insiders know ...

[november 2024 roommates]

SO, roomiematch.com's Manchester roommate rundown:

Manchester is the largest city in New Hampshire, northern New England's largest city!

But that's only about 110,000 residents.

Manchester experiences harsh winters with lengthy snow cover. Storms thrill skiers as there are lovely, less crowded local slopes . . . while non-skiers are meh.

Spring and fall are brief transitions, while summer is sometimes pleasant . . . sometimes exceedingly humid.

Like most cities this small, Manchester isn't celebrated so much for public transport. Very limited bus service. You and your roommates will need a car.

But especially compared to larger cities, there's very little crime!

Do you like shopping? There's no sales tax! That's part of why South Manchester's many retail outlets and the Mall of New Hampshire are popular! I mean, the Mall has 115 stores, plus several dining options. That's good shopping.

But many in Manchester craving fun but not into skiing or shopping occasionally take off north for Boston instead.

Manchester claims to have invented the chicken tender, maybe even at the Mall of New Hampshire? Several prominent residents have suggested that for tourism they rebrand themselves, "The Chicken Tender Capital of the World!"

This has remained controversial even though validated by America's Test Kitchen.

The rest of the Manchester roommate lowdown:

• located in South Central New Hampshire at the Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack River
• 50 miles NW of Boston
• home to several sports teams, including ice hockey, Women's Tackle Football, and flat track roller derby
• home to a few minor-league teams, including Fisher Cats Baseball and the Phantoms soccer. They also love their Manchester Monarchs in the American Hockey League
• home to several colleges and universities, including Granite State College, the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, Southern New Hampshire University, St. Anselm College, and the University of New Hampshire at Manchester

After you're settled down, you and your roommates should experience Manchester's:

• Currier Museum of Art: Painting, photography, sculpture and performance. Free Saturday mornings!
• Elm Street: Walk to a number of popular bars and taverns. You may want to remind new roommates from elsewhere that last call is 12:45 a.m., quite a bit earlier than most cities.
• White Mountains: Drive around in fall for fabulous foliage viewing!
• Dean Court: The side street leading to the Manchester Library is now a public gallery for cat-centric street art. Painted right on and into the alleyway.
• SEE Science Center: "Hands-on science fun for everyone!" In addition to Physics Fun, Dinosaurs, Sun Earth Universe, and Bubbles & the Ocean, SEE is home to the LEGO Millyard. It's a representation of Manchester's millyard as it might have looked in 1900.
  
  It's the largest permanent LEGO installation at minifigure scale in the world.

Here's the city of Manchester's official .gov for Residents, including city announcements, city maps, landlords and tenants, list of parks, parking, polling locations, and vehicle registration.

Notes

1.   The non-traditional roommate rent average for this city we've experienced over the last 3 years. We can't predict future rental availability, because we're neither in control of any rental market nor psychic, sorry!

But in most cities most of the time, the recent and relatively recent past are the best predictors.


2.   This idea came from smartasset.com's ranking of what a roommate saves you in 50 cities. They ranked where roommates will save you the most money, based on the average cost of a 1BR as opposed to a 2BR ÷ 2. Unsurprisingly, the more expensive the city, the more you can save, but the savings are significant in all larger metros. So we got the data for the rest of our cities from Zumper too.

This is really the minimum you could save, as you could live with more than one roommate, split more services, share food or other supplies, etc. More sharing tends to lead to more savings too, as per our roommate roadmap.

As per the rest of the description at the top of this page, we're calling this "traditional" roommate rent.


3.   From zumper.com.


4.   Directly quoted from the Trust for Public Land's parkland rating system.

"The ParkScore index awards each city up to 100 points for acreage based on the average of two equally weighted measures: median park size and parkland as a percentage of city area. Factoring park acreage into each city’s ParkScore rating helps account for the importance of larger “destination parks” that serve many users who live farther than ten minutes’ walking distance."

While each city's rundown already includes their individual ParkScore, nature lovers might like to see all roommate cities ranked for parkland.


5.   Directly quoted from Walk Score's Cities and Neighborhoods Ranking. They've ranked "more than 2,800 cities and over 10,000 neighborhoods so you can find a walkable home or apartment."

While each city's rundown already includes their individual Walk Score, dedicated pedestrians might like to see all roommate cities ranked for walkability.


6.   From various lists here on our own best roommate cities.


7.   From hoodmaps.com: a collaborative map where residents use tags describing social situations you're likely to find. Other users can thumb up or down, so the largest tags have been thumbed up the most.