Help us pick a new city to move to

June 26, 2024 12:11 PM

My partner and I have begun a 5-year plan to save up and plan for a move to an as-yet-undetermined new city. We’ve started a list of a few cities/areas to check out, but I want to hear what else is out there! Does our unicorn perfect city exist? Parameters inside.

Current situation: We live in Chicago in a northwest side neighborhood that is affordable but car-centric. I love Chicago with all my heart, but it is increasingly disappointing in terms of the things that need to function to keep a large city like this livable. Or maybe I’m just getting old. CTA is unreliable, car traffic is a nightmare, and we bike a lot but it feels increasingly dangerous and unpleasant due to aforementioned car traffic. So we end up staying home and not engaging with the things that make this city great (or seeing our friends).

Looking for: a small to mid-sized city where we could purchase a detached house in the city (not suburbs). We also want a neighborhood where there are restaurants, cafes, bars, and a grocery store in reasonable (less than 2 miles), walkable distance.

Budget: Assuming our current house doesn’t lose value and our careers stay on track, we should be able to afford 450-500k. Maybe more depending on career stuff and interest rates, but 5 years is a long time so this is not a completely strict requirement within reason.

Transportation: We have one car that gets minimal use, and both have currently remote or remote-friendly jobs. We do NOT want to have to buy a second car. This city should have good public transit (buses are fine) and bike infrastructure/bike friendliness.

Climate: Chicago is as warm as we’d like in terms of summers. Cold winters are fine; in fact, four seasons are ideal.

Intangibles: As a GenX/Xennial childless couple, we’d like someplace where we wouldn’t feel too old or out of place and be able to make friends and feel a part of an inclusive community. Diversity (age, race, LGBTQ, etc) really helps with this for us.

We’re looking to head east, not west. Our current list includes:
- Buffalo (I was born and raised in WNY)
- Pittsburgh
- Hudson Valley area (not sure what specific cities are worth looking at here)
- Ithaca (might be too small but I went to Cornell and love the Finger Lakes)
- Burlington VT
- Portland ME

I’m looking for new cities to add to the list, but I’m also open to comments on the current list if you think any of them are a bad or good fit based on what I've described here.

posted by misskaz to Home & Garden (27 answers total)

Ann Arbor, Michigan, might work for you, especially if you don't mind the cold.

How big a grocery store do you want to walk to? Kerrytown has a small grocery store, and that's more in the kind of neighborhood you're looking for. There's also a food co-op in that area. But it's not the same as going to something like Kroger.
posted by FencingGal at 12:19 PM on June 26

You might consider Cleveland, OH and its suburbs. Lakewood is a suburb, and Cleveland neighborhoods Ohio City, Edgewater and Gordon Square. Public transit is very dependent on location, but one car should be very doable without kids.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 12:42 PM on June 26

I've been thinking about the same thing, it's all a bit half-baked at the moment, but I did put together a little webpage to try and work through the data. (Change the numbers at the top to change how much of the different columns contribute to the city's score. ) I'm adding more data sources as I have time scrape more sites for data 😅. Hopefully adding min/max temperatures, better art scene numbers, James Beard award count, etc.

As you look into different cities, I've found Weather Spark to be very helpful in comparing climate.
posted by gregr at 12:46 PM on June 26

Perspective of someone who also hates car reliance, grew up and went to school and have family in small towns on the east coast, lived in NYC, Chicago, and the midwest:

If slightly north and west is ok, consider Madison or Milwaukee. Madison is very bikeable, there's enough going on with people and organizing and bars and restaurants to stay busy at all ages, and close enough to MKE and Chicago via bus if you need a city fix. I've visited Milwaukee a bunch and I don't think life will ever bring me to live there, but I would if I had the opportunity. Downside: the rest of Wisconsin's conservative politics.

The "core" of Burlington is tiny; more like small town than small city. Demographic stats here. You might fall in love, but I recently visited again and it's smaller than I remembered. And starting to suburban sprawl.

Hudson Valley: public transport is challenging once you get outside the NYC metro (stretching it to even say north of Westchester). And if you're in the NYC metro, finding a detached home in your budget will be challenging. Maybe check out Tarrytown.

