Silly Poll- Road names and home buying

[Paige]

We are relocating and looking for homes and I'm finding that I'm crossing homes of my list because of the name of their street address. DH thinks I'm crazy! Does anyone else factor in the road name? We have moved many times and this is the first time I remember doing this. I don't think there were as many crazy road names in the cities of our last home searches.

 

Things like the street names I won't live on:

 

Those that have the same name as people in our immediate family. I don't want to live on My Name Rd. or even My Ex-Fiance's First name Rd.

 

Those that have the same name as major tragedies. Hindenberg Lane? I don't think so. 

 

Those that have negative connotations like Desperation Dr. MMmmmk. No.

 

Those that remind me of genocide like Taino Blvd. 

 

Or anything at all like those on this list: http://heavy.com/comedy/2012/12/the-20-worst-street-names/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Laura Corin]

No - I don't think about road names.  It's just a series of letters that I won't even notice once I've lived there for a few months.

[Susan in TN]

No, but we've never had so many options that we could be particular about the name.

[Runningmom80]

I definitely consider it!

 

 

There was a house we liked and the address was 3666. I couldn't do it, and I'm not even religious. Lol

[Sdel]

I would love to live on My Name Rd.  Too bad that particular road in my area is in a run down, not good part of town.  Other than that, I don't pay too much attention to road names.

 

Stefanie

[Carrie12345]

I voted maybe... mostly because a really freaky name would probably make me want it, lol.  I've always wanted to live on Shades of Death Road, which happens to be in an awesome area.

 

There's a local road that is both my sisters' names.  And it would be in our birth order when saying "Carrie lives on Sistersname Sistersname."  :lol:

[5of5]

Same as Susan.  Usually, we had to choose between only a few, none of which were close to ideal.

[milovany]

We live on a street that's the same name as one of our daughters.  :)

 

There's a property we'd love to purchase to build a house on (it's the type of situation that's pretty much a fat chance, but if the opportunity ever presented itself, we'd consider it), but it's on a road whose name I don't like at all -- think "Industrial Lane" or something similar.  That's the big bummer to be about it!  I do have a smidgen of hope though -- the same road has a different name a little bit further down, with no natural physical marker where the one stops and the other starts, and I might be able to convince whoever makes those decisions to let us use that name instead.  When I google map it, it comes up with this alternative name. 

 

I liked a property once on Faust Rd.  Didn't like that and didn't purchase the house. 

[Cinder]

I voted maybe. We haven't lived in an area where street names might be so unusual as to factor in our home buying decision. But I *could* see myself being reluctant to live on a street with a colorful name. Around here we have to contend with whole subdivisions with the same name for all the streets and the "Street" part being different, as in Elm St, Elm Rd, Elm Dr, Elm Way, Elm Ct . . . This might actually be worse than Halitosis Hwy or Skunk Cabbage Ct or something like that. At least if I lived on Annihilation Alley people wouldn't get lost and my mail wouldn't be delivered to the wrong house. :p

[QueenCat]

I grew up in a neighborhood where all of the streets were named from parts of Longfellow's poems. And our neighborhood was named Longfellow.

[JenneinCA]

Most of the streets in our neighborhood are some version of -------wood. The only problems are when the post office mixes them up.

[Rachel]

We looked at a house on a road named after a horse. I can't remember the name of the road but it was something like a young girl might have chosen like Dreamers Moondance Way. If we had liked the house, it wouldn't have stopped us from living there but I definitely thought about not wanting to have to tell people that was the road I lived on.

[teachermom2834]

There was one once that had name that has developed a vulgar slang meaning. Just couldn't do it. I don't think any of the rest would bother me.

[.Michelle.]

 

 

There was a house we liked and the address was 3666. I couldn't do it, and I'm not even religious. Lol

 

One of my favorite bumper stickers, "667: The Neighbor of the Beast."

[Jennifer132]

We considered a house on Cemetary Road. It wouldn't stop me, but we mentioned the name and noticed it, whereas other street names like 89th Street are easily forgettable.

[Miss Marple]

I'd love to live on a road with a real name.  We live on a numbered road with directional abbreviations.  Add to that a 5 digit house number and my poor kids could NOT learn their address for quite some time.  When they were in a local church preschool, the director was terribly worried that my kids did not know their address (at age 4).  FYI:  something like 86594 EW 2257 road.  Seriously, I wish we lived on 24 Pine Street.

[goldberry]

Maybe.

