Glad it worked out for her. It’s important to note that she had some serious advantages going in: most importantly, she’s a native of the region with an existing support network; she’s also a cisgender white person, which I’ve heard counts a lot in the Midwest; she’s an educated creative-class person who could only make the kind of gross income she does because she established herself by spending a number of years in big expensive coastal cities and because she’s still doing remote work in some of them.
tl-dr; version is that this kind of move, while great for her, isn’t going to work for everyone. Same goes for staying in your midwestern hometown.
I’ve heard this a lot from people in mid-sized and small cities. The rent for that loft conversion may seem like a steal for someone who’s lived in Seattle, but for a local it’s far more expensive than what they’re used to and it’s driving up market-rate rents in the hip new neighbourhood. In a sense people like the author are unwittingly acting as export agents for the kind gentrification we see in large, desirable cities.
I’m now as West as West gets, without leaving the mainland.
But “Midwest” is still a misnomer for Ohio, which is physically nowhere near the middle or the West; it just wasn’t one of the original 13 colonies.
(We were the 17th state in the Union.)
I always argue that Ohio is a weird case because culturally the different parts of the state are different parts of the country. The northern edge of the state was historically settled from New England and has stronger ties to the Northeast. The southwestern area was closely tied by trade to the deeper southern states through the Mississippi river. The southeast is Appalachian and a lot the western and central state were shaped by the same agrarian influences that people generally think of for the Midwest. The split isn’t just history, it shows up in accents, voting patterns, and residential relocations.
So am I (in Maryland), as well, apparently. I guess I never really thought of it as being Southern – normally people put it in a “Mid-Atlantic” region which sounds classy like the quasi-British accent people like George Plimpton used to affect.
I grew up in Ohio and always thought it was odd to be considered part of the Midwest. Stranger still is meeting the occasional Pennsylvanian who considers Pittsburgh to be the east coast.
Lumping Ohio and the Dakotas together into something called “Midwest” is just about useless. If/when I become emperor, there will be a “Great Plains” for the western formerly Midwest states, and a “Great Lakes” for the eastern group around the…you guessed it…Great Lakes. Easy peasy, and all our problems are solved. All of them.
This is definitely one of those if-it-works-for-you-then-awesome cases. My freelance work is completely online, so I could work equally well in Ohio, NYC, or East Armpit, Nebraska if I wanted to. If my goal was to buy a house, I’d move to the midwest in a heartbeat – my sister just bought a very nice new house with a lake behind it and a nice yard for about $180k. Where I’m at, a house down the street recently sold a floor of the home (no yard, one bedroom, one bath) for $550k.
She didn’t say that. I didn’t claim she said that. I’m expanding the perspective on the article’s rosy picture (based primarily on financial cost-benefit analysis) by commenting on it in this comments section.
That’s the reason I worked there from time to time. Wilmington can be an easier commute from the PA suburbs than driving into Philadelphia. However, I visit DE and towns in MD to visit cousins. Based on that, it seems like Maryland is definitely more Southern (even in towns near the same latitude).
And that one funny roadside on 20?