Flatbush, Brooklyn, may be one of the dozen places that This Old House picked as one of the Best Places to Buy an Old House, but there were two West Coast picks...
The article about all 12 places is here. Read more about Albany here and Centralia here.
Images: Albany Visitors Association and Tom Jones, Coldwell Banker Kline and Associates via This Old House
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Comments (8)
As a native Oregonian remembering all times driving through Albany ,rolling up the car windows and plugging my nose, I cannot imagine anyone wanting to live there!
It is home to one of the stinkiest paper mills on the planet!
Maybe that is why buying a nice old house there is easy .
Centrailia is one of the rainiest ,wettest ,muddiest places .
Pretty because of all the rain ,but it rains like a muther there!
I want to visit! :)
I'd question the suggestions on this list if I were you. I grew up in Reading, PA and it's nothing like their description. True, there is a beautiful historic district where you can cheaply buy a house, but "home to top-notch schools, four universities"? Not exactly. My high school had a gang problem (my locker was owned by the Latin Street Kings) and is probably going to be taken over by the state, and there's not a university to be found...unless you count the satellite campus of Penn State on the outskirts of town. Also, it's more like an hour and a half from Philadelphia, not the advertised 30 minutes. I do have pride in my hometown, but it's not the nice-to-live-in place that the website claims it to be.
millersburg, OR is the stinky place--adjacent albany is fine.
as former albany resident, the smell is mostly by the freeway, the historic district, by the river west of the stink.
I know that the homes are a little newer, but highland park IL is a suburb north of Chicago, and has a LOT of unremodeled architecturally significant Mid-Century Modern Homes. Mostly ranch style, but some other variations including split levels, the homes around there are really great.
A bedroom community to Dubuque?
And a historic split level ranch? This I gotta see...
Hit submit rather than preview.
One big problem with their list is that most of these places are cheap because their local economy sucks. A suburb of Detroit? Great for a cheap old house, bad for a job with a real wage. Flatbush is indeed a treasure trove of old houses, but it's not cheap (only by NYC standards).
Centralia has a really excellent old bowling alley that hadn't been remodeled in a lonnnnngg time. It's a real gem.