North Alabama 55+ Communities

55+ Communities also called 55 Plus Communities are active retirement communities and developments cater to active adult retirement living. These types of communities really offer anything and everything for an active retirement lifestyle. You will find upscale golf course homes as well as quite city living surrounded by like minded neighbors. Amenities often include swimming pools, Pickle Ball, Shuffleboard, Tennis Courts, Clubhouses with community kitchens, championship golf courses and everything else you can think of in a gated retirement resort type environment. That being said, many 55+ communities also offer a quiet more reserved type living for those residents that appreciate a slower pace lifestyle. Almost all have community centers or clubhouses that feature many community activities. Almost all have pets allowed policies. About the only thing you don’t find in 55+ communities are a lot of children, which can visit but cannot reside full time in most communities.

North Alabama is a region of the U.S. state of Alabama, generally thought to include these 12 counties: Cherokee, Colbert, DeKalb, Franklin, Jackson, Lauderdale, Lawrence, Limestone, Madison, Marshall, Morgan, and Winston, with a combined population of 937,059.

The anchor city of this region of the state is Huntsville, but other cities of notable size include (in order of population): Decatur, Florence (along with its sister cities Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia), Madison, and Athens.

Decatur is considered a quasi anchor city for western North Alabama, being the largest economic center north of Birmingham, and west of Huntsville.

Locals tend to refer to this area as the "Tennessee Valley" in reference to the Tennessee River, which flows through the northernmost part of the state. A section of East Tennessee shares the "Tennessee Valley" moniker.

Winter Warm Up: Communities in the Southeast

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