Some honest opinions about relocating to the midwest?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
It's about weather, not light. Wet hay will rot, therefore you make hay when it's sunny as it dries out the hay and it can keep for the winter.

Yes, after she explained it, I understand, but also why she said I gave myself away as a city dweller.

[Anonymous]

Ugh, so many people talking about the midwest as if it's all the same. I am from Minneapolis and it's a GREAT, undiscovered gem of a city. It has everything you want of a city, but in a smaller, easier to manage package. Art everywhere, diversity, very educated population, well-read, well-traveled, huge support of public radio and television, progressive. I cannot stress the art aspect enough. Art of all kinds, everywhere. Great park system, lakes right in the middle of the city to bike/jog around, take kayaks out, and even swim in on the beaches!

Huge number of Fortune 500 companies. Plenty of jobs. Yet still low cost-of-living. It really is the sweet spot.

Yes, winter some years is pretty rough. But it's not every year. And the summers are magical to make up for it. You are not sealed up in the AC for months like you are here. It's also light until 10 PM there so the nights just go on forever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We left Cincinnati in 2007. I would not return but my circumstance is 100% different than the OP's. I am in a minority group and in my hometown the level of segregation is such that its difficult to prove you are competent. I also found I was living in a area with either have not's or basic middle class suburbianites with connections to certain neighborhoods and HIGH SCHOOLS!. Here the question "Where did you go to school?"---it is all about HS and class and upbringing. It is hard for outsiders to fit in.

My husband is from St. Louis and never really fit in the Cincy clique. We got tired of the low paying "Bank" jobs that came our way. We were "odd", because we wanted more and finding a job there IS a real struggle.

OP, I suggest you go on City Data and look under forums for any area you find interest in. The threads will quickly give you a feel of how the locals think and feel about their town. I DO miss the lower cost of living but I do not miss the constant sports talk, and a lot of people there are not fond of "DC" for political reasons.

I have several gfs who relocated to cincy. My impressions:

-almost everyone grew up there, went to school there, is raising a family there. Hard to find people who spent meaningful time elsewhere
-travel, especially foreign, is not a huge priority
-massive drinking
-once people hit the baby years, they are totally obsessive about babies and everything is about family time
-hard to make new friends as it is very insular

This is exactly why DH and I moved from Cincinnnati to DC. Especially if you like city living vs. suburbs, you cannot get the type of life you have in a city like DC or NYC in Cincinnati or any other major Ohio city (I also lived in Columbus for 6 years). We wanted our children exposed to culture and diversity that Cincinnati cannot provide, but DC does. To us, we felt surrounded by the culture of sports talk and drinking and driving.

Can someone give some concrete examples of how the culture and diversity of DC has enriched their lives (perhaps the PP)? It seems like people in DC give a lot of lip service to diversity yet only hang out with people from the same SES.

I agree.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We left Cincinnati in 2007. I would not return but my circumstance is 100% different than the OP's. I am in a minority group and in my hometown the level of segregation is such that its difficult to prove you are competent. I also found I was living in a area with either have not's or basic middle class suburbianites with connections to certain neighborhoods and HIGH SCHOOLS!. Here the question "Where did you go to school?"---it is all about HS and class and upbringing. It is hard for outsiders to fit in.

My husband is from St. Louis and never really fit in the Cincy clique. We got tired of the low paying "Bank" jobs that came our way. We were "odd", because we wanted more and finding a job there IS a real struggle.

OP, I suggest you go on City Data and look under forums for any area you find interest in. The threads will quickly give you a feel of how the locals think and feel about their town. I DO miss the lower cost of living but I do not miss the constant sports talk, and a lot of people there are not fond of "DC" for political reasons.

I have several gfs who relocated to cincy. My impressions:

-almost everyone grew up there, went to school there, is raising a family there. Hard to find people who spent meaningful time elsewhere
-travel, especially foreign, is not a huge priority
-massive drinking
-once people hit the baby years, they are totally obsessive about babies and everything is about family time
-hard to make new friends as it is very insular

This is exactly why DH and I moved from Cincinnnati to DC. Especially if you like city living vs. suburbs, you cannot get the type of life you have in a city like DC or NYC in Cincinnati or any other major Ohio city (I also lived in Columbus for 6 years). We wanted our children exposed to culture and diversity that Cincinnati cannot provide, but DC does. To us, we felt surrounded by the culture of sports talk and drinking and driving.

Can someone give some concrete examples of how the culture and diversity of DC has enriched their lives (perhaps the PP)? It seems like people in DC give a lot of lip service to diversity yet only hang out with people from the same SES.

