Is South Scranton a nice neighborhood? (Wilkes-Barre, Old Forge: crime rate, houses, neighborhoods)

[JenLie]

I have been looking at houses and have found some nice ones w/ great prices listed as South Scranton. Is this a good area? I tried doing a search on here but just too much comes up. Also where is it? I am limited on the places I know but my husband works downtown near Adams where that big white house is being renovated. If this is in another thread can you just link it just in case I missed it? Thanks!

[FightinPhils]

It depends....the lower part of South Side, sometimes called "The Flats," is a place to avoid.....Pittston Ave/Cedar Ave closest to the flats is a lousy area. But the Nativity section, East Mountain, and Minooka are nice areas of South Side.

If the prices sound too good to be true, then it may be in a bad area (but then again, what we call "bad areas" in Scranton are really not that bad in comparison to bigger cities). If you can post the specific street or block a house you're looking at is on, I, or someone else here, might be able to give you more info.

[JenLie]

Originally Posted by MrKrabs

It depends....the lower part of South Side, sometimes called "The Flats," is a place to avoid.....Pittston Ave/Cedar Ave closest to the flats is a lousy area. But the Nativity section, East Mountain, and Minooka are nice areas of South Side.

If the prices sound too good to be true, then it may be in a bad area (but then again, what we call "bad areas" in Scranton are really not that bad in comparison to bigger cities). If you can post the specific street or block a house you're looking at is on, I, or someone else here, might be able to give you more info.

618 Moosic St. and 1217 Providence Rd. Now, nobody buy these houses if they are in a good section LOL.

Thank you very much for doing this for me. My husband doesn't seem to be as worried about neighborhoods as I am, we drove around yesterday in Taylor after the parade and Old Forge and liked those areas. I even talked to a nice older lady who has lived in Taylor for 6 years and said it was nice and quiet and I talked to a girl who goes to the high school and she said it was nice. We are going to buy a house in 9 months, I just want to be prepared and know exactly where we want to look.

[CHS89]

I live in South Side. Like Mr. Krabs said, the section is large, so it really depends on what part you're looking at. Some sections are really nice, some are pretty nice, some need work but can look nice with a bit of effort and maintenance.

Minor nit-pick, though. You will find very few East Mountain or Minooka residents who identify themselves as South Siders. They consider their neighborhoods to be their own unique sections of Scranton.

Edit:
Providence Rd. isn't considered South Side.

600 of Moosic is on a busy stretch of road. It's not a bad area, but if you have kids or pets, it's probably not the neighborhood you want to be in, unless the yard is fenced and you have off-street parking. As far as location, your husband could probably walk to work in 30 minutes if necessary.

[JenLie]

Originally Posted by CHS89

I live in South Side. Like Mr. Krabs said, the section is large, so it really depends on what part you're looking at. Narrow it down for us if you can. Some sections are really nice, some are pretty nice, some need work but can look nice with a bit of effort and maintenance.

Minor nit-pick, though. You will find very few East Mountain or Minooka residents who identify themselves as South Siders. They consider their neighborhoods to be their own unique sections of Scranton.

We must have posted at the same time LOL

618 Moosic St. and 1217 Providence Rd

[SteelCityRising]

As MrKrabs said, a "bad" neighborhood in Scranton is really no more dangerous than an "average" neighborhood in any larger city. Scranton's crime rate is very low, and when violent crimes do occur they are very rarely random. Generally speaking most people in the Electric City who stay out of the drug trade and try to just be upstanding citizens will not be the victim of any sort of crime. Property crime, on the other hand, is to be expected from time to time. I live in a rather affluent suburb near Pittston, about ten minutes south of the city proper, and even I had the contents of my wallet pickpocketed in high school. Our Halloween decorations one year were stolen as well, and people regularly drive their ATVs on public roadways, which is also illegal. In my opinion personal property crime is very high in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area, but I can put up with "quality-of-life" issues like paintballs being shot at my siding if it means that the violent crime rate is nearly zilch. You can survive a bored teenager smashing your mailbox on a country road, but someone mugging or carjacking you, which is thankfully perhaps a once-a-year occurrence in our city, can be a life-changing and emotionally-scarring event.

