Oscar Martinez

Oscar is the one person on this list who will read his own relocation guide specifically to find something in it to correct. Good news, Oscar: the answer is obvious, it’s correct, and yes, you may be smug about it.

After a run of characters who want farmland and mega churches and the smallest condo in the flashiest building, Oscar Martinez is a genuine relief to place, because Oscar has taste, self awareness, and a budget that actually matches his life. He knows what he wants. He wants a city. A real one, walkable, cultured, progressive, with a symphony he’ll attend and a wine list he’ll have opinions about and no one asking him to explain himself. He is not going to a suburb. He would rather not discuss the suburbs at all.

Who we’re working with

Oscar is a senior accountant, and a very good one, the kind of smart that he is fully aware of and only sometimes hides. He’s cultured in a way that’s real rather than performed, genuinely into art and music and food and politics, sardonic about almost everything, and the most reliably liberal voice in a Scranton office that mostly baffled him. He came out in that office under the worst possible circumstances and came through it as the most self possessed person in the building. Whatever we pick for him has to be a place where none of that requires a second thought.

His profile is refreshingly coherent. Urban, very high walkability, a modern condo rather than a house with a lawn he’d resent, a progressive and cultured neighborhood, and a $400,000 to $600,000 budget that, for once, comfortably buys the thing the person actually wants. Oscar isn’t stretching for a fantasy. He’s a solid earner with sophisticated taste and the means to satisfy it in the right zip code.

The match: Midtown

For Oscar, it’s Midtown, and it isn’t remotely close.

Start with the culture, because that’s the whole point of Oscar. Midtown is the arts core of the entire metro. The Woodruff Arts Center puts the High Museum, the Alliance Theatre, and the Atlanta Symphony on one campus, Piedmont Park is the city’s front yard, and the whole district runs on exactly the intellectual, cultured, urban energy Oscar has been quietly missing his entire adult life. This is a man who wants to walk to a gallery, and Midtown lets him walk to several.

Then the part that seals it. Midtown is the historic heart of LGBTQ Atlanta, the center of the city’s gay life and community and Pride, and for Oscar that’s home in the truest sense, not a bonus feature. After everything, he gets to live somewhere he was always going to belong, no explaining required, surrounded by his people in the middle of a great American city.

And the money works cleanly. Modern condo towers along Peachtree run around $450,000 to $500,000, right in the fat middle of Oscar’s budget, which buys him an actual nice unit, not the sad small one Michael’s going to end up in four blocks away. Best walkability in the metro, three MARTA stations, a car that becomes optional. Oscar reads this listing, nostrils flaring slightly with vindication, and buys it.

The alternatives

Virginia-Highland. Culturally, very Oscar. Walkable, tree lined, independent restaurants and bars, a genuine neighborhood with taste. The catch is the housing stock is 1920s bungalows, not the modern condo he specified, and prices run well above his budget. He’d love to visit. He’d have notes about buying.

Decatur. Progressive, walkable, foodie, arguably the most values aligned town on the whole map for him. Two problems: it’s over his budget at around $705,000, and it’s across town from the Midtown cultural core he actually orbits. A strong fourth quarter contender that loses on both price and geography.

Inman Park. Atlanta’s beautiful old Victorian neighborhood, walkable, on the BeltLine, next to Krog Street Market, genuinely cool. It’s also expensive and light on the sleek modern condo inventory Oscar wants. Right sensibility, wrong housing, high price. He’d approve of it aesthetically and decline to buy.

The verdict

Oscar lives in Midtown, in a tasteful condo he can comfortably afford, walking distance from the High Museum and the symphony and a neighborhood that was always going to be his.

He is one of the few people on this site who gets exactly what he wants with no compromise and no overreach, which is the most Oscar outcome imaginable. He did the analysis, the numbers worked, the culture’s right there, and he was correct the entire time. Let him have this one. He’s earned it, and he’ll only bring it up occasionally.

Next is Kelly Kapoor, who also wants to live in the city, and who has approximately a third of Oscar’s budget and four times the confidence.