Dh and I are both minorities. Came here for law school. He took a job in private sector, I took one in public. We got involved in politics thru first and second Obama campaigns. Thru that, work, college friends, and other connections, we are friends with minorities working in: wh, biglaw, think tanks, enviro nonprofits, consulting, etc. our extended group of friends is racially, ethnically, religiously and geographically diverse. Thru these extended friends we are able to enjoy events like: Ailey, jazz concerts, charity events, etc. I don't think ppl understand what its like to live in a place and EXPECT that you will see minorities at the decision making table, spearheading cultural and charitable events, etc. Its invaluable to know my kids will have so many role midels of success around.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This thread is making me homesick (all the people who have clearly never lived in the Midwest? please, keep your misconceptions and stay the hell out of the Midwest; I've had enough of your kind in the last 12 years) for the Midwest.

Me too! This post is making me think about other things I miss about my (very small) Iowa hometown: you can see tons of stars at night, everybody knows everybody, community theater. Sigh.

Everyone knowing everyone else, and their business, is a main reason my parents left the Midwest for DC. I don't want to know everyone and I sure don't want them in my business.

Where did your parents live? I've lived in several cities in the Midwest and this was not my experience at all. Not even close.

Milwaukee

I am the small town Iowa homesick PP, and I agree, the flip side of everybody knowing everybody is that everybody is all up in your business.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My company has a presence in downtown Des Moines and while I've never lived there, I'm in Des Moines annually for at least a week at a time and often several times a year.

Full Disclosure I'm a native Washingtonian, and I really do love it here, and I hope I never have to move to Iowa/Des Moines.

1. Lack of diversity among race, educational attainment, everything. I saw people refer it as white bread on another post - agree completely.

2. Lack of professional sporting options - think they have minor league baseball.

3. the city literally closes at 5pm and on the weekend. Positive: the idea of traffic is a joke for anyone coming out of DC/Atlanta/LA

4. The food options - most are horrid. There are a couple that are good - I would heartily recommend anyone in Des Moines to visit Centro (wonderful!) but I've had "Mexican" in Des Moines where I strongly suspect they poured ketchup on my food in place of red sauce (I also got food poisoning that night). When I'm in town I spend a lot of time at Panera....

5. I never once saw someone on a run or on a bike, and most of the people I interact with are much larger than the average person in DC.

6. The people are very nice but at times shallow in their niceness. They've known everyone in their circle their whole life so it can be hard to break into their existing cliques.

7. There's a reason you can get real estate downtown for <$100K. There's really nothing to do, comparable to being downtown in DC. Theatre/Museums/Cultural events are much smaller/further apart location and timing/smaller scale - see also lack of diversity above.

8. I don't find the weather that much different from DC, except for they have extremes. It's flat and blah - just as hot and humid in the summer, winter last year was miserable. Constant snow, and the worst of the polar vortex it was NEGATIVE 55*. -55*. No, thank you.

9. Finally. All the dumb farming colloquialisms... "Gotta make hay when the sun shines"

Your post is so full of total exaggeration. You are clearly one of those annoying people who feel DC, and by association themselves, are superior. For starters in the worst of the polar vortex it was -20 with wind chills to -40. It was never -55 on the thermometer. There's a number of good food options in DSM, but if you like Panera there also no lack of cheap chain food too. Centro is good as is Splash, Djanjo, Proof, 801, etc. are all very good. The city doesn't close at 5pm, however a lot does close on Sunday. What you will find are more sole proprietor restaurants and shops and many of those are closed on Sunday. I live in NE Iowa in an area smaller than DSM and have never lacked for good food including Thai, Indian, Japanese and Pakistani all within 10 minutes of home. If you are downtown here, you won't see people biking or running. They are doing it on the miles and miles of bike trails built just for them so they're not zipping down the sidewalk. There's no professional sports, but I couldn't care less about sporting events. If I'm desperate to watch sports we have a minor league baseball team and a hockey team in town and one of the state universities is 5 minutes away. Iowa is far from perfect but its like any other place, if you approach it with a crappy, condescending attitude you get out of it what you put in.

So because you don't care about sporting options means they can be disregarded as a city draw. OK got it.
Sounds like my "crappy, condescending attitude" might be contagious.

Yeah but a lot of people don't have time nor the financial resources to go to said professional sporting events in all the larger metropolitan cities anyway.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My company has a presence in downtown Des Moines and while I've never lived there, I'm in Des Moines annually for at least a week at a time and often several times a year.

Full Disclosure I'm a native Washingtonian, and I really do love it here, and I hope I never have to move to Iowa/Des Moines.

1. Lack of diversity among race, educational attainment, everything. I saw people refer it as white bread on another post - agree completely.

2. Lack of professional sporting options - think they have minor league baseball.

3. the city literally closes at 5pm and on the weekend. Positive: the idea of traffic is a joke for anyone coming out of DC/Atlanta/LA

4. The food options - most are horrid. There are a couple that are good - I would heartily recommend anyone in Des Moines to visit Centro (wonderful!) but I've had "Mexican" in Des Moines where I strongly suspect they poured ketchup on my food in place of red sauce (I also got food poisoning that night). When I'm in town I spend a lot of time at Panera....

