--- Page 1 --- 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. Love that you guys are here; we ask that you subscribe so we can keep you informed of everything that’s going on in Huntsville. I’m Cameron Walker, broker-owner of Cameron Walker Realty. We’re coming back to the Boomtown podcast here with my co-host, Megan Hines. I’m Megan Hines; I also work with Cameron at Cameron Walker Realty, and we’re about to do a podcast. Yeah, absolutely. Something we were talking about yesterday—and I think it’s really cool because we kind of come at it from different directions—I grew up in Alabama and moved away for about 10 years, then moved back, and you moved here from the West Coast. We were talking about what nobody told us about Huntsville. You have these expectations coming in, but there are those unknowns that, when you get here, you find are just completely different than what you were expecting in some facets. What were some of those things for you that we talked about? Well, I moved here about 10 years ago, and some of these have changed a little bit. When I first got here, the diversity in terms of grocery stores and restaurants was less than it is now, and it’s definitely getting to be more. You can get all kinds of different things; Trader Joe’s is here, Whole Foods is here, Sprouts was here when I got here. I missed my West Coast fancy grocery stores a lot, and I had to adjust a little that way. I went to a lot of fruit stands, and in the summer it’s no problem, but it’s really different in the winter. That was big for me. Also, you touched on this when we were talking about it, the work-life balance situation, which was really why I moved here. I was living in the San Francisco Bay area and my daughter was two at the time. Your work-life balance there is just non-existent because even if you manage to live close to where you work, you’re spending so much time parking and dealing with every little aspect of your day. You go to the grocery store and it takes three hours because you have to park. Here, every little thing is so much easier. I experienced the same thing when I moved back from the Northern Virginia/DC area. That’s a melting pot of melting pots, and you’ve got millions of people there, so they can support different ethnic cuisines, styles of food, grocery stores, and things like that. The longer I’ve been here, the more of those places there are. What I find is they’re actually already established in most cases, and so Huntsville kind of has a bit of a challenge with social media in general. We tend to celebrate the new and what’s coming in—and a lot of times that’s chain stuff now because we’ve gotten large enough to bring those chains in—but we’re not celebrating those little spots. The jerk chicken place that nobody knows about, that kind of stuff. It’s hard to go and find it, and they’re not necessarily masters at their cuisine and masters at Google --- Page 2 --- advertising or getting out on Facebook or Instagram. It has to do with where we are at in terms of social media and marketing. These chain restaurants come in, they have a big financial push behind them, and they push the marketing. These locals are just doing it organically, and it’s very different. You don’t know as a consumer whether you’re getting organic marketing or if there’s a financial push behind it; it’s almost impossible to tell at this point. They’ve gotten really good at it. I do a lot of the marketing for our brokerage, and when I’m doing research and talking to different marketing companies, they constantly talk about UGC (user-generated content). They’re paying an actor to do user-generated content, so it’s the same thing—it’s hard to know now if you’re really looking at something legitimate. It’s almost like the grainier the footage, the better nowadays. Going back to something else you touched on, because this was really important for me and my family when we moved back from the DC area: at one point in time, we had two houses there. We had sold a house, it fell through, and we wound up owning two. They were on either end of the worst bottleneck in the U.S., off of I-95 down in the Stafford/Fredericksburg area. It was so bad there that it could take us two hours to go just a couple of miles to go to, like, Target or something. Where it really impacted us wasn’t necessarily on the work days—that was bad, you know, we had morning and evening rush hour—it was even weekends, particularly over the summer with everybody trying to go down to Virginia Beach and the Outer Banks. Our kids couldn’t really get involved in much because, at best, we could do one thing per week with the timing. When we moved here, having grown up in Alabama, I knew it was much more affordable, but that still came as a shock. How much more affordable? You don’t think about the things like taxes and the small stuff that adds up, like the gas, groceries, and the entry fees for things for your kids, whether it’s a one-off thing or a seasonal thing. You don’t realize how much time debt you have in those other areas. In Northern Virginia, if it’s a two-hour one-way commute, and down here you’ve got 15 to 30 minutes, that’s five days a week—that’s hours back. Over the course of a month, that’s more than a day back in your schedule. Now my kids are three-sport athletes, they’re in dance, they’re in cheer, they’re in archery. They’re not exactly Robin Hood, but you know! We can afford it monetarily and we can afford it time-wise, and I still have more time for my own hobbies and pursuits. I didn’t have my own business in Virginia; now I do, and I can still be a family man, travel with them, and do these other things because it affords me the money, the time, and the opportunity. I think that filters down and you notice it throughout the community, because this area is really into, like, nerdy pursuits. Yes, absolutely. We have frisbee golf courses all over the place, people are really into pickleball, and pretty much anything that people would like to do that’s fun, you can find a group of people who do it. That’s because they have the time. People will call and they’ll be like, “I’m open to a 45-minute commute,” and I’ll be like, “Really? Are you open to that?” Because it seems like such a short commute where you live right now—would you be open