Last week Anne Hart of southernmamas.com asked me if I would share what I think are the best neighborhoods in Savannah for children. Let me preface the rest of this blog by saying that I will be talking about historic neighborhoods as that is my area of greatest interest. My first response was Baldwin Park as I have sold three houses over there in the past year and in all three cases, this neighborhood won out for my clients who are all professionals with young children. They all preferred this neighborhood over others we looked at and it is not surprising because you can get a lot of house for the money there and the neighborhood just plain feels good. It is kind of hard to explain because you have to be there yourself, sort of like when you look at all those on-line photos of a house and then you actually go – can be quite a different experience. Because I am familiar with the neighborhood and have friends Robert and James who have been living there for several years, I am not surprised by this. I love Baldwin too. The photo above is a couple young ladies from the Baldwin Park neighborhood enjoying the movie night in the park.

I spent my first 17 years living in the Landmark Historic District and when we got here in 1990 the Savannah Real Estate market was at the bottom of a slump with many houses for sale. We were lucky (just like the people who are buying in Savannah right now can be) in that we were able to find a wonderful house at that time in the best kind of location you can possibly find in Savannah – facing a square. A few years later the house next door – we should have bought it –sold - the young couple who were getting ready to have a child left downtown for the islands because “downtown was not a good place to raise a family”. And yet I can think of several couples since then who have successfully done just that such as Mark and Kim, Rolfe and Jean, Greg and Kelly, just to name a few. But the reality now is that downtown has become so expensive it is not feasible for the average income buyer. If you could have the best of all possible worlds though, here is my plan: 1) Be as downtown as you can afford. With all that there is to do and see and learn about you will hopefully raise a sophisticated little future adult. 2) If you are concerned about the balance between county and city than you can also spend a portion of that child’s life residing as close to deep water as you can afford. There is nothing like our coastal ecosystem to inspire the naturalist in us all.

Other affordable historic neighborhoods for children near downtown: