What is it like living in Surprise, Az?

Question

I live in Southern California and am considering moving there. I am married and have three young children. I wanted to know what the community is like from someone who lives there. What are the schools like, are there a lot of young families?

Answer 1

Hey Ryan-
I moved here from the Clairemont section of San Diego in January of this year. What I found is that areas that offer good housing values are distant from business' that offer good wages. As an example: If you got a good deal on a house in Surprise like a 4bd/2.5ba for $225,000 but worked in aircraft at Sky Harbor airport, your commute would be over an hour each way. Not a good thing.

What we are did was to rent a 2 year old home in Buckeye, which is adjacent to Surprise, while we started a business. Now that the business is locked in we can focus on buying a house in that area which will give us virtually 5 minutes of commute time.

The public schools in the West Valley are not too good. Go to Westvalleyview.com That's a local newspaper and just read the editorial comments from last week. Education was the primary focus and the comments were not encoraging. Finances are a big concern right now. Private schools do a good job here. It's like anywhere else. You get what you pay for.

Surprise is nestled among Sun City houses which are 55+ in age requirements. For young families I would suggest either Buckeye, Goodyear or Avondale.

Good luck to you.
Tom

Answer 2

Surprise is a nice area and it's growing, not as fast as it was due to the housing market right now, but there's plans for a lot more housing and shopping. You'll be in Surprise with all the other ex-Southern Californians like me. If you are going to live here, you don't want to work in say, down town Phoenix. You should consider jobs in Glendale, Peoria, Avondale, Sun City or West Phoenix, maybe even North Central Phoenix because you can catch the 101 freeway there.

Just stay away from Grand Ave because of the trains and El Mirage because of the Ghetto. You can really get some smokin deals on new houses right now. They are including a lot of insentives because they are not selling fast enough.

Good luck!

Answer 3

Surprise Use to be pretty small. It's not to bad a lot of house community's so if you don't like follow what some one else tells you to do with your house then you will have a little bit of trouble finding a house. To get to phoenix you just go on the 101 and I think its a half hour drive. Nice schools, stores, things like that. It's pretty developed. You could also look into Phoenix, Glendale, Gilbert..... All the cities run into each other for the most part.

Answer 4

if you going to live in Surprise you should also work in Surprise. Getting in and out of Surprise is a traffic nightmare.

good luck

Answer 5

Move to Maricopa. Great area and u can get a nice house for less the $200,000.