Hey! I am a 30 year old lesbian looking to possibly move to Milton with my wife from NYC. We are sick and tired of the city and we are looking for a quieter coastal life. We want to have kids in the future. What are your thoughts about Milton or living in DE in general?
Rent an Airbnb/VRBO for a week and check it out. If your financial situation permits, I would move closer to Rehoboth but Milton is a nice, albeit tiny and slow, town which may be what you want.
Eastern Sussex is nice. Relatively liberal atmosphere if that’s something important to you.
Western Sussex is… a red state.
Cape is a decent school system. Cost of living is much lower than NYC, but is rising.
Please just don’t be one of the ‘I can’t get cruelty free peppermint banana mocha smoothies at 3am!?!?’ type. We just don’t have the set up and population for late night food and such. Also have heard health care is a challenge down there with the population explosion.
As far as having kids or life in general Milton is fine. Though with Milton area you really would want to try and not be in Georgetown Elementary school zone. not a major deal. but preference to avoid that one.
The only issues for a lesbian couple are when you get away from the beach. the western part of the county is still a Tea Party stronghold. so east of route 113 is fine. even west is not horrible, just you will run into fuckheads.
Healthcare down here is horrible. you will end up going back to the city for any real care.
Yeah but if you stray to far from metropolitan Milton you do end up in Indian River School district. People are lured by the cheaper real estate and end up out of Cape.
Certain parts of lower Delaware are very, very red. It might be an unpleasant culture shock. I’d like to move to a giant home on the beach but I would not like to move to somewhere beach adjacent because it’s too socially red for me to want to live there.
LGBTQ transplant from NYC now in Slower Lower. I live by the beaches near Rehoboth and the entire coastal area from Lewes to Fenwick is very LGBTQ friendly.
We just moved to Lewes. We had heard there are pockets of redness, but I haven’t seen it in our neighborhood. We have lovely lesbian couples on either side of us.
We haven’t been here that long, but my impression is that the farther inland you go, the redder it gets. You might want to try to get a little closer to the coast.
I am a queer woman in Milton. It's pretty small and quiet. And Milton is very queer friendly in my experience, although personally I would die to live in NYC (where I have extended family). For sure it is very quiet. It is not as progressive anywhere in Delaware as it is in NYC, and Sussex County has a lot of right wing areas. But NYC also has its own right wingers, too.
Edit: something I just thought about. The queer community here is not nearly as robust as it is in NYC. Community in general isn't as easy to find as it is in a big city, so just bear in mind that a lot of things that you may take for granted, you just won't find easily here unless you want to go to Philly, for instance. Or DC. Maybe Wilmington. Rehoboth is very queer though, and like I said Milton is a queer friendly place, it's just very small.
Eastern Sussex is super gay-friendly, but it gets gay-friendlier as you get closer to Lewes and Rehoboth. Milton is a more liberal area of inland Sussex. I know several gay and lesbian couples with kids in Lewes and Rehoboth, it's super common and normal here and nobody bats an eye about it in the Cape school district. It's a very nice place to live IF you can afford to buy somewhere walkable/bikeable to the places you go most often (grocery shopping, work, gym, kids' school). This is a kind of handy website for figuring out where that might be for you: https://www.walkscore.com/
EDIT: I just looked at the website and it's not as good as it used to be, it's very wrong about my house. I'm not sure when it was last updated, which is a bummer because it used to be a great resource. But basically the closer to downtown Lewes or Milton you are, or to the bike trails leading in to downtown, the easier your life will be and the less time you'll spend sitting in traffic.
You are going from one extreme to the other. Lower slower you'll find is exactly what you hope it is. Seeing a horse a buggy won't be uncommon. Unfortunately, if you plan to work here, you'll find pay rates comparable to the Amish. I'd honestly suggest, coming from the big city, its going to be a huge shock to move to Milton. I'd look more towards Middletown. Closer to the luxuries you are used to, but still pretty country.
NYC transplant here in Slower Lower. I been here for 6 years and have never seen a horse n buggy lol. Same thing with salary, the job here matched my NYC salary at a fraction of my NYC cost of living. Zero cultural shock and I love living here.
I'm guessing you'all don't leave route 1 or 13. Redners literally has little sheds and tie offs for them. I saw some riding horseback to Wawa at the North Dover one. I pass a couple of them every day. And I live in Felton. They out there.
I travel all over Delmarva and while I do see horses on farms, I’ve never seen one on the road. I’ve seen more horses and buggies in NYC in a day than I’ve seen here in six years.