5. I never once saw someone on a run or on a bike, and most of the people I interact with are much larger than the average person in DC.

6. The people are very nice but at times shallow in their niceness. They've known everyone in their circle their whole life so it can be hard to break into their existing cliques.

7. There's a reason you can get real estate downtown for <$100K. There's really nothing to do, comparable to being downtown in DC. Theatre/Museums/Cultural events are much smaller/further apart location and timing/smaller scale - see also lack of diversity above.

8. I don't find the weather that much different from DC, except for they have extremes. It's flat and blah - just as hot and humid in the summer, winter last year was miserable. Constant snow, and the worst of the polar vortex it was NEGATIVE 55*. -55*. No, thank you.

9. Finally. All the dumb farming colloquialisms... "Gotta make hay when the sun shines"

Your post is so full of total exaggeration. You are clearly one of those annoying people who feel DC, and by association themselves, are superior. For starters in the worst of the polar vortex it was -20 with wind chills to -40. It was never -55 on the thermometer. There's a number of good food options in DSM, but if you like Panera there also no lack of cheap chain food too. Centro is good as is Splash, Djanjo, Proof, 801, etc. are all very good. The city doesn't close at 5pm, however a lot does close on Sunday. What you will find are more sole proprietor restaurants and shops and many of those are closed on Sunday. I live in NE Iowa in an area smaller than DSM and have never lacked for good food including Thai, Indian, Japanese and Pakistani all within 10 minutes of home. If you are downtown here, you won't see people biking or running. They are doing it on the miles and miles of bike trails built just for them so they're not zipping down the sidewalk. There's no professional sports, but I couldn't care less about sporting events. If I'm desperate to watch sports we have a minor league baseball team and a hockey team in town and one of the state universities is 5 minutes away. Iowa is far from perfect but its like any other place, if you approach it with a crappy, condescending attitude you get out of it what you put in.

So because you don't care about sporting options means they can be disregarded as a city draw. OK got it.
Sounds like my "crappy, condescending attitude" might be contagious.

Yeah but a lot of people don't have time nor the financial resources to go to said professional sporting events in all the larger metropolitan cities anyway.

I wonder if the snooty PP considers NASCAR to be a 'city draw' sporting event?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No never.Used to live in Milwaukee.

This is a city we talked about, any specific reasons why?

Ghost town .Very strange.Big buildings but noone walks on the streets.Now the best place to live for schools would be north shore area(Shorewood,fox point etc),while houses are beautiful and inexpensive a lot of them for sale.We still can't sell our house there.Weather is terrible year round.You get one month of warmth(July).People are big drinkers.You will be surprised to see so many functional alchoholics.

Define "warmth." Minnesota native here and I'll grant you that the summers there are nothing like the summers here, but c'mon, more months than July are warm.

I lived in Minneapolis for four years. I grew up in Arkansas. By my reckoning, it started getting warm in May and stayed nice throughout June, July, and August. The earliest snow I saw was on Halloween. The latest snow I saw was early May.

Minnesotans make the most of it, though. Ice fishing, cross country skiing, snow mobiling. They are sort of nuts.

When it's regularly been 10-20 (or far lower), March starts to feel balmy at 40-60 (or 80. oh, global warming), and it goes from there. Some years springs are awful, just chilly and damp, and some years it's glorious. But it's generally tolerable from late April on. And while we do have hot spells, summers are not the painful slog they are here (or further south).

[Anonymous]

Minneapolis is beautiful but not cheap. Winters can be long but if you do one sunny trip on spring break, you'll be fine. Former New New Yorker loving it here in the Twin Cities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We left Cincinnati in 2007. I would not return but my circumstance is 100% different than the OP's. I am in a minority group and in my hometown the level of segregation is such that its difficult to prove you are competent. I also found I was living in a area with either have not's or basic middle class suburbianites with connections to certain neighborhoods and HIGH SCHOOLS!. Here the question "Where did you go to school?"---it is all about HS and class and upbringing. It is hard for outsiders to fit in.

My husband is from St. Louis and never really fit in the Cincy clique. We got tired of the low paying "Bank" jobs that came our way. We were "odd", because we wanted more and finding a job there IS a real struggle.

OP, I suggest you go on City Data and look under forums for any area you find interest in. The threads will quickly give you a feel of how the locals think and feel about their town. I DO miss the lower cost of living but I do not miss the constant sports talk, and a lot of people there are not fond of "DC" for political reasons.

