Best Places to Live in Fort Wayne Indiana

So you’re someone that’s thinking about moving to the Fort Wayne area, who likes beautiful old homes and mature trees? You’re not a fan of new style cookie cutter houses, and you really like a thriving community? Well, if that’s you then 46807 might be an area in Fort Wayne that you might want to look into.

Hey everybody, it’s Dave Brough. We’re going to talk all about eating, working, playing, and sleeping in the Fort Wayne area. Feel free to call, text, or email me! 46807 is a zip code that is affectionately called the 07 by people who live in Fort Wayne, and it’s an up and coming part of town.

Southwood Park

One of my favorite things about this area is the unique, broad range of homes. We have home prices ranging from a little under $100,000, to over a million. It’s not a terribly large area, but it has a huge sense of diversity in just the homes themselves. For the style of homes, we have Cape Cods, tons of Tudors, some little bungalows, some beautiful mansions, ranches, and everything in between.

There’s a very active HOA, meaning there’s no new rentals. Although, there are a handful of rentals left that got grandfathered in when they rewrote the covenants and restrictions. Everyone in Southwood Park is a homeowner, and they like knowing when they purchase a house, the community and neighborhood is going to be stable. There won’t be a flight of renters coming in and out of the area. Ultimately, that will help your home prices.

Southwood Park is a really big subdivision. There’s over 700 houses in this subdivision, and it was built by a man named Prange. There’s actually a small street in Southwood Park called Prange Drive. He developed the neighborhood, and the houses were built primarily between the 1920s and 1950s. There are a lot of two stories with detached garages, hardwood oak floors on the main level, and about half of them have a fireplace. Upstairs either has hardwood oak flooring or hard pine, which people would use if they wanted to spend less money; guests usually only see the downstairs area.

The craftsman style homes in Southwood Park are beautiful. They have really ornate wood, and most all the craftsman’s have a working fireplace. The price ranges in Southwood Park go from around $130,000 to $300,000. Up until a couple of years ago, the first time home buyer price in Southwood Park would have been around $100,000. Not anymore. Since 2015, we’ve had about 8% appreciation per year in this area. So, now a good starter home is going to be in the $150,000-$300,000 range.

Expanding outside of Southwood Park, you’d probably never know you were outside of it, because the houses look the same. Roughly speaking, Southwood Park goes from Fairfield Avenue, to Petit, to the river. These are all beautiful stately homes mixed with more affordable homes.

Woodhurst

Just South of Southwood Park is Woodhurst.

Woodhurst was the last subdivision built in 46807, and it features really nice ranches. It was built by a man named Worthman, and he has an awesome reputation as being a very high quality home provider. Most of them have an original tile foyer, and they all have in floor duct work so you don’t have ducts going above the ceiling. Those little details make a difference, and they survived the test of time, 60+ years later. These houses are newer, so they’re going to have more modern conveniences. These include two car garages, master bathrooms, and old growth trees. Just in the last year, Woodhurst had all the concrete roads replaced, and it was a massive investment by the city. A few years before that, the association came through and paid contractors to level out all of the sidewalks. You can walk through this neighborhood with your eyes closed and not worry about tripping, which is a big deal for anybody who ever has lived in an old neighborhood. The trees are so large, you can walk underneath of them in a rainstorm and stay dry for the most part.

The home prices in Woodhurst range from around $140,000 to the $500,000’s. The home sizes range from about 1,400 square feet to 6,000 square feet. There’s only a couple hundred houses in this neighborhood, and they have a really strong association, so there’s no rentals in Woodhurst. There’s a security patrol every day of the week, usually in the evening time, and there’s security in the neighborhood constantly. So, there’s an incredibly low crime rate. There’s also security in Southwood Park!

Oakdale

Just outside of Woodhurst and Southwood Park, to the North, is the Oakdale neighborhood. These houses are gorgeous, beautiful two-story homes. They call it Oakdale because it was built amongst these huge old oak trees, and they’re massively beautiful. Oakdale, and just North of Oakdale in Canard, Packard, and the Williams Woodland neighborhood, have been depressed areas. So, there’s a high concentration of rentals with landlords who didn’t take good care of the property. A lot of these properties have been physically damaged due to a lack of maintenance.

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen investment in this area, and I believe this is one of the greatest opportunities for an investment in the city. There’s a lot of opportunity to buy a house, put some money into it, put some sweat equity into it, and get a quick return on your investment; these prices are only going increase.

There’s a 100 year old General Electric plant just North of 46807, so just South of downtown, that’s been sitting vacant for decades. There’s been recent talk of redeveloping this, and they’re wanting to put in bars, restaurants, a hospital possibly, and educational facilities. It’s mixed use with hundreds of thousands of square feet to work with, and multi-million dollars of private and public investment. The hope is once this gets started, these outlying areas are going to start seeing an impact pretty quickly. It’s going to expand out into the 46807 neighborhoods that have been hurting. So, if you ever want a place in Fort Wayne where you can do some long-term investing that will appreciate faster than the rest of the area, and you want to buy a house to polish up, this is where I would do it.

So what do people do for fun in the 46807 area? We have the golf course I talked about, Clyde Theater, the Club Room that provides food and a show, a coffee shop cafe called Crescendo, a large trail system, and Packard Park. The possibilities are endless!

We specialize in helping people move to Fort Wayne, and we absolutely love it. Call, text, or email me anytime!