had to kind of change my stance on this a little bit recently. I would always tell people—and please don't take this the wrong way—when I would see the news, I always thought all of California was on fire. Now, it happens to be there is a huge fire there, and that's really unfortunate for those people. But I feel like when people look at Alabama, they see that same thing. Off and on, I've lived in Alabama over 33 years; I've never seen a tornado personally, and until last year, I didn't know anybody personally that had damage, except for one guy that lost one board on one fence. That's 33 years, right? Now, obviously they happen, they can be devastating, they can definitely damage people's homes and property, and loss of life. But I think what other people don't realize is, if you have a fire in your area, like one of these massive wildfires, you're just out of luck. If you're here, there are ways to protect yourself, your property, and financially. They make storm shelters, so if you do have a lot of anxiety about it and you're in an area that tends to have more, you can get an underground shelter or an above-ground shelter—these things that are designed to withstand the EF5 tornadoes—and then your homeowner's insurance covers it. It's not like flood insurance or hurricane insurance where you need this separate rider; your homeowner's insurance is going to cover it here. I think for a lot of people that's surprising. And then the newer homes, many of the builders actually build beyond the standards necessary for it. Stone Martin is a builder that I've worked with a lot in the last year with different clients; they actually do the hurricane straps on their roofs, and there's actually something different they do on the walls—there's like a lower section and then they build on top of that—and these are for hurricane preparation. So if they're building down in South Alabama or Florida, that's a necessity there; it's not a necessity here, but it does make the house much more resistant to tornado damage. I have one client that actually got a huge discount on his insurance because he had Stone Martin fill out a form; they weren't necessarily targeting this insurance program, but their build quality happened to land within it. One of the number one questions I get from people moving here is, "What about the tornadoes?" I almost whisper it, like one's going to hit them if they ask. I do have to go into that a bit, and I don't roll my eyes at people, but I also have to explain to them they're not that big a threat. But I think the difference is you have tornado warnings here, and I have not seen an actual tornado since I've been here. Last year, a tornado hit downtown, and you can see some of the damage from that, but that was the first time I've seen that, and there were no fatalities; it was some property damage. But you do get multiple times a year where you have a tornado warning. When I first moved here, that was incredibly scary, and the locals are used to it; they handle it, they're just like, "We're just going to our safe spot." But the first few times, I was genuinely frightened. What surprises people here—and you don't get this outside of hurricanes—if an earthquake happens, nobody knows it's coming. It's not your fault, you haven't done something wrong like not go to your safe space. It just happened. I've been in one earthquake in Virginia and I actually thought a truck had hit the building I was in, but there was no warning. It just happened. Here, it's very rare that happens. We usually have a "First Alert Weather Day" seven days in advance. Now, our guys can't forecast snow to save their life, but they can forecast severe weather seven days in advance. As they get closer and closer, the models get tighter and tighter, and they can basically tell you this is what time the line of storms is going to come through, this will be the worst batch, this first batch is less likely to have a tornado but more likely to have straight-line winds, and all that. They're highly accurate. That is probably why you don't see fatalities. I don't schedule showings on those days, and if I do, we're doing two in the morning before the weather gets worse in the afternoon. That is exactly the reason why. I've never been in Alabama and been surprised that there were thunderstorms. It can happen that a small tornado drops out of a thunderstorm unexpectedly—it actually happened about a month ago over in the Athens area—but by and large, we had a tornado watch in place. So it wasn't that big of a surprise that it happened. The other thing that you're going to notice is, because they're very accurate, you're going to have school canceled here. That's the other thing that I noticed, and this is something you probably need to pay attention to if you have kids—small kids especially. School will be canceled several days out of the year because of tornado warnings and severe weather. I actually know the guy that works with the schools for that for the National Weather Service, and it's actually straight-line wind that is their concern, for school buses tipping. So we don't want that to happen. I get a little heads-up the schools are going to close by about an hour or so. You need to account for that, because even if you work remotely and you have a small child, you're pretty much not working that hard that day. The daycares and after-school programs accommodate that unless they're in the school after-school program. I'd say if you live anywhere else, you deal with something similar—you deal with evacuations for something or whatever—so having to take half an afternoon off is a pretty mild inconvenience for this kind of stuff, and I'd rather know. You will have those days where they say severe weather is possible, and then it'll be perfectly beautiful. I'd rather have that than the other, which is you don't see the severe weather coming. If you keep your eye on it day by day in the forecast, they do tell you, like a day or two in advance, like they start lowering that threat level. They're like, "We're going to keep the alert up because the possibility is there, but it's looking less likely." So it is a lot of just kind of keeping your eye on it. Absolutely. Well, I think we kind of ran the gamut. We could go on for hours and hours, but these were kind of the big ones for me, so hopefully they were yours. Absolutely. If anybody else has anything that occurred to them, I'm sure we'd love to hear about it. In Huntsville, opinions flow freely, so feel free to share yours, too. I'm sure I'm going to think of nine things the moment this segment is over. Absolutely. Or, hey, if we got something wrong, correct us too. Absolutely. Thank you, thanks guys. Thanks for watching or listening. You can always catch us on audio wherever you get your podcast, be it Spotify or Apple, or you can watch our video on YouTube. Really appreciate you guys being here. Ask that you subscribe so we can keep you informed of everything going on here in Huntsville.