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5 Things They Don't Tell You About Living In Jacksonville Florida

Posted By: Sarah Schwartz

Is your next move bringing you to Jacksonville, Florida? Well I'm going to tell you five things they don't tell you about living in Northeast Florida.  

Hi! I'm Sarah Schwartz, a local realtor in Jacksonville, Florida. If your next move is bringing you here, I'm going to tell you five things they don't tell you about living in Northeast Florida. You're going to want to stick around to the end though because if you know who Florida Man is, you're gonna think it's pretty funny.

Reason number five. Hashtag new year, new me. Always working on myself, well so is Jacksonville. We have constant road construction all over town, all the time. Whether you're driving on a new highway, a new road, there's always going to be something going on. We are constantly working on the roads here to make them larger, just to make things easier for people. This is going to help in the future because it will be faster to get places but in the meantime it's kind of frustrating. One day a road might be called 295, the next day it's 9A. It could take you an hour to get from one part of town to the other so whether it's 210, JTB, 95, 295 there's always going to be some type of construction to widen the roads and just to, you know, make you take a little bit more time to get places. So make sure that you plan accordingly because most likely you're going to be merging. 

Reason number four. Hurricanes, thunderstorms, tropical storms, oh my! Jacksonville is home to so many hurricane warnings, tropical storm warnings and we've had some really bad tropical storms here. Especially over the last few years. Matthew, Irma, Dora! We don't care what your name is, you're probably gonna hit us. Those are some of the major hurricanes that have hit Jacksonville. Living in Jacksonville, you're gonna get some rain here. I recommend investing in some rain boots and a really good umbrella. One interesting fact about living in Jacksonville is that we have a lot of bridges here. When there's a hurricane or tropical storm, or basically if the winds are at 40 miles per hour, guess what bridges are going up. So you're gonna have to get back to your side of town or at least on your side of the river as soon as possible and if you're at the beach, you might as well just stay home that day. Once you hear that warning, you need to go home.

Reason number three. Did you know that Jacksonville's the largest geographical city in the united states? 840 square miles make up the city of Jacksonville. You know what that means, if you're going from one side of town to the next, it's going to take you a while, especially with all the construction that we just talked about. Unfortunately, we're not like Los Angeles or one of those other big cities, we still usually just have two or three lanes so you might want to leave early. If you're going from the beach to the St. John's Town Center, which is the best mall here in Jacksonville, it's going to take you about 20 minutes. If you're going from the beach to South Mandarin, you might want to allot about 40 minutes. It's a great city to live in but it is kind of spread out.

Reason number two. It might be surprising but Jacksonville actually does get cold. The lowest it usually gets is in the 20s and by the afternoon it's probably a little bit warmer. You can still break out your gloves and your scarves. I mean who doesn't look cute in winter wear! I know that we're in Florida, the sunshine state, but we still do get really cold days we're all the way at the top of the state. People in Miami might have sunshine and rainbows, we might have some cold. Although it has snowed, or I guess flurried a little bit over the years, the last real snow that stuck to the ground was in 1989 so you're pretty safe, but at the same time it could mean that we're due for another snow storm. 

Last but not least, reason number one. The moment you've all been waiting for. Drum roll. We've had some pretty interesting stories over the years. A lot of them have to do with alligators. There are a lot of alligators in Northeast Florida. You could be driving down the road and one could be walking next to you or you could go out for your morning coffee and there's an alligator in your backyard! A lot of people like to live on man-made lakes, sometimes they come with little friendly pets. If you follow Florida Man, you've probably seen some of these stories. Did you see the one about the man that was chasing people carrying an alligator? I don't know about you but I would be running! Then there was a guy that broke into the alligator farm and got bit. Hmm, weird. I don't know why that happened. Well guess what you don't have to jump into an alligator farm. If one comes around, you can just scoop it up in your trash can, like one Florida man did!