to that if all your neighbors were --- Page 3 --- already home and grilling by the time you got home? Would you be like, “No, that’s no longer fair.” It’s not a necessity here. Whereas in another area, like where I was in Northern Virginia, I worked in a new home sales community and we were the last thing before you hit no man’s land before you got to Richmond. Our joke was, “We’re a drive-until-you-qualify community.” So, you didn’t make enough money to buy elsewhere, you worked in DC, so you bought in our community because we were the last new construction, nice community before you hit nothing. That was a necessity for people. Here, because of the affordability and the lack of traffic, you can be 15 minutes away from work in a nice neighborhood in a good area with community-wide amenities—maybe even neighborhood amenities—and you don’t feel like you need to be 45 minutes away. I live in a whole other county and when I come to work downtown it’s less than 25 minutes. My wife works on the Arsenal, she has to go through the Arsenal gate and the FBI gate, and she’s 23 minutes door-to-door. We’re 15–20 miles away from where we go, but it’s super easy. You hit one or two stop signs or red lights, and you’re on the interstate. When we say “interstate” here, it’s not like anywhere else. Every other city I’ve ever lived in, the interstate goes right through the middle of the city, so they have to build some kind of beltway around that city for people to even stand a chance of getting around. Here, the actual interstate—the true interstate that goes across state borders—is 20 minutes away from downtown. It doesn't go through the city; we’re on a spur that goes out that way. It’s literally just people going to Huntsville that are driving through Huntsville, so we don’t have the Birmingham traffic that’s going to Nashville. Birmingham has the traffic for anything between Nashville, Montgomery, and Mobile. While they have a larger metro service area anyway, they’re dealing with people from elsewhere. In Huntsville, that’s extremely rare. We do have to put up with that, but I have to say, the locals are going to be mad at us because they think they have the worst traffic. That’s absolutely true. Any forum, anyone that’s been here for 20 years plus—because there used to be no traffic—now, that 565 to Decatur and back at rush hour? That’s not a great experience anymore. We do have a lot of people moving to the area, and I don’t want to give people the idea that it’s all sunshine and rainbows because we do have a little bit of traffic; it’s just nothing compared to these major cities. If you’re coming from somewhere like Chicago, San Francisco, or Phoenix, you’re going to find it a welcome relief for sure. I had another agent who used to work with us, and he grew up in a town with 2,500 people. Then he moved to go to college to a town with 25,000 people, then he moved here, and at the time it was 250,000 people. So he kept going up in multitudes of ten, right? For him, it did seem like a lot of traffic because his entire life up until he moved here, it was smaller. I totally get that. For people that have been here forever, or are coming here from a smaller town or more rural area, it is going to seem like a lot of traffic. It all depends on where they move and what their daily commute is like. Many people work from home now, so a lot of people don’t even really have a commute, so to speak. It’s more about what they’re doing after work hours: where do their kids play baseball, where are their hobbies, or what do they do on the weekends? That’s more their true commute. I think that plays into it. Then you think about Athens—it’s the fastest-growing city in the --- Page 4 --- fastest-growing county. Now, it’s still relatively small compared to just about anywhere else, including Huntsville, but because more people are moving out that way and people are still moving into Madison and Harvest between Athens and Huntsville, that commute has gotten worse. You mentioned Decatur a moment ago; Decatur’s actually got a unique challenge. It’s on the other side of a river, so you’ve either got to cross the bridge there to get to 565 or you’ve got to go south, cross down there, and come in all the way from the south of Huntsville, which is a beautiful drive, but it’s long. There are places where there are challenges, that’s true. You were mentioning how easy it is to get places and the after-hours, the sports, and things. I think the arts community here is something very special that I wasn’t expecting at all. Agreed, 100%. It came as a complete shock to me. I had heard of Lowe Mill—someone said something—but I didn’t realize what that was. I suggest you Google it and look it up. It used to be an old mill that’s been converted into this amazing, gorgeous art mall. They probably wouldn’t like me calling it a mall, but it feels like a mall. It’s got these beautiful old windows, the light coming through is amazing, and antique hardwood floors. It just has this feel that is very creative and beautiful. There are artists all around, screen printing shops, and a man that makes cigar box guitars. There’s a thrift store, a record store, painters—every kind of artist that you can imagine has a little studio there. So you can walk around, talk to people, they have festivals, plays, coffee shops. It’s just amazing. Having this huge space supports art throughout the community, 100%. It even brings people in from outside the community. If people are watching this and they’re from the Northern Virginia/DC metro area, there’s the Torpedo Factory there, which is actually where my wife and I got engaged. It’s a very similar vibe to that, I would say—it’s actually a little bigger here. The Torpedo Factory was literally a torpedo factory in World War II, and now it’s studio artists, and there’s quite a few of them. I think there are 200 studio artists at Lowe Mill, the last I heard, and I think there are 150 studios. When you think about that, and you were talking about the festivals, they have an open-air festival every weekend from, say, May into October, and then you’ve got the year-round stuff that just happens there. It’s becoming more and more of an event center. They have music on Friday nights in the summer; you can sit outside on the lawn and