Agree with Pittsburgh (lively, transport, not sure about how great a bike culture it has), and the suggestion above of Cleveland.
posted by paradeofblimps at 12:59 PM on June 26

Happily returned to Buffalo. It's turning around. Much development downtown and the fruit belt area. nd the riverfront, Canal side area. Still need a car in the suburbs I think.
posted by Czjewel at 1:02 PM on June 26

Hudson Valley, check out Kingston, NY

I happen to think Buffalo is a very underrated city. My ex is from the area and I was very willing to move there.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 1:03 PM on June 26

Kalamazoo shows up on "best cities" lists for livability. I'd consider it myself, but not interested in the cold.
posted by adamrice at 1:05 PM on June 26

Providence, RI might work for your requirements! The bus and bike infrastructure isn't great, but there are a lot of people trying really hard to make them better. You can definitely function day-to-day without a car. The restaurant scene here is incredible, because Johnson & Wales grads often stick around for a while. Take a look at Vogue's guide to the city, which was published last week and I'm honestly a little mad that they spilled the beans on my fave brunch place.
posted by pollytropos at 1:11 PM on June 26

My family lives exactly your desired life in St. Paul, MN, right down to the single car that we don't use very much. But I'm not sure, in 5 years, that there will be many good options under 500k. We paid 395k in 2022 for a house in a majority-minority neighborhood (i.e. many white people wouldn't consider living here because of 'crime' and 'schools' so you can get good value) but we were a bit lucky even then, the rest of the similarly priced stuff that we looked at in our neighborhood needed six figures of renovations. So maybe it's right to be looking at smaller cities.
posted by Kwine at 1:15 PM on June 26

Also seconding Milwaukee. It seems a lot like Cleveland to me, both in its problems and its delights. It's colder, but the summers are so beautiful.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 2:18 PM on June 26

I've lived carfree (bike commuter/transit user) in Chicago and several other cities and have similar priorities, other than homeownership. Based on my experiences in two of the cities mentioned:

Pittsburgh: Some potentially relevant neighborhoods might be Friendship, Bloomfield, East Liberty, (not sure if single family homes in Shadyside or Lawrenceville would hit your price range), Point Breeze, Squirrel Hill. The busses are decent, though the airport bus is a disappointment (the airport's far away, and there's a single relatively infrequent bus that goes there, with an annoying detour to the Ikea parking lot en route). Definitely important to pick your neighborhoods with bus routes in mind, though, since the topography (rivers, hills) and smaller population mean that options can get scarce in some areas, especially during non-commuting hours. Bike infrastructure is popping up, and there's an active bike advocacy group (BikePGH) & city bike system (POGOH) but it isn't as well-developed as it is in Chicago, and there are fewer bike commuters. While there may be less traffic than some areas of Chicago, drivers are probably less comfortable with bikers, and there are some roads that are quite unpleasant/that really encourage poor driving, so I don't know that I'd consider it a less stressful biking experience, and I suspect you'll find that to be true in many smaller cities. Compared to the Chicago grid, the topography also means you can't always rely on ducking into a parallel quieter residential street. While the airport's a pain, Amtrak's got the Capitol Limited and the Pennsylvanian lines downtown (connections to Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, NYC, DC). Winter's probably a little warmer than Chicago.

Cleveland: Agreed on the suggested neighborhoods, though I might toss in Tremont too. Note that Lakewood is technically a suburb, but it's an old inner-ring one that's densely populated and stretches across the lakeshore pretty close to downtown and is very integrated with the city proper - don't write it off! As with Pittsburgh, there's more bike infrastructure starting to show up, but it's not everywhere (and some areas of Cleveland are less dense/more sprawling, which doesn't help). There is an advocacy group (Bike Cleveland). Compared to Pittsburgh's T, the Rapid covers a little more of the city (though it's nowhere near the level of the CTA), but the bus network is probably sparser (considering not just the number of lines but frequency). I have less personal experience with transit/biking in Cleveland, though, since when I head back to see family, they're car-only. Probably beats out Pittsburgh culturally on a number of axes (better music scene, better food scene) - it's a slightly bigger city. Getting in and out of the city is a bit easier: the airport's closer in and directly accessible via the Rapid, and both the Lakeshore Limited and the Capitol Limited Amtrak lines run through the city, though at inconvenient hours (connections to Chicago, Rochester, Erie, Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany, Boston, NYC, Pittsburgh, DC). If there's anything you liked about living along Lake Michigan, Lake Erie's probably got something similar to offer, and the weather will be familiar but with a bit more lake effect snow. Downside: the rest of Ohio.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 3:14 PM on June 26

Ann Arbor fits your criteria except that housing is pricey - there is more being built all the time but in 5 years I suspect your numbers won't get what you want. It's livable, walkable with lots of protected bike lanes and decent bus transit.
posted by leslies at 5:01 PM on June 26

I have similar values to you and was also going to mention Madison, although you live so close that you may already know if it’s a fit and there may be a reason it’s not on your list. Transit is the big asterisk here — I used to be a heavy user of the buses, but there was a big redesign and it’s had mixed reviews. But bike infrastructure’s not bad. Diversity is another asterisk - Madison thinks well itself but not really deservedly so and I get the sense that black people here in particular are not super comfortable (though there IS a community). Cheap to visit though and see!
posted by eirias at 5:43 PM on June 26

misskaz, am I you? Are you me? I'm also a Buffalonian (Williamsvillian) who went to Cornell! I only have a few points of reference for you, but it might help.

