Living in Charleston, featuring West Ashley area.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Hi, welcome back to living in Charleston Podcast. I’m Lisa, Richart Hernandez, your host today. And I’m excited to talk to you about West Ashley, which is a suburb of Charleston. And I lived there for 12 years of my life. So now that I live in Mount Pleasant, I talk a lot about Mount Pleasant, but it wouldn’t be fair to not talk about all of the different areas of Charleston. So I’m going to talk to you about West Ashley today.

intro
Welcome to Living in Charleston podcast with your host, Lisa Richart Hernandez, a fun loving Charleston resident for over 25 years and a full time real estate agent with her pulse on everything Charleston, from where to live, to where to eat, what to do, where to tour, and who is who about living life in the low country of Charleston, South Carolina.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Hi, welcome back to living in Charleston Podcast. I’m Lisa Richart Hernandez. And I’m going to talk to you about West Ashley today, which is a place that I live for about 12 years and I’ve been in Charleston area for over 30 years.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So this was a good chunk of my time I spent in West Ashley. Now when you go to search for West Ashley, it’s not going to come up as a city. It’s going to come up as Charleston, South Carolina. And then you’re going to have either 29407 or 29414 zip codes. But this area is called West Ashley because it’s located west of the Ashley River. So when people say Oh, I’m from Charleston, I live in West Ashley. That means it’s a suburb of Charleston that we call West Ashley. It’s not actually their address on an envelope, if you were to send them a snail mail, it’s broken down into those two zip codes, 29407 and 29414. So if you’re searching for a home and you see those zip codes, those that’ll be where you’ll find.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Now, each ZIP Code has about 35,000 people in it so is equally divided. So West, Ashley in general has about 70,000 residents. Now 29407 is West actually sort of divided by the interstate 526. So we call that i 26. i 526. And so we’re inside or outside of i 526. So inside of I 526 would be closer to downtown Charleston and then outside of 526 would be the farther side from downtown Charleston. The closer you get to downtown historic Charleston, the higher the prices are in general. More things and activities to do. However, the homes are older. The homes that are in the 29407 area are primarily built from the 1950s to the 1970s. So you’re going to get a lot of that brick ranch, older style home a lot of homes have been renovated some little maybe Cape Cod’s in the Avondale area, you’re going to get a higher price per square foot, but you’re paying for the convenience of location to downtown Charleston.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And some of the other areas like triangle and Avondale that I’ll talk about in just a minute. Outside of 526, which is primarily going to be zip code 2941, for the average home age is going to be around in the 2000s. So they’re going to be built in the 2000s. So that development happened, there was a big boom, of course, when real estate started booming on 2005 2006. And then of course we had, you know the sort of housing recession and G 1009 and 10. And then they started building out there again. So it’s continuing to sprawl outward, because that’s the only way we can go. If you go. There’s West ashless, kind of divided by two main roads. So you’ve got Savannah highway or highway 17. And you’ll find when you live in Charleston, every road has like three names.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So people will be like, oh, yeah, it’s on 17 or Oh, it’s on Savannah highway. Those are both the same street, and then they’ll say, Oh, it’s on St. Andrews Boulevard, or it’s on 61. Those are the same street. So those are the main two main roads that sort of divide up West Ashley for you. So on Savannah highway, you’ve got a place called Avondale, which is they call this in the triangle area. So Magnolia road splits off of Highway 17 and that is called the triangle. It literally makes a triangle on the road. And at the triangle is a restaurant called triangle char bar. And it’s a great restaurant actually, it’s been around for a good amount of time. It has some outdoor seating and kind of like bar food. I mean they’ve got salads and great burgers and all different like things eat so it’s it used to be like it’s a great watering hole, Happy Hour type of place. Great place to go have lunch, especially if the weather’s nice.

Lisa RichartHernandez
That’s triangle char bar and that’s in the little neighborhood called Avondale. Now the homes around the Avondale area have all gone up in price so you’re going to find some much higher price per square Foot their

Lisa RichartHernandez
homes which will be like what this is only 1000 square feet. How could it be $500,000 when I could live on in West Ashley farther out and for that same price, get a 4000 square foot home. So definitely are paying for location. That’s everything in real estate anyways. So in the triangle area just to give while we’re talking about that there’s a bunch of great little restaurants.