watch bands. They bring them in from Nashville and from all over the area. When somebody tells you an area is “in transition,” you never know what that actually means. There are a lot of existing homes there that were for the workers of the mill—it was true mill row housing. A lot of those homes, as they got older, especially during that 2020–2021 era, were knocked down and rebuilt, so there’s a lot of new construction, existing homes that are older, homes that have been renovated, and now I want to say there’s a whole new apartment complex in there too. What’s really cool about that area is it’s extremely walkable. That’s something in Huntsville in general—if we’re talking about things I didn’t expect—as a city, it’s not very walkable. There are these pockets like Lowe Mill that are, and it’s getting better. They’re building a skyway—I’m not sure exactly when that is planned to be completed, we can look that --- Page 5 --- up—a sky bridge from Lowe Mill to downtown Huntsville. That will make the entire area just way more walkable. You’ll be able to pull into downtown Huntsville and spend the entire evening, maybe get a hotel, spend the weekend just hanging out, walking around. Chattanooga seems to have an advantage for tourism based on the fact that it’s extremely walkable and has great public transit. We don’t have great public transit, but Huntsville is getting there with the walkability for sure. What I’ve seen with Huntsville—and again, this has changed since I moved here more than I was expecting—is that when you look at a comparable city, a lot of times there is a downtown, and that is where everything is: all the restaurants, all the walkability, all the hotels. While we definitely have that, we also have these city centers. You think about MidCity, you think about Lincoln Mill, you think about Lowe Mill, Ditto Landing is getting a lot of growth right now. These areas are more like pockets, and it distributes the events, the restaurants, the parking, the hassles. If you’re coming into Huntsville for an event on the weekend, there could be three events going on, and you’re not in cross-traffic, cross-parking, you’re not trying to walk. I think the worst I ever ran into was there was a concert and a hockey game one night. That goes down to, you have to give a shout-out to city planning, because that doesn't happen by accident. That happens because we have a plan for this city. We have city planners who are actively courting businesses; MidCity was created by the city, they actively courted businesses to be there. It was part of a plan; people didn't just organically build MidCity. It is working out really well. Huntsville’s grown a lot since I’ve been here, and all indications point to the fact that it’s going to keep growing, but there is a plan in place. We are working hard to keep traffic bottlenecks at a minimum and to make it—as it grows—continue to be a livable place, which is the advantage. The reason it has grown so much is because you want to spend time with your children, not in your car, for sure. You mentioned traffic, growth, and infrastructure. About a year after I moved back here—I’ve been back almost six years—they passed a higher gas tax, which was very controversial in Alabama, but it was for a program they called Rebuild Alabama. It was for rebuilding bridges and roadways, expanding roadways, and resurfacing them throughout the state. While a few local people complained, Huntsville has won out huge in that. Really, all of our interstates have been resurfaced at this point, they’ve widened most of them, and the one last one that really needs to be widened, which just happens to be the one going by my house, is the last stretch they’re doing. What’s really neat about Huntsville—I don’t know why this isn’t everywhere—you ever live somewhere where there was, like, a 20-year construction project and nothing happened? In Huntsville, they take six months, a year, and they’re done. They actually do the job. Between that less-than-six-year window, Town Madison’s been built, a baseball stadium has been put in there—we went through COVID, so there was a delay, the team’s been playing there for three years—and now they’re building the flyovers to get on the interstate. I think they open this month or next. It has all happened like that. It’s so funny, because when I grew up in Birmingham, we would go to Montgomery every year on a field trip, and there was a bridge that was a laughing joke. For the 12 years I was in school, that bridge was under construction. There --- Page 6 --- were always people there, but I don’t know what they were up to. Here, projects start, finish, and another project starts. I do think it’s a well-run city and it’s efficient in that way. I was going to mention, it’s funny—a lot of the local people here do not know how to parallel park. It’s because they don’t have to! I’m from a place where you have to know how to parallel park, because if not, you just have to keep driving. That just speaks to how convenient it is if you can go to a downtown and not have to know how to parallel park. It’s a pretty convenient place. I can parallel park, so long as there are three spots in a row that are empty! My wife, who spent 15 years in the DC area, she can parallel park, so she’s pretty good at it. I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s funny. That’s where those different perspectives come from, right? Here, everybody can drive, like, a massive SUV, an F-150 that’s got the wide tires and all that, and all the parking spots are big enough for it. I remember when I was in the DC area and I got my first SUV when we had our second kid, there were plenty of spots I couldn’t park in. I’m not necessarily talking about the ones just marked "compact," they just were so small because they were trying to accommodate so many vehicles at once. You kind of had to know where you could go. My wife drove a Camry for a long time, so there were certain places we knew we just had to take the Camry. Thanks for watching or listening. You can always catch us on audio or wherever you get your podcasts—be it Spotify, Apple—or you can watch our video on YouTube. Really appreciate you guys being here; we ask that you subscribe so we can keep you informed of everything going on here in Huntsville.