I was just in Ithaca a few weeks ago for reunion, and talked to some friends who live there. Great restaurants, great cultural opportunities, but Ithaca has been having a LOT of difficulty with public transportation. Apparently, they can't find enough drivers, so just in the three days I was there, almost every bus my friend had hoped to take to her home (so she wouldn't have to keep driving her car) was canceled. (On the plus side, the app made it clear that it was canceled, so she wasn't out waiting in the rain, unaware.)

It's been my sense that Ithaca has a more expensive cost of living that you'd expect for such a small (if lovely) community. Per Zillow, the average Ithaca home value is $333,397, up 7.7%. Also, though it's not on your list, my friends who live there who aren't associated with CU or IC (including a friend whose son and DIL live there) have been having a lot of trouble establishing relationships with physicians. They're all retiring. (This may be a uniform post-COVID experience, but only my Ithaca peeps have been complaining.)

I am inclined to suggest Providence, RI. It's proximity to Boston means you'd have all the cultural and weather advantages, but the living expenses are not quite what they are in Boston. A friend of mine with a lot of your same concerns went to Brown (a 40 years ago) and is considering moving back to Providence with his husband because it has the intangibles you're seeking. (But I'm pretty sure they only have busses but not much in the way of serious light rail service.) Zillow says the average home cost is $393K.

As you know, Buffalo isn't a small/med city; it's pretty big but feels small, and like Chicago, you'll spend most of the time in your own neighborhood. If you really want to be *in* the city, there's a Wegmans on Amherst Street, the other side of Bidwell Parkway, beyond the history museum -- west of the Zoo, north of Elmwood Village. (I mean, there are other grocery stores from Tops to ethnic markets — it's definitely not a food desert — but why would you want anything but Wegmans?)

My mom still lives in the suburbs, but the sense I get from her is that it's still a far less expensive city that most. The airport can get you anywhere; you can also take the train. But for local travel, rapid transit is free (above ground) downtown but the whole city only has one line, running the full length of Main Street (downtown) to UB's south campus and back again. (There's supposed to be an extension built to Niagara Falls Boulevard, but I don't think they've done anything since before the pandemic.) Zillow says the average home coast is $385K, but that was in Williamsville. If you aimed for a house in the Fruit Belt, the average is only $176K! So there's a LOT of price variation.

Go Big Red! ;-)
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 5:45 PM on June 26

I assume that if you live in Chicago you already will have considered and dismissed Milwaukee. Bay View, in southeastern Milwaukee, sounds very close to what you're looking for, except that...
Well - if you can stay in Bay View, you're fine; public transit commuting to the rest of central Milwaukee is, I think, not bad; but the car traffic (in downtown and between downtown and suburbs) can be VERY BAD.

I am unsure whether to recommend it, just offering up those data points (for better and for worse).
posted by Jeanne at 6:05 PM on June 26

Team Buffalo here. I'm a homeowner who lives on the west side in a double. Our neighborhood is very diverse with a mix of renters and homeowners as well as a variety of cultures and ethnicities. The local cooperative grocery store, a wide variety of restaurants, boutiques, shops with locally-made items, an Olmsted park, library, nursery, hardware store, seasonal farmers market, bank, and world-class bakery (in the Five Points area) are all within walking distance of my home. Highly recommend.
posted by Scout405 at 7:22 PM on June 26

I live in suburban Madison and also think Madison sounds like a good fit. The bus system revamp has been a freaking nightmare but it's supposed to get much better in August.
posted by notjustthefish at 10:44 PM on June 26

This city should have good public transit (buses are fine) and bike infrastructure/bike friendliness.

As TWKoC mentions, like a lot of other places, Ithaca’s public transport is not doing so great at present, with a shortage of both drivers and buses. There’s a healthy biking culture, but we’re somewhat lacking in infrastructure, and have a fair number of hills.
posted by zamboni at 6:01 AM on June 27

Burlington, VT or Portland, ME.
posted by terrapin at 6:40 AM on June 27

Vermont is lovely and liberal overall but also very white.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 6:45 AM on June 27

Clevelander who has traveled quite a bit (altho not all that much in the last decade and very little since pandemic.)

Milwaukee, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh will "feel" pretty familiar, I think - there's a whole sort of Midwestern post-industrial city vibe that carries across this area, at least partly due to architecture and economics and the various waves of immigrants who settled and built these cities across the 19th & 20th centuries. IOW, I bet your first impressions, especially if you visit in person, would be "Oh! It's like a smaller Chicago!" This may or may not be a good thing for you.