Lisa RichartHernandez
There’s this fabulous little Italian restaurant called Ali law. And if you’re going to go there, you should try to get a reservation if you can. It’s pretty small, but it has fabulous like, you know, homemade pastas and things like that. Then you’ve got just a couple little chain things like a place called Verdi. That’s like a salad place that makes salads, buy whatever you want in it.

Lisa RichartHernandez
There’s a place called pearls. Oyster Bar, which is my favorite thing there is their oyster shooters, so we go there a lot of times they do have a little outside seating area as well. Primarily a seafood place that got great oysters. Oysters shooter’s as they put a raw oyster in a cocktail glass. Put some like hot sauce like basically almost like a Bloody Mary type, like sauce and then you just shoot it down with vodka. So that’s an oyster shooter. We’ve also got in the triangle area, several other little great bars and restaurants.

Lisa RichartHernandez
The Mellow Mushroom one of my favorite places for pizza Mellow Mushroom is actually a chain. But this one is located in this old theaters that they remade into a restaurant so it’s kind of cool. Just a great place for a really good sort of gourmet type of pizza. One of my favorite things there actually is their cream of mushroom soup. It’s delicious. There’s also a little bar called that used to be called voodoo lounge and now it’s called Caroline’s Aloha bar. And they have these like duck fat, tater tots that were really good and really cool tropical drinks if you want that. But it’s very eclectic, and it was named. It used to be Buddha Buddha for years.

Lisa RichartHernandez
We used to go there for drinks and they would have music and things like that. And Caroline was a favorite bartender of everybody there. And Caroline passed away at a very young age. I think she was maybe in her 30s. And so the owners she had worked there forever. The owners closed down the restaurant, reopened it, revamped it and named it after Caroline. So you’ll see her little Aloha lady in there. Their logo, and that is actually Carolina with a long brown hair. She was great. And I knew her. What else is in West Ashley aside from Avondale.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So you’ve got your general regular shopping of West Ashley That’s kind of like anywhere USA, you’ve got the Citadel mall, which a lot of things move out of the mall, but there’s still a target there. You’ve got Bed Bath and Beyond and Party City and Costco. There’s a West Ashley Costco and a Mount Pleasant Costco in the Charleston area. So we have to Costcos if you’re a Costco fan, like I am, and we have a whole foods over there, a Harris Teeter, here’s teeters the name of our local chain of of grocery stores. I always hate when I go to a new city.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And you’ll see something like the name of a grocery store like Harris Teeter, for example, that doesn’t explain that it’s a grocery store, like what are Harris theaters? Like? What are Kroger’s? You know, because everywhere in the United States has different named grocery stores I’ve found and they don’t they like groceries on the outside. So here’s taters kind of like the more upscale, I would say, grocery store in general. And then you’ve got Whole Foods, of course, and all kinds of options as far as as far as grocery shopping is concerned and anything you would need.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Now, if you live out past i 526, you’re going to be near the gardens and plantations of West Ashley. And highway 61 is like the only road it’s a two lane road that goes out to all of these neighborhoods like Village Green, you’ve got shadow Moss Out there.

Lisa RichartHernandez
In so you’ve kind of got this like one, one road that sort of is the main drag. And because there’s all these huge magnolia trees on either side of it getting out to the gardens and plantations, those roads will probably never be widened.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So the traffic is what it is, if you’re a commuter nine to FiVER, got to get up and go, you know, nine to five, that may be something to take into consideration. If you’re looking for a home and you want to live out that way. You’re going to have to consider the commute so when you drive there in the middle of the afternoon, it’s perfectly fine and then all sudden, you know, eight o’clock or five o’clock eight in the morning or five o’clock at night. You’re like, why is all this traffic here.

Lisa RichartHernandez
They have done some other roads out in one sachet to kind of alleviate some of that traffic but they’ve also built so many more homes out in that area. There’s a lot more new construction. And you’ll find as I mentioned, the homes were built like In the you know, in the 2000s, so they’re newer. There’s a lot of apartments being built out that way. There’s a brand new super Walmart out there. There’s also a hospital in West Ashley it is Roper St. Francis Hospital. So it’s everything you need is located in West Ashley where you don’t really have to leave that area, the convenience to the airport, generally speaking, you just jump on 526 And you’re probably to the airport within about 15 to 20 minutes from almost anywhere in West Ashley.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And, and then downtown historic Charleston. Those people that want to really be close to that are the ones that live inside of 526. I’ve I raised my kids there. My children were two years old when we moved to West Ashley. And we lived in a neighborhood called Sandhurst, which is inside of 526 It was on the Ashley River.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And we had a lot of it’s an older is to a lot of older established neighborhoods with like, already has the trees kind of a feel. Whereas when you head out, you know out past 526 those those houses that were built in the 2000s you’re going to get a lot of vinyl sided homes, you’re going to get a lot of more of a plan development type thing.

