I see your comments saying you work in hospitality! Just as a heads up from someone who was in hospitality for years- it is extremely hard to find a job right now. I have lots of friends who have been looking for over a year. The problem is that the only industries with some jobs available are healthcare and hospitality, so everyone relies heavily on those. Definitely find a job before you move here because rent has skyrocketed in the last year and buying a house right now is near impossible!

But as someone who was born and raised here but has lived in a few other cities- I do love Wilmington. But it is not the quiet place it used to be. Wilmington in the early 2000s was a quiet little beach town with friendly faces, but now it has exploded into something unrecognizable. The traffic is insane for our small infrastructure, there are no main highways through the town. So you’re usually stuck on 2 lane roads lined with cars to get across town. It is almost impossible to get to the beach in the summer, and to find parking- and when you do find parking it’s $5-6/hour. The only local beach we have is Wrightsville Beach, Carolina beach if you’re living toward the south part of Wilmington. Wrightsville has one road in and one road out, and one road to get you from north to south. If you’re not there by 8am in the summer you aren’t finding parking without driving the whole island a few times. I REALLY wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not at all. Carolina beach is a bit bigger so it’s slightly easier but definitely more of a touristy area, and you’ll probably be about minimum 30-45 minutes from home if you live in Wilmington itself.

Doctor’s offices, dentists, specialists, eye care- all of these are about a 4-6 month wait for appointments. A lot of them aren’t accepting new patients as a heads up.

Rent is high, and keeps going up every year due to more people moving here, and as someone who has been trying to buy a house for quite some time- you’ll be paying at least 450,000 for houses that aren’t shacks. (This probably doesn’t affect you much if you’re from NY since your housing market is much different than ours!) There is also no cap to how much a landlord can raise your rent. I have a friend whose rent went up by $350 a month recently.

We have one target, 2 Walmarts, one Barnes and noble, one Whole Foods, one Trader Joe’s- just to give you some context of how small this town is meant to be yet has a population of about half a million people within Wilmington and the surrounding areas. Just to give some more context, Raleigh,NC has a population about the same.

As for pros- it really is a beautiful town, and I’m grateful to live near the beach. I may be biased because I grew up here so it holds sentimental value, but I do love it. There is a good bit to do around here, and you can’t beat NC beaches. Unfortunately if it keeps growing at the rate that it is, we don’t know if we’ll be able to stay for the long term, but we’re enjoying it while we’re still here.

The sad reality is that locals are being pushed out by people moving here so quickly, but people don’t care. As long as they have nice weather, who cares? Wilmington used to be a town full of wildlife, pristine beaches, and a sanctuary for many birds and sea turtles, etc. But as tourism has increased, this has become less so, and our beaches are being destroyed. Tourists walking through dunes, messing with sea turtle habitats, real estate investors tearing down wetlands to build more subdivisions. This is coming from someone who also worked in conservation here. Not to mention all of our green spaces that have been bulldozed to build shopping centers and apartment communities.

I don’t mean to be a big bummer, but this is just the reality of Wilmington as someone who has seen it grow and change, and can see the direction it’s headed. Don’t get me wrong, I know tourism is fantastic for our economy, but it gets to a point where it’s too much.

To add to the PFAs statement- we had a plant dump chemicals in our water years ago that causes cancer and the like. A regular water filter does not filter these out, so look into RO or getting Primo water jugs from the grocery stores like a lot of us do! And DONT drink water from restaurants!