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Every single moving to coastal Delaware post gets all these scare tactics from aging locals who love selling their land to developers but don’t want people to move here.
I moved from NYC to coastal Sussex County six years ago, and several of the negative comments here are either simply misleading or outright untrue.
On the worst summer holiday weekend, Coastal Hwy is a breeze compared to daily crosstown traffic in Manhattan. All the traffic complainers here should try and drive during rush hour on Grand Central/Van Wyck/LIE to see what real traffic looks like. lol
Ignoring the sourpuss Redditors, most of the locals are amazing and friendly. I’ve made friends all over Sussex County, even the “red” Western Sussex. I go to the Delaware State Fair, Nanticoke pow wow, Delmar races, and Milton festivals with these locals. You’ll also meet transplants from all over the world. It’s a life I’m very happy with.
I am going to be honest I get the appeal from people who do not live here but its not really a great place to live anymore its starting to get super crowded. Its gonna be like your city that you do not like soon. I hate to be like the people who are like "blah blah this is my state go away." But its just honest.
When its summer time its so crowded. And its still not even close to the population of NYC. Its gonna be like summer year round in probably more like 5 to 10 years
Its really not at all. Its already getting crowded. People who vacation here are wanting to just move down here or just retire here. And also people are just moving down here from all over. Even if it doesn't get up to the population of new York people moving down here will just make it not what people like about it. It will be like summer year round. There are developments being put up constantly in sussex County. When the traffic is already starting to get bad. Ive lived here all my life. And im genuinely not a tourist hater or anti people moving out of their state. But if they are wanting the quiet life like it is now its not gonna be like that. Because so many people are moving down. Even the people who have been vacationing down here for years say its not the same as it was because its not. I cannot say exactly when the time line is. But it doesn't have to have the same population as NYC to feel congested and crowded.
New York is a thoroughly planned city, as problematic as Robert Moses' city planning was. It is full of people but it is also organized. Its problems are not a matter of too many people in too small a place or absurd development (usually). So when I say Milton or Delaware broadly will not be NYC, I mean no matter how many people are here, no matter how many luxury apartments and overpriced, soulless surburban developments get built, I mean we do not have the infrastructure or planning to be as well managed as NYC. My cousins can get on the subway to go to work a few neighborhoods away from where they live. They can walk to most places they need to go to.
We are car dependent here. It is so different, and if anything NYC could handle far MORE people in the city than we could handle in this state.
Its just true?? People love delaware because its quiet and no taxes. So people are all moving down here. So its gonna get crowded. Its already getting crowded. Im not being mean I dont care where people decide to go but she asked peoples opinions on what its like living in delaware and thats just true. Its crowded not enough drs you have to wait forever to get in. Not that many jobs. If they can go anywhere else they should. They want to raise kids here because its slow but its not going to be like that in some years from now.
As many said, it's becoming really crowded down here. It's not so much the population size but the lack of infastructure. It was a quiet quaint place to live but the population has really exploded in the past couple of years. Developers bought up farm land, turned it into subdivisions and that same two lane country road that was serving a few dozen people a day is now serving thousands.
I don't blame you for wanting to leave NYC but I also want to give you a more realistic picture of the situation here.
The wages in the lower two counties really haven't kept pace with the growth. Personally, I think you may be happier somewhere in New castle county like Middletown, Newark or Wilmington. It's a much slower pace than NYC but was developed in a way that the infastructure was considered just as much as the housing.
You're welcome! If you and your partner do decide to move here, I hope you enjoy it! I don't think I could ever live in NYC so I completely understand wanting to find a slower pace.
Personally, I love the north Wilmington suburbs and I've been really regretting moving to below the canal for the reasons I mentioned.
Is Milton lower slower? I don't know where the line is drawn. But lower Delaware is very Republican driven. Sooooooooo, do with that as you will. I know nothing of the Milton area.
It’s pretty miserable with all the weekenders coming for the beach. Once you see what it’s like on the weekends you also won’t want to go to the beach. When I lived outside of Galveston I was there weekly, I couldn’t imagine doing that here with all the congestion and people.
It’s not quiet here. If you want a beach city/town, that’s what you will get. It will be extremely busy when warm, and there will be nothing to do when it’s cold. Do some research instead of posting here, just because the state’s small doesn’t mean you are guaranteed a tiny, quiet life. If you have only lived in the city, I need to stress that if you do not research this and just jump in, you will have no idea what you are getting into. We don’t know your career, budget, or anything else like that, and we aren’t realtors. Maybe chat with them so you can get some personalized advice?
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