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Horsham, Pennsylvania happens to be on a lot of “best places to live” lists while simultaneously being the place we have lived for many years before starting out this trip. We didn’t live in Horsham proper but in the surrounding Montgomery County area. Really there is nothing we see that is particularly awesome about Horsham that isn’t available in Willow Grove, Hatfield, Lansdale, etc. Though we would generally recommend locating yourself North of the turnpike and west/north of Bensalem, the entire region is pretty nice but in our opinion slowly degrading.
The basic problem that we see is one of population growth and runoff. As ex-residents of University City, Philadelphia we saw over 10 years or so this area turn bad and now we are starting to see some of the same kind of runoff in these areas. Some areas, like Hatfield, still really don’t have any true crime problems. A true crime issue in our perspective is random crime where the victim doesn’t know the perpetrator. The rest of the crime where the perp and victim know each other we consider something that can and will happen pretty much anywhere. Additionally over the last 10 years traffic has grown a lot and projects to handle this growth are far and few between. Since I’ve spent nearly 2 hours of my day each way commuting and because I enjoy driving a bit faster than the flow of traffic - this matters to me.
Montgomery County seems to have an epidemic of bad and slow drivers in general. It is literally filled with people who will happily travel 30mph in a 45mph zone. These same people will advocate that their major thoroughfare is actually a quaint residential neighborhood and succeed in getting a 25mph speed limits and walking in the middle of the road while the sun is setting during commuting hours - literally begging to get run over. If you travel just 30-45 minutes north or west, people suddenly have a place to be and understand how to operate a motor vehicle. It’s the weirdest thing, you’d never believe it until you saw it.
It isn’t all bad though - the simple fact is the area is full of large high paying companies to work for. All of these companies are aware that jobs are easy to come by and for the most part take good care of their employees.
As for activities, you really have to drive pretty far to do things, especially geeky things. There is a race track 2 hours away. Old city Philadelphia 1 hour away, an indoor electric gokart track that is excellent, many excellent movie theaters and plenty of diverse weekend activity. There is also Lehigh Valley hackerspace which is 1 hour north.
The area is high on the list when it comes to tech. Several Apple stores in the area, FIOS is rampant, LTE came here very shortly after being introduced by all of the carriers. People who love chain stores should locate near Montgomeryville, Willow Grove or Bensalem/Fairless HIlls areas.
Last modified: 22 April, 2014
Created: 10 May, 2013