Fair warning, though, real estate one inch outside the borders of Detroit proper are beginning to get unaffordable for ordinary people again. FSM help you if you think Ann Arbor would be cool, you can’t rent a closet for less than $1600/mo anywhere near downtown.
The days of the $100 tear-down are pretty much over.
@Quinn_Skylark: There’s no usable mass transit in the entire Detroit metro area (srsly, bus stop three houses down from mine is completely useless unless you believe traveling 6 miles should take a full hour). My SO works in Cleveland during the week, he says it’s worse than the worst areas of Detroit. Milwaukee is pretty good. You’d be near a big lake, have access to great cheese, and lots of beer options. If you do, head over to Racine and send me some cringle. Raspberry, please. I grew up in MSTP, highly recommend it. Lakes everywhere, good beer, not so much on the cheese, but you’re a pretty darn short drive from Wisconsin.
I know there’s a huge amount of construction in London (and Toronto) but I really love visiting the city. I tolerate LA. Since you could live anywhere, I’m not sure why pick California.
Pittsburgh is nice…housing prices are still pretty reasonable, many very good school systems, compact downtown, great universities, and one of the best restaurant scenes in the country.
But good luck on your move, hope it all goes well.
That’s a fair point- the freeways are terrible to look at and often the nexus of the worst/ugliest necessities of a major metropolitan center. But they’re not the city.
Yeah… and you’re stuck in the Valley, too. Wouldn’t bother me (I lived in North Hollywood and Burbank for several years without much complaint… hot weather doesn’t bug me), but there is still that stigma when you deal with folks from over the hill.
Fuck that place. It has one season (too fucken hot), visiting anything out of Florida takes for-fucken-ever on the insane-train that is I-95, or the slightly gentler insane-train of I-75. Throw in the ever-present Florida Man with more than a touch of bible-beltish folks and the one cajun place in town does not nearly live up to the standard. Toll roads, mosquitos, trafficus horribilis in spades with the motorist deathtrap that is I-4 running right up the middle, hell no a hundred times over.
Lake Eola is, however, lovely.
This is more like it. Beautiful city, crazy good arts scene, crazy good beer/bar scene, gets great music acts, is near enough to big cities if your weekends run that way, outstanding outdoors everywhere…I’m amazed the city hasn’t been overrun yet.
Seconded for all the same reasons–lots to do and doing it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
As for L.A., too much town for my taste. San Diego, on the other hand, is lovely, as is northern Cali. But instead of breaking off and slipping into the sea, I think Cali might just shrivel up like a salted prune–ain’t no water left in them thar hills.
The 80s to the early 90s. There were always expensive places, but there were plenty of relatively inexpensive housing mixed in as well. It was bound to explode in price though considering where it physically is.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if cory popped in and yelled, “psych suckas! I’m just big data minin’ ya’ll, hope you like your twice daily Papa Johns mailers disguised as foreclosure notices!!!”
The issue for me is that such cities will have one employer for my field, at best. A job change means a home sale. In Boston, where I am, a job change means a different subway stop in the morning.
My wife’s family lived in the Malibu Colony when she was born, circa 1972. That was affordable (hell, cheap!) back then. I’ll have to look up their address, see what it goes for these days. It was on the beach, so it’ll be steeeeep.
Thanks IEK. I’d lay bets on Detroit’s recovery. A good friend designed the new Rosa Parks bus depot there. Artists are beginning to abandon Brooklyn (where $1600 for a shoebox sounds like a deal) for Motor City. Galapagos, the art collective, abandoned their Brooklyn digs for acres of land, an old factory, where they can build performance and gallery space, an indoor lake, a huge art-endeavor for the same amount as a retail storefront in Williamsburg.
Frustration mounts. I make my living in marketing, am not an artist, so NYC offers the green bread I need. But my fantasy is to move to an affordable city, make NYC bread, and be able to buy all the books I want (and to have the walls to support the shelves upon which they’ll sit). Telecommuting! The future is now. Milwaukee here I come. Husker Du! Mary Tyler Moore! Love is all around, indeed.
I’ve lived in LA recently, and now live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I gotta say - if you have to leave for the West Coast, perhaps you really should consider the Bay Area.
