Letter: You pay a lot to live in the mountains

Graphic by Lori Deaton

Just to mention, as per your article of living and wages [“Pay Raise: WNC Reacts to New Living Wage Rate,” Feb. 16, Xpress], I moved from Asheville in 2019, after just short of three years. I was living at Hawthorne at Southside apartments off Hendersonville Road. A nice area, but had I not moved from there at that time, I would have been paying $1,000 a month in rent for one of their older apartments, for a one-bedroom.

At the time of living in Asheville also, I was just working at a drugstore and without a second-income partner. The Asheville experience: You pay a lot to live in the mountains.

Now that I’ve moved to Greensboro, a three-hour drive away, I’m saving $300 a month in rent for where I am now. It’s not as updated as my Asheville apartment was, but for the price, I don’t miss paying higher rent.

— Irene Corey
Greensboro

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3 thoughts on “Letter: You pay a lot to live in the mountains

  1. kw

    Bravo! More people who cannot afford to live here should leave if it improves their lives. Now we just must slow down tourism and ‘affordable’ housing.

    • Voirdire

      sure, but how do we slow down the yankee retirees whom have descended on our fair spot in a swarm that would make locust envious? You know, the ones that expect in their luxurious retirement to be waited on hand and foot… hence the affordable housing types you so deplore. I’m quite sure more than a few of them would approve of your departure… you know… it’s a quality of life thing . bye.

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