I have several gfs who relocated to cincy. My impressions:

-almost everyone grew up there, went to school there, is raising a family there. Hard to find people who spent meaningful time elsewhere
-travel, especially foreign, is not a huge priority
-massive drinking
-once people hit the baby years, they are totally obsessive about babies and everything is about family time
-hard to make new friends as it is very insular

This is exactly why DH and I moved from Cincinnnati to DC. Especially if you like city living vs. suburbs, you cannot get the type of life you have in a city like DC or NYC in Cincinnati or any other major Ohio city (I also lived in Columbus for 6 years). We wanted our children exposed to culture and diversity that Cincinnati cannot provide, but DC does. To us, we felt surrounded by the culture of sports talk and drinking and driving.

Can someone give some concrete examples of how the culture and diversity of DC has enriched their lives (perhaps the PP)? It seems like people in DC give a lot of lip service to diversity yet only hang out with people from the same SES.

Diversity might not be important to white middle to upper middle class people, but if you moved to a city where your kids were the only (Black/Indian/East Asian/etc.) kids in the class, and furthermore their classmates had basically never been around any minorities ever, how do you think that would affect your kids? What about if your family was mixed-race or LGBT? You might think "Well there are no places like that anymore in the U.S." but there definitely are and most of them are in the Midwest. And maybe there are neighborhoods that are majority African-American but they might not be safe or might have poor schools so a middle class AA family from DC wouldn't want to move there anyway, or they'd move there and send kids to private or Catholic school where they're, again, the only Black kids in the class.

[Anonymous]

Getting out of the rat race and slowing your pace down sounds lovely especially if you have little children. I understand your wanting to do this. I suggest st louis if you want to be near a big city, or just go for it and move back to you dhs hometown.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We left Cincinnati in 2007. I would not return but my circumstance is 100% different than the OP's. I am in a minority group and in my hometown the level of segregation is such that its difficult to prove you are competent. I also found I was living in a area with either have not's or basic middle class suburbianites with connections to certain neighborhoods and HIGH SCHOOLS!. Here the question "Where did you go to school?"---it is all about HS and class and upbringing. It is hard for outsiders to fit in.

My husband is from St. Louis and never really fit in the Cincy clique. We got tired of the low paying "Bank" jobs that came our way. We were "odd", because we wanted more and finding a job there IS a real struggle.

OP, I suggest you go on City Data and look under forums for any area you find interest in. The threads will quickly give you a feel of how the locals think and feel about their town. I DO miss the lower cost of living but I do not miss the constant sports talk, and a lot of people there are not fond of "DC" for political reasons.

I have several gfs who relocated to cincy. My impressions:

-almost everyone grew up there, went to school there, is raising a family there. Hard to find people who spent meaningful time elsewhere
-travel, especially foreign, is not a huge priority
-massive drinking
-once people hit the baby years, they are totally obsessive about babies and everything is about family time
-hard to make new friends as it is very insular

This is exactly why DH and I moved from Cincinnnati to DC. Especially if you like city living vs. suburbs, you cannot get the type of life you have in a city like DC or NYC in Cincinnati or any other major Ohio city (I also lived in Columbus for 6 years). We wanted our children exposed to culture and diversity that Cincinnati cannot provide, but DC does. To us, we felt surrounded by the culture of sports talk and drinking and driving.

Can someone give some concrete examples of how the culture and diversity of DC has enriched their lives (perhaps the PP)? It seems like people in DC give a lot of lip service to diversity yet only hang out with people from the same SES.

I agree.

Being middle class in DC (in the city) vs. middle class in Cincinnati (in an inner ring suburb), I've found that I'm surrounded by more diverse people in general. There's a lot to be said about just being able to walk outside your house and see people on the street who are both like you and different from you. People of all races use the public transportation here in DC. In Ohio, you're stuck in your car to get anywhere, and walking around to explore means going to the mall or a strip mall (which, I suppose is a suburban thing in general, and not unique to Ohio).

In DC there are are a lot of free events for kids, where kids of all backgrounds come together, even at the library or at one of the Smithsonians. I like the idea of my child being exposed to people from other cultures and countries. In DC it's not uncommon to meet families transplanted from other countries. The DC public schools also have more diversity than similar neighborhoods in Cincinnati.

Being Jewish, It's also not uncommon to be around other Jews here in DC, but also to meet non-Jews who have actually met a Jew before. In many areas of Ohio, even people who work in white collar jobs in the city, I've met people who have never met a Jew before and were discriminatory towards me.

Now, if you live in some suburbs of VA or MD, you may have the same experience I did in Cincinnati.

[Anonymous]

The only question I have to OP is why?
I understand someone wants to move to Midwest for promotion etc but you seem to have good life here

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The only question I have to OP is why?
I understand someone wants to move to Midwest for promotion etc but you seem to have good life here

She explained her husband wanted to spend more time with his children and to work for himself. Also it seems like they'd like to have a slower pace in life and be around family more.

[Anonymous]

I'd got with Madison, close to major cities and your family