I will remind you that Buffalo snowfall is a whole other level - I still regularly drive through there around Thanksgiving and it's a coin flip as to whether I'll run into dry roads and clear visibility or Terrifying Blizzard Whiteout.

Also, like Chicago, all these cities have a bit of sprawl, so there's pockets of "15-minute city" walkable/bikeable areas but you might (probably will) need a car to get to and from these pockets and neighborhoods.

Cleveland-specific tips: As has been alluded to above, we have named neighborhoods (like Ohio City, Old Brooklyn, University Circle) that are within the city borders, and inner-ring suburbs (like Lakewood, Brooklyn, and Cleveland Heights) that are technically separate entities but are de facto "Cleveland" neighborhoods. (Cleveland was not very aggressive when it came to absorbing its neighbors as it grew.) This can be quite confusing to non-natives (and some natives), so keep a map tab and a Wikipedia tab open if you start checking out the area, and don't necessarily discount places that don't have "Cleveland" as the address.

Public transportation is . . . OK. The infrastructure and scheduling is still centered around shuttling commuters downtown and back, either for work or sports and entertainment, so the ease and viability of using it really depends on where you're starting from and where you want to go. It's been quite reliable when I've used it, it's just that getting from, like, Lakewood in the west to University Circle in the east is minimum an hour even in the best case. But it's a 15-20 minute drive in a car.

I'm not a bicyclist so I don't know much about it, besides the general note that there are an increasing number of bike lanes, and plans for many more. We do have an extensive park system, so if you're interested in biking for fun and exercise more than transportation we've got you covered.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:34 AM on June 27

gregr, where are you getting the data for your site?
posted by orrnyereg at 9:11 AM on June 27

Gee, no one has talked about Portland, Maine? I'm gonna talk about Portland.

Pros:
- low cost of living
- 2 hour drive/train ride to Boston
- lots of culture
- lots of coffee and beer
- great food scene
- decent biking culture
- a surprising amount of public transit throughout Maine
- less white than you'd think
- charming as all hell

Cons:
- a shocking number of homeless people
- the public transit is having the same challenges that public transit nationwide is having
- still way whiter than the nation in general
- you might be able to do one car, but you definitely can't do no cars

You are also likely to be younger than the average age in the state, which is 45.
posted by rednikki at 12:49 PM on June 27

orrnyereg, it's coming from all over. It's been really messy to try to put together.

Base data is all cities in the US with more that 100k people from Wikipedia. Cost of living comes from several sources Economic Policy Institute, Payscale, AdvisorSmith, Numbeo, and BestPlaces (in order of preference); different sources have different subsets of cities using those five sources that seem to cover all the cities on my list. James Beard awards come from their site. Arts Vibrancy comes from SMU DataArts Arts Vibrancy Map, which that data is based on counties rather than cities, so if a city is in multiple counties, I use the proportion of the city that's in the county to proportionally assign the score. Park Walkability comes out of Trust for Public Land, I'm using the percentage of residents that live within a 10-minute walk of a par (tried Walk Score initially, but for cities it seems to too heavily weight the downtown). Climate risk is from the table at the bottom of the ProPublica article, summing their 6 scores to generate the score for each county and then going from county to city as noted above.

I am hoping to build out a little cleaner site and have a splash-screen to explain where the data is coming from and what do do with the numbers at the top but haven't gotten there yet. Just as a disclaimer, I am not a statistician (IANAS? IANYS??), so there's probably some methodological issues, but seems to work as expected?

I can share spreadsheets or code or whatever if you're interested.
posted by gregr at 12:39 PM on June 28

I live in Portland. The peninsula is very walkable and checks every one of your amenity boxes, but 500K will not get you a detached house. It will get you a nice home off-peninsula, but you lose some walkability. I think many neighborhoods are excellent but you will likely need a car for groceries etc. The buses are decent, inexpensive, and clean, but coverage might lack depending on your neighborhood. I grew up in the Midwest and lived in Chicago for awhile, I found fall and winter familiar, spring arriving too late, and summers a glorious revelation. Highly recommend, feel free to memail any questions.
posted by donnagirl at 7:43 PM on June 30

Just to say that if you're thinking about Buffalo, you should also think about some of the inner-ring notionally-suburban areas. Kenmore, Snyder, Eggertsville, Tonawanda south of Sheridan, etc. We used to live on Bernhardt in Snyder and could walk to several good restaurants, a couple of more divey places, drug stores, grocery store that's good enough for a "we need some...", etc.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:35 AM on July 9

Hee, I grew up in Tonawanda (at least until 4th grade when we moved to Clarence/East Amherst). I'm sure it's changed a lot since the 80s though!
posted by misskaz at 8:09 AM on July 9