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Where in the piedmont do you live that you have incredible views of the mountains? The social fabric is more natural and stable???? Huh? When I went up for 4 days for my son's graduation from App State we stayed in a beautiful house on several acres of gorgeous land that was in a neighborhood environment that was very social with people who knew their full time neighbors and knew the part timers and watched out for their houses. I met many of them while out walking the dog and I found it very social. They have parties, get togethers outside, etc., just like people do in Charlotte, except it's in a higher elevation.
It's pretty up there right now, and it's sunny there as well. The flowers are blooming and people were outside. They aren't bumpkins, these are people who just wanted out of the city and into the mountains.
While I'm not sure where we'd live when we finally do move up there, I do know it won't be IN Boone/Blowing Rock because of the traffic, but it will be somewhere near the general area.
I just don't get what you mean by the social fabric is more natural and stable......
No, living in the mountains isn't for everyone, but I have to say that waking up in the morning to cool, crisp air and a deck that overlooks the most beautiful scenery there is while drinking my coffee in total peace is something to be prized.
I posted a reply to LovesMountains which probably will answer most of your questions. The bottomline is, it's people that count and not location. There was a book that came out several years ago about the 100 best small cities to live in. One of the criteria they used for determing the best cities was the percentage of people who lived there who were also born and raised there. I don't remember what they considered the ideal range, but basically, they looked negatively on towns where a very high or low percentage of the people were either born there or moved there. The reasons may be obvious, but having lived in both extremes it seems like you are either an outsider, and the people simply don't have enough time to visit with you once they have visited all of their relatives, or you are simply talking to other people who have no roots in the area and are likely to leave to be closer to family at some point. The piedmont falls more into the inbetween area where many of the people have family and often times this can extend back for several generations. However, there is also a decent amount of new folks in the area to keep things interesting. As I mentioned to LovesMountains, I don't really look at Charlotte, Raleigh, or the Triad as being typical of the piedmont. Hope this helps some. Again, it is just my two bits which means I don't give a great deal of weight to my own opinions!
Surely he meant the foothills? You are correct, you don't really see the mountains from the piedmont!
Piedmont is an Indian word that means "at the foot of the mountain." The Piedmont/Mountain line goes right through the middle of Wilkesboro and the mountains are quite visible from there. Much of the information the poster is asking about is on the regular City-Data information under the town of Boone.
If the poster is going to be renting, I see no reason not to go for it for a little while. If he wants to open a pizza place, it would probably sell. College students and tourists will usually try almost anything once. Question is, will it taste good enough for them to try it again??
I think it would be much better to call the pizza place a catchy name and not talk about NEPA. When you live in the best place in the world, you really don't need to be asking for food from anywhere else, but most people do eat pizza these days. If you just have a name on the restaurant, you can watch the patronage and adjust your food to your customers. Personally, I prefer Blowing Rock to Boone, but the entire area is wonderful. How about calling it something like the Bear Den Pizza Palace. LOL
The pizza market is a bit saturated in Boone at the moment. There used to be a really great Brazilian place there but it closed within a year, as did the Italian trattoria in the same place before it. Downtown commercial space is ridiculously expensive and only a handful of places stick around past a year, which is insane considering the student population and the tourists. You'd be better off opening a bar since liquor by the drink has only been allowed there for a couple years now. Most of the students used to drive back home to Charlotte or Cary every weekend because of that, but now that they're sticking around you'd probably do alright. Another live music venue would be great, especially for more outsider/fringe artists since the school-run "club" mostly books boring garbage, and house shows tend to get shut down within ten minutes. Kids have to drive an hour to Winston-Salem or two and a half to Asheville to catch good live entertainment, which is a shame and a lot of potential business the town is losing out on.
Piedmont is an Indian word that means "at the foot of the mountain."
Not Indian. I always thought Piedmont was from the French "pied" for foot and "mont" for mountain. I was close, but it actually has Italian origins:
... originally piemont, from It. Piemonte, lit. "mountain foot," name of a region in northern Italy, from piede "foot" + monte "mountain." With -d- added by 1855. Source: Online Etymology Dictionary (etymonline.com)
"The Piedmont Province lies between the Coastal Plain and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Piedmont occupies about 45 percent of the area of the state. Along the border between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain, elevations range from 300 to 600 feet above sea level. To the west, elevations gradually rise to about 1,500 feet above sea level at the foot of the Blue Ridge. The Piedmont is characterized by gently rolling, well rounded hills and long low ridges with a few feet of elevation difference between the hills and valleys. The Piedmont includes some relatively low mountains including the South Mountain and the Uwharrie Mountains."
This is a quote from the NC geological survey. I never thought I would have to go into this much detail, but this hopefully will remove any doubts that you can see the mountains from the piedmont. Not to rub it in, but the piedmont actually includes some mountains as mentioned in the quote above.
To add a little more to my mention of the piedmont representing a "more natural and stable social fabric", I will simply add the fact that any area that has a large influx or outflow of residents will experience what I consider less natural or stable social fabric. One simplistic guide to the social fabric is the average age of the residents in a town or county vs. the average age of the residents in the state. In my mind, a natural social fabric would represent all ages in a manner typical of the U.S. A stable social fabric would also be represented by having the number of people who were born in the area being at least somewhat similar to the national average. As always, this is just my two bits. I hold other folks opinions in higher regard than my own.
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The flowers are blooming and people were outside. They aren't bumpkins, these are people who just wanted out of the city and into the mountains. 