Lisa RichartHernandez
My children did parkshore pool which was a community pool in a neighborhood across the street from us which is also close to the north bridge. They call the north bridge that’s the cause Grove exit if you look on a map, and you’re coming up from i 26, you’re going to you’ll see the SU river you cross over the Ashley River into West Ashley. On the cars Grove exit you’ll see cars grow. That’s where a lot of these neighborhoods are that I’m speaking of northbridge Park shore lavar all the places that are right Charlestown, Charlestown landing as park right there also, they have tours and history and events and stuff. And Charles Town landing, which is also in West Ashley.

Lisa RichartHernandez
The community pools was a really fun thing for our kids to do in the summer. They go from age five, kindergarten, as long as they could swim one lap, all the way up to their senior year in high school. My daughter swam from kindergarten to her senior year even when we moved to Mount Pleasant, she wanted to go back and be with her friends from Park shore. We swam against other neighborhoods like northbridge tears, they also have their own swimming pool and swim team. Shadow moss has their own swimming pool and swim team. So if that’s something that you’re interested with your children, then you Village Green, you would want to look into that as a great, great way to meet new families and new people. I think we had about 100 to 120 kids on the swim team from all ages from age five to age 18. And we would compete against other neighborhood so it was a really fun summer activity.

Lisa RichartHernandez
In West Ashley also, I talked about the north bridge and coming over the Cosgrave bridge, they have made a kayaking launch little area there. So if you want to take your Coyote kayaks onto the wet, the Ashley River, there’s a lot right there. And there’s a little park that they’ve built. So it’s very nice. Speaking of things to do, and must Ashley there’s a 7.8 mile Greenway.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So you’ll see sometimes homes that say located on the Greenway, located near the Greenway. That is a it’s like a long sort of trail. People bike ride on it, people go jogging, walking, walk their dogs, whatever. On this trail that goes basically all the way down very almost parallel to Savannah highway. So from almost downtown Charleston. It’s not actually downtown Charleston because you’d have to go over the river to get to downtown. But to almost downtown Charleston, all the way out. 7.8 miles there was Ashley. So that’s another thing to do and look for.

Lisa RichartHernandez
If you’re interested in West Ashley, the average age of people and what’s actually I was really interested I was doing some research on I found this on what was it called? Zip Code. United States zip codes.org. So the median age in West Ashley is 36. So I would say probably a lot of young families that live in West Ashley maybe probably also due to the just the the home prices that are over there. Right now we’ve got limited inventory in West Ashley also we’ve only got about 24 active listings in each section of last Ashley inside of 526 and outside of 526. So considering that there’s you know about 17,500 housing units and there’s only about 50 homes for sale.

Lisa RichartHernandez
That’s a very, very limited inventory. So if you are interested in West Ashley, you want to be on top of new homes that are coming on the market, especially the renovated ones because a lot of people are fixing them up and reselling them and it’s about that time because they were built in the 50s and 60s. So that’s kind of my take on West Ashley I loved living there. I loved it because I lived, you know, inside 526 in an established neighborhood, I loved it.

Lisa RichartHernandez
There were trees. I didn’t want that. Ruby, repetitive vinyl sided neighborhood feel. But there are some of those also, if that’s what you’re, you know, enjoy in West Ashley, that’s further out. Grand Oaks is like that. So if you have any questions, I mean, there’s everything you need doctors, attorneys, everything in West Ashley. If you would like any advice, or are looking to move to the area, I’m happy to answer any questions you might have. And you can hit me up on living in Charleston podcast.com.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And I would love to hear all your questions, and I’ll address them at another time, and another podcast. If you have anything that you’d like to know. I’m happy to help. So that’s all for today. Thanks for listening. And I hope you’ll visit West Ashley sometime soon.

Outro
Thanks for listening to another episode of living in Charleston podcast. We hope you’re inspired to come back. Grab yourself a pool iced tea and listen to the next episode. Don’t forget to share this with your friends, like comment and feel free to reach out directly to Lisa at livinginCharlestonpodcast.com. If you have any questions about the area, looking to move or wants to be in our next episode

Transcribed by https://otter.ai