 

A relative lived in a lovely neighborhood on Corporate Dr.  ???  That would totally bug me.  When we moved recently, I didn't discount anything because of road names, but I was happy the house we wanted ended up having a nice name.

 

As a joke, we used to always say subdivisions name themselves after whatever they destroyed to put the subdivision there.  Deer Run,  Elk Ridge, Forest Hills...

 

edited to avoid killing a kitten

[Ewe Mama]

I am very Anne of Green Gables-ish about names, so yes, names do matter to me.

[kiana]

I would love to live on My Name Road ... and there is definitely an ex where if the house were on His Name road I would refuse to live there. It just gives me a bad taste if I see it. 

[Garga]

There's a street around here that is inpronouncable. It ends with 4 consonants and an E, I think. I can't remember exactly what it is because I can't pronounce it. All I know is that when I pass it I try to say it and my mouth gets all jumbled like there are marbles in it. I hate that street. I would hate to live on it. Having to say that name every time someone says, "What's your address?" would drive me bonkers.

 

Other than that, I don't think I'd care about the name of the street.

[Garga]

My street name ends with an "S" sound. So, when I say my street and then "street" it all blurs. That is annoying to me. I feel obligated to spell the name so that people know that my street ends with an S and they don't drop the S thinking that the S belongs to the word street.

 

Like:

 

Marbles Street. They might think it's Marble Street.

 

It's tiresome to me.

[Matryoshka]

Mostly, I think I wouldn't care.  It would have to be really egregious.  Since I just did a Gilmore Girls marathon, one that springs to mind is Sores and Boils Alley. :lol:

[AMJ]

I've found that GPS units can have some problems with some street names, even one as simple as Lane Lane.  I would nix living somewhere with such a difficult address unless there were an obvious landmark we could tell people to navigate to, and then give them directions to our house.  I have lived on a street so new it wasn't in maps or GPS systems for a few years, and some people, I've found, really cannot follow directions, no matter how simple they are (and the directions to find out house were NOT simple at all!).

 

I also have decided I will NOT live in Greeley, CO.  Partly I have no need to live there and there are other places close by that would serve nicely if we were to move back there, but mostly it's the streets.  They number the streets and avenues both, and streets are perpendicular to avenues.  People get lost there a LOT trying to find their way about.

[MrsMommy]

Mostly, I think I wouldn't care.  It would have to be really egregious.  Since I just did a Gilmore Girls marathon, one that springs to mind is Sores and Boils Alley. :lol:

 

Me, too!

 

There's a street not too far from us that I'd love to live on--Whiskey Road. I'd just love to see the looks on people's faces when I told them where to find us. Alas, it's all industrial, so no homes there.

 

Near one of our old apartments, there were homes at the corner of Betsy and Ross. I always thought that would be a fun place to live, too.

[Laura Corin]

I actually don't have a street name.  We all - 100 houses - just live in such-and-such village.  So the address might be Maple Cottage, Bumbletree (village), Pinkyboo (town), Fife KY2 9HW.  Delivery drivers go to the village hall, where there is a map, to find out where the houses are.  The only time the village has street names is when Google Maps randomly ascribes them to us.  We were on Laburnum Crescent for a while, according to GM, which is much too suburban a name for an old quarrying village.

 

ETA: Google Maps is at it again - it has taken a road named such-and-such crescent from a nearby town and named one of the village roads such-and-such place.  I think that we are a copyright marker site for GM.

 

Oh, in one town there's a lane called 'Butts Wynd'.  It's actually 'Butts' as in archery field and 'Wynd' (pronounced 'wined') which means alley.

 

L

[AMJ]

Maybe.

 

A relative lived in a lovely neighborhood on Corporate Dr.  ???  That would totally bug me.  When we moved recently, I didn't discount anything because of road names, but I was happy the house we wanted ended up having a nice name.

 

As a joke, we used to always say subdivisions name themselves after whatever they destroyed to put the subdivision there.  Deer Run,  Elk Ridge, Forest Hills...