I myself aspire to move to a "sketchy" neighborhood by the standard of most city residents---the Lower Hill. I like the idea of being within walking distance to a university campus, a medical school campus, a small college campus, library, theater, mall, cultural center, parks, etc., and the Lower Hill provides its residents with those opportunities with tree-lined streets and sidewalks as an added bonus. On the flip side this neighborhood is a haven for drug trafficking and is home to a lot of rowdy college parties for the University of Scranton (which is a surprisingly big party school for a Jesuit institution), but as a budding young single professional those won't really bother me. When I finally do start raising a family I have my eyes set on West Side, and more specifically Hyde Park, where MrKrabs, WatsonWest, and a few other members live, because I like the cozy "small town" feel it has with its own Main Street and orderly alternating one-way grid-shaped residential street network with shade trees and working-class roots. I have no interest in living in some sort of sterile "keeping up with the Jones's" place like my current suburb, The Abingtons, Glenmaura, etc.

SouthSide in general is a neighborhood that I think is destined for a lot of improvement in the coming years. This Doherty mayoral administration (for better or in my opinion for worse) has a habit of focusing all of its attention and assets into one particular neighborhood at a time while neglecting all others, and after "restoring the pride" in the Hill Section around the dawn of the millenium (which from what I hear is now starting to revert back to its former nefarious reputation), and playing "Mr. Moneybags" for his friends' downtown yuppie-oriented projects, SouthSide looks like it will be the next neighborhood receiving a major overhaul with extensive blight removal, a new dog park, a new library, 1,000 new shade trees, and other improvements that will be delightful for neighborhood association president Wayne Evans and other SouthSide residents, but will irk people in "neglected" parts of the city like Lower Green Ridge and parts of West Side (I put neglected in quotations since I still think those neighborhoods are stable places to raise a family, despite the objections of some on this forum with a vendetta against every city politician).

Lower SouthSide is becoming a haven for a growing number of Hispanics that are bringing a Latino culture and new Hispanic-oriented businesses with them. As MrKrabs said "The Flats" is a visually-disgusting neighborhood not far south of Downtown. I myself become depressed driving between vibrant, stable, friendly Minooka on the southern fringes of the city and what I perceive to be a rebounding downtown district in Center City with that hemmorrhoid on the arse of progress in the middle known as The Flats. I truly wish the entire South Side Shopping Center would have been razed to the ground a few years ago to make way for the Shoppes @ Montage lifestyle center---a complex that could have rejuvenated that neighborhood and boosted the city's tax base instead of contributing to its further declining with the promotion of additonal horrid urban sprawl in Moosic.

As CHS89 said many residents of Minooka and East Mountain will steadfastly separate themselves from South Scranton. I'm not quite familiar with where the Nativity neighborhood is that MrKrabs recommended to you, but I do believe the Dutch Hollow neighborhood is the one between South Side and East Mountain and seems to also be a nice area. I remember seeing their neighborhood association marching in a city parade a few years ago and making the comment to my friends "I wonder where Dutch Hollow is?" A fellow parade-goer standing nearby answered me and pumped up the neighborhood's image, so if someone who lives there has such beaming civic pride it can't be a bad place to call home, right? Then again most people think my current suburb is the best thing since sliced salami because it's tax-free and has free garbage collection, but I'm one of the few who would rather pay taxes in order to enjoy decent services that you'll find in urban areas like Scranton. Hell, my own suburb doesn't even have police patrols or curbside recycling.

[FightinPhils]

Providence Rd is north Scranton. I'm pretty sure that part of Providence Rd is not a bad neighborhood.....Providence Rd is a little seedy from Weston Field down to the high school....but up above Weston Field to Main Ave is not a bad area. That's a pretty convenient area to downtown, and is also walking distance to the high school, which is good since the Scranton School District doesn't bus high school students.

[weluvpa]

Southside could be worse.......






But it can always be better......

[SteelCityRising]

Dan, are those first few photos of Downtown Pittston?

[FightinPhils]

Those first two look like S. Main St. in Wilkes-Barre.