"Bob" wrote in message
...
With job offer in hand from Chandler, I'll solicit opinions from the
folks who've lived in the area. I spent about a month over the last 2
years, mostly in the summer, in Phoenix.

Looking for a house about 200K or so. Good areas? Bad areas?

Wife is an attorney looking to get teaching certificate. Any
suggestions?

Things to do? Boating doesn't seem big unless you go to San Diego.

I found a website that does a cost of living comparison between any 2
cities in the US. Seems Phoenix is actually quite moderate...almost
the same as Lebanon, PA (near Harrisburg).

Thanks all.
Lived in Chandler for 17 years, just moving back to Illinois two and half
years ago. Tremendous growth during that time. Not really too many bad
areas. I would suggest you be careful of any house that is over ten years
old. In Arizona, the heat and sloppy building practices take a toll on
construction pretty fast. Be wary of buying too near one of the freeways as
the noise can be unbearable during rush hour. Ditto on airport flyways. I
had a problem with Chandler's water system...they don't regulate the
pressure and it isn't unusual to have almost 100 lbs of pressure at the
house. Pipes under slab gave out twice in two years...expensive fix. Put
a pressure regulater at house input and no more problems. Another thing to
worry about is "expansive soil". The clay around that part of Arizona
swells up when water is added and will cause some pretty bad settling in
house. Coming from Illinois originally, it never occured to me not to plant
flowers near the foundation and the cracks in the walls from watering those
flowers were pretty bad. I eventually found the builders "care and use"
manual that the original owner had left behind and it warned about not
planting any vegetation within four foot of the house.
The traffic has become much like Los Angeles so you might want to consider
locating near your place of employment. Sitting in traffic at 110 degrees,
even with the A/C running can be rather irritating. And one final
thought...even though real estate taxes, some food items, etc were much less
expensive there than Northern Illinois, I found that auto insurance and auto
registration cost, more than made up the difference. In Northern Illinois,
we never locked our house or cars but I learned to break that habit. I
worked out of Fiesta Mall and we averaged one and a half cars stolen per
day from that parking lot. But then I suspect that was the result of living
in a metropolitan area instead of a rural farming area.
Hope this has been of some help....I wouldn't hesitate to move back to that
area but would do some things different knowing the above.

Tom.