 

edited to avoid killing a kitten

 

Would you please explain the bold?  I sense a potentially fun forum culture item here (the editing to avoid, not the killing of the kitten!) and want to feel like I'm in on it.  :bigear:

[MyLittleBears]

When were looking at houses hubby would refuse to live on a street named something like county Rd.13 But a street off county Rd. 13 was okay.  :confused1:

[PeacefulChaos]

I voted maybe. We haven't lived in an area where street names might be so unusual as to factor in our home buying decision. But I *could* see myself being reluctant to live on a street with a colorful name. Around here we have to contend with whole subdivisions with the same name for all the streets and the "Street" part being different, as in Elm St, Elm Rd, Elm Dr, Elm Way, Elm Ct . . . This might actually be worse than Halitosis Hwy or Skunk Cabbage Ct or something like that. At least if I lived on Annihilation Alley people wouldn't get lost and my mail wouldn't be delivered to the wrong house. :p

Yes they do that in some of the subdivisions around here, too.  Add to that the number of cul-de-sacs and dead ends and weird times when the name changes and you can LITERALLY get lost in suburbia here.  (ex: Turn off Deer Run Rd. onto Deer Run Dr.  Don't take the first left onto Deer Run Ct. because you won't get anywhere - pass Deer Run Ave. and Turn left on Deer Creek Ln.  Take the 2nd Right onto Antler Dr.  IT LITERALLY DRIVES ME INSANE!  I refuse to live in one of those :lol: )

 

Re: numbered roads, they changed all of those around here about 15 years ago.  DH's family had long lived on Rt. 789 box 234 but then they changed everything.  911 addresses I guess?  And they got to vote on their lane name.  So now they live at 00 tree road, which is off of Rt. 789 (but also has its own name, though a lot of people still refer to it as 789, since that is still the number).

 

 

ETA: I forgot to add my answer to the original question. :P  Road names aren't something I'd consider.  Granted, I've yet to ever buy a house, but when renting location and stuff never came into question - we got what worked best for us, cost wise and size wise.  Mostly cost. :lol:  And I can't see us having such a huge pool of homes to choose from that we would find 2 houses we absolutely loved completely equally with only road name exception. :lol:  So I guess I just don't see it as something that would ever even come up.

[Ali in OR]

We once moved to a house being built in a subdivision--first house on this particular street. I was very upset that the developers or planners or whoever is in charge of such things misspelled the name of the street--it's an object found in nature and has one right spelling which they didn't use! I was envisioning having to forever spell the name of my street for people and having them think my town must be full of stupid people if they don't know how to spell their street names! Someone in the city did the work to get the name changed for me, but only because we were the first house on the street--if someone else had already moved in with the wrong spelling we would have been stuck. But I still have photos in a scrapbook of the wrongly-spelled street sign and then the new one they put in with the correct spelling.

[Laura Corin]

Would you please explain the bold?  I sense a potentially fun forum culture item here (the editing to avoid, not the killing of the kitten!) and want to feel like I'm in on it.  :bigear:

 

If one misplaces an apostrophe, one kills a kitten.  Mrs Mungo has a statement on it in her siggy.

[SparklyUnicorn]

I would not care.

 

 

[AMJ]

We live on a street that's the same name as one of our daughters.  :)

 

There's a property we'd love to purchase to build a house on (it's the type of situation that's pretty much a fat chance, but if the opportunity ever presented itself, we'd consider it), but it's on a road whose name I don't like at all -- think "Industrial Lane" or something similar.  That's the big bummer to be about it!  I do have a smidgen of hope though -- the same road has a different name a little bit further down, with no natural physical marker where the one stops and the other starts, and I might be able to convince whoever makes those decisions to let us use that name instead.  When I google map it, it comes up with this alternative name. 

 

I liked a property once on Faust Rd.  Didn't like that and didn't purchase the house. 

 

Back in my college days my roommates and I lived in an old farmhouse just outside of town on a county road.  Our road turned into a named street as it crossed the city limits, so when we really wanted pizza delivery we told them our address was #### nameofstreet, and they found us every time.  We only would do this when weather was okay (not foul), and not during their busiest times, and we always tipped the driver a lot.  The drivers never ratted us out, and we had a special few who tended to come most often.  I think they knew how to find us and liked the big tips, and so would claim our delivery.

[Matryoshka]

Would you please explain the bold?  I sense a potentially fun forum culture item here (the editing to avoid, not the killing of the kitten!) and want to feel like I'm in on it.  :bigear:

 

Yes, fun forum culture item. :)

 

It comes from Mrs Mungo's siggy: A kitten dies every time you use an apostrophe to pluralize.

 

[AMJ]

If one misplaces an apostrophe, one kills a kitten.  Mrs Mungo has a statement on it in her siggy.

 

Thank you, I think I actually recall seeing that.  I will have to tell my kids -- it will really motivate youngest to make sure her apostrophes are correct!

[Desert Strawberry]

There are a lot of unpronouncable roads here. We lived on Feu Follet for four years and I still don't know how to say it. No one could ever tell me, either. At the same time, there are a lot of really pretty names. I want one of those. 

