Awesome Living in Des Moines: The with Kids Edition

October 14, 2015 4:01 PM

Mr. Songs_About_Rainbows is interviewing for a job in Des Moines. What will we love about being in a Midwestern paradise? What should we be prepared to not like so much?

We have been living in an east coast small city we have never liked for eight years now.

Obviously, We are excited about a possible move. We are cooks and readers and museum lovers. We are also hikers, cross-country skiers and lovers of science. A farmer's market would be a dream come true. We don't like mean people, but we do like being around people different from ourselves.

We like to walk places but we don't mind driving occasionally. We don't love long commutes and we prefer to live near the city center.

We would love to use the public schools (we don't in our current city because they are rigid "teach to the test and nothing else" kinds of places.) We love public parks, especially if the community loves them too and doesn't treat them like trash dumps.

Is caucusing as awesome as we have heard?

Tell us how will we like Des Moines?

posted by songs_about_rainbows to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

You're going to love it! Des Moines is better right now than it's ever been before. There's more culture there right now (restaurants, arts, bars, etc.) than at any point in my life, and it remains a shockingly cheap place to live. There are several excellent farmers markets that are always well-stocked by the surrounding farms, a small-but-thriving downtown (the East Village), tons and tons of space and parks to go do stuff in, a few fun little neighborhoods, and a pretty great public school system. As a person raised there, I can say that Des Moines was and is a pretty great place to be a kid. Skywalks are one of humankind's greatest achievements and one of the few criticisms I will hear of Chicago is that they never took hold here. Iowa has the best sweet corn in the world.

Downsides: it's really, really homogenous. If you value diversity, it's not going to be a great fit. It's a fairly progressive state, but it's white as hell. Caucusing is...it's fine. You're going to be underwhelmed there. It's a driving city; East Village is pretty walkable and then everything else, you'll be driving. There is lots of parking, though. Um...it's behind the coasts/urban centers by five or so years on most trends, good and bad, although I've gotten the sense in recent visits that that gap is closing.

I love Iowa and Des Moines. If you end up there, I think you will too.
posted by protocoach at 4:28 PM on October 14, 2015

I know a couple from Virginia who live in Des Moines and have fallen in love with it. They are forever posting stuff about it on Facebook, like today's installment.
posted by 4ster at 5:00 PM on October 14, 2015

When I visited Des Moines in August, I was sitting in the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park (which is a world-class gem, with work by Louise Bourgeois, Olafur Eliasson, Sol Lewitt and other artists you've probably heard of), admiring the just-past-full moon and talking on the phone with my girlfriend while eating a delicious plate of peaches and sausage from the Hole in the Wall when I heard BRAP BRAP BRAP and something like this.

Then four pickups with two guys in each cab and five or six more in the bed and two full-size confederate flags each rolled into view past Yoshitomo Nara's "White Ghost". I was so shocked that I rose to my feet. I know I looked shocked, too, because a guy in the back of one of the trucks looked me in the eye, pointed, and guffawed. As a white guy who grew up in Michigan I'd felt the fear of racist violence exactly never before that point in my life, but I certainly felt it then--if that jackass had gotten out of that truck and said so much as a single word to me I would have punched him in his fucking face, and then he and his friends would have given me the beating of my life.

The next week, I realized that this had happened on the day Dylann Roof entered his plea of not guilty.

The Great Western Trail, which runs about 20 miles between Martensdale to Waterworks Park in south Des Moines, is a great ride if you're a cyclist. There's also excellent camping with electricity, showers, etc. about a 45 minutes south of town at the Lake Ahquabi State Park, or, if you prefer more rustic campgrounds, another 45 minutes southeast Stephens State Forest.
posted by pullayup at 5:56 PM on October 14, 2015

I used to work for a company that had a significant office in Des Moines that I visited regularly.
The NYC'ers rolled their eyes at times, but there were several really good restaurants and back then (about 5 years ago) the East Village was really coming up.
The people I interacted tended to be lovely, and it's a big enough/competitive enough city to have a reasonably competent workforce.
posted by dotparker at 7:28 PM on October 14, 2015

The biggest thing I noticed about Des Moines is that the people who came from other places loved it. The people who were raised there tended to want to get out as soon as possible.
posted by lester at 8:12 PM on October 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I love Des Moines. I get there as often as I can from Kansas City. I have some great friends that have moved there from Baltimore and they have fallen in love with it. They do acknowledge the diversity issue but housing is cheap, the people are nice and, if all else fails, they have Zombie Burger.
posted by extraheavymarcellus at 8:26 PM on October 14, 2015

Pros:
DM has an excellent farmers' market during the growing season.

Ice cream at Bauder Pharmacy
Beaverdale books is a lovely indie store.

Fleur Cinema screens art house movies.

(These last two were not around when I was at the Writers' Workshop in the early 90s).

Cons:

Winter temps of-70F WITH windchill.

Hyperpseudofriendliness from the fundamentalist Christians
posted by brujita at 10:19 PM on October 14, 2015

The Des Moines Botanical Center is nice, if you're the sort of person who likes those.
posted by Spathe Cadet at 11:15 PM on October 15, 2015