We live in a cute little cottage on Cherry St. I love it. It looks out on 60 acres of wildflower-strewn meadows and trees. It's like a story book. We regularly read Dr. Seuss's Book as And to Think That I saw it on Cherry St.

[AMJ]

Many years ago, we lived on Golden Way. I didn't think anything of it, until a teacher commented that she thought it was a lovely name. I guess it was. My mil named one of the roads in the subdivision Ditchline Drive. One resident hated it so much she got it changed to Skyline Drive. The other unfortunate name was Farway Lane. There's a Fairway Lane and it's caused problems with the FD. I don't like the look of 3112 F 3/4 Road in Grand Junction, but it does make it easy to find! We're on a numbered county road now. 

 

Yeah, and SW Colorado isn't the only place out west with fractioned road numbers (though they do have quite a number of them).  I have friends out there, and they and the locals took to referring to certain roads with local in-joke names, such as "end of the world road" and "dumb bunny road".  Come to think of it, it was in the mountains of western Colorado where I encountered directions including "turn left at the cabin that isn't there"....

 

Hmm, how about decimalized road numbers?  I'd love to live on 3.14 road!

 

[Alessandra]

Some of those names are awful! It would affect my decision.

 

Maybe you get used to some of them? I know Skunk's Misery Road and have always loved that name. But the double meaning, semi pornographic ones? Never!

 

Thank you for this important poll, lol.

[Ipsey]

I have not the faintest care about a street name.

 

I just want a house is a decent area that I can afford. I'd live at 13A1/2 Dismay Drive if it met the previous criteria. :)

 

 

 

[Ipsey]

If one misplaces an apostrophe, one kills a kitten.  Mrs Mungo has a statement on it in her siggy.

 

 

(I don't want to hijack--but I haven't seen Mrs. Mungo in a loooong time. Is it just me?)

[Ipsey]

I definitely consider it!

 

 

There was a house we liked and the address was 3666. I couldn't do it, and I'm not even religious. Lol

 

Hahah! I would consider that a selling point. 

 

A good friend of mine who is a Reformed Christian pastor's wife (who knows I'm an atheist) FB friended me, and I happened to be the 666 friend on her list. We both had a terrific laugh. Still a proud moment for me. :)

[Chelle in MO]

Someone I know quite well has been known to drive by Morning Wood Rd. and remark that he sure would like to live there.

 

:lol:

[mrsrevmeg]

There is a street in my town named Damien Drive. There was a house for sale on it for at lease two years. I never even thought about looking at it.

[Hunter's Moon]

There is a street in our town named "Fisher D!ck". I just cannot understand the thought process behind that one.

 

I would for sure put that in the con section of our pros/cons list if moving onto that street was ever an option.

[MeAndTheBoys]

We have lived on two streets that were hard to spell--THAT was annoying.  EVERY time I told someone an address, I'd end up having to spell it out, and they'd still be like, "huh?"  It wouldn't be a deal killer, but I sure do like living on a street with a normal name now.

 

B

[dirty ethel rackham]

The street name would have to be something truly heinous for me to cross that house off my list ... something along the likes of Hitler Drive.  But, then again, I imagine people living on a street with such horribly and commonly known connotations would lobby for a name change.   After all, street names are part of the marketing in real estate.  The examples that you list would not even register for me. 

[gingersmom]

I never thought about it till I moved and the current state I live in has some crazy street names.

 

My street has an easy to spell street name with an extra letter. So I have to tell everyone how to spell it. Which always leads to a discussion of why was it spelled like that and how odd, etc.

[Slartibartfast]

I live on a street that is the name of a popular Disney movie.  Something like, "Cinderella Lane" or "Snow White Drive"... but I'm not going to say what it is, being that it's the internet and all.

 

My grandmother's whole neighborhood is like that. She  lived on Aladdin.

[Slartibartfast]

(I don't want to hijack--but I haven't seen Mrs. Mungo in a loooong time. Is it just me?)

 

I am on the phone with her atm. She's fine.

[catz]

Oh no, I don't think of it at all.  It was hard enough buying a house without thinking of the street name.

 

Our current house is on a really annoying, no one can pronounce or spell it street.  It's actually named after a city in England in Essex county and the pronunciation/spelling seems like a no brainer to me, but everyone else botches it.  But I LOVE our house and location, so it's kind of become a family joke. 

[KrissiK]

I like living on a nicely named road, but if I found a house I really liked and the price was right, the name of the street wouldn't be the deal breaker!