Give Salt Lake City a look. The walkability is questionable unless you live downtown and the art and music scene, while extant isn’t large, but it meets your other criteria pretty well.
I avoided Salt Lake for a long time but had to go out there for work and found it one f my favorite places to go (admittedly, my other regular destinations were Sunnyvale, CA, Chandler, AZ, Orlando, FL, and Littleton, CO, so traffic, heat, humidity, and strip malls) and while the state is heavily Mormon Salt Lake itself is more moderate. The 2002 Winter Olympics brought changes to the liquor laws, improvements to the airport, and a new wave of dining options, and for outdoor recreation you’ve got mountains just to the East and the Big Five National Parks along with a bunch of National Forests and state parks all within a few hours drive. Think Denver before all of us Californians ruined it by emigrating.
Charleston is a nice place to visit (if you’re white) but I wouldn’t want to live there. It is pretty much the epitome of the genteel antebellum charm facade covering a profound degree of racism and xenophobia, which includes any ‘carpetbaggers’ moving there from “The North”, e.g. anywhere that isn’t the Deep South. (When your definition of “The North” included Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas you know you are in Lost Cause Country.) Unless you are comfortable living in that kind of environment I’d cross it off the list.
I’m going to throw Atlanta into the mix. While it is “The South”, it is distinctly the opposite in many ways. It seems to be very vibrant, not expensive, and on the upward swing economically. I’m not sure about a lot of your checklist, but just thought I would mention it.
You can get a nice condo for under 500k on Oahu. It’s the other costs of living which make it so expensive to live there. Even though you ruled it out that’d be my vote if I was in a similar position. It’s an amazing place to live.
Phoenix has insane summer heat with many weeks in triple digit temps, and except for a few neighborhoods like Old Town Scottsdale and Mill Street District in Tempe it is anything but walkable. It’s basically an enormous sprawl in the middle of the desert where nothing natural should live,
I’ve been hearing nice things about Huntsville from friends who’ve moved there - most affordable city in the USA, apparently. The aerospace and tech industries and the uni make it very uncharacteristic for the South, is what they tell me. Quite cosmopolitan.
But walkability is a bit of a crapshoot. Highly depends on where you live, apparently.
Anyone from Huntsville want to confirm or repudiate my friends’ opinions?
I’ve never lived there but used to travel often for work, and knew numerous people that lived there. Your perceptions mirror my own. I wouldn’t say it has a great airport in terms of service but it is a secondary hub that you can pretty much get anywhere with a connection as long as you’re not in a big hurry or need multiple flight options each day, and it feels more like suburban Virginia than Alabama thanks to all of the transplants and all of the ‘culture’ they’ve brought with them, although a lot of that culture is shopping malls and entertainment complexes. The biggest problem with Huntsville is there really isn’t anywhere to go from there; the nearest city worth visiting is Nashville, and the lack of a straight shot to Atlanta makes that an overnight trip at minimum. If that and mosquitos don’t bother you, it’s fine. It fits the o.p. criteria as well as anything else mentioned so far.
Isn’t Huntsville also pretty racist? I would imagine that it has the same problems as Charleston - with less psuedo “charm.” But it would be nice to be wrong.
Huntsville is relatively progressive because so many people from the Northeast and elsewhere have moved there, and that’s not a new trend; the Army set up its post-war research in rocketry at Redstone Arsenal, the Missile Defense Agency moved their headquarters to Huntsville in 2009(?), and it has long been known as “Rocket City” for being the quiet southern hub of aerospace development. As a result, Huntsville itself is pretty diverse and has a lot of amenities. They areas of northern Alabama outside of Huntsville, on the other hand…
You’re wrong on the walkability, and your final statement
I mean, what do you consider “walkable”? How far? Because if you’re expecting to walk from outside the downtown in the areas of single family homes into downtown, well, that lets out just about any city over 2000 people. But if you want to live within walking distance of…whatever it is you want to walk to (church, store, theater) you totally are able to.
If the OP is working remotely, the “excessive heat” doesn’t mean anything. You stay inside during the day, and go out after dark.
But hey, doesn’t bother me if everybody just stays away. No one should move here. It’s a dangerous place of racist repubs, rattlesnakes, MS-13, 130 degree days, and not a park or a bit of green to be seen withing 500 miles. Yep.
Like I said, it’s a great place for the undead. Especially if they can transform into a bat and fly.
There are places I quite like in Phoenix; it has my favorite Irish pub west of the Mississippi (Rúla Búla), and easy access to Sonoma and Flagstaff. But even the natives admit how miserable it is in summer. As for walkability, believe it or not there are cities even in the Unites States where one can walk, bike, and/or take easy public transit to grocery stores, restaurants, et cetera. Phoenix is not one of those places; it is very much an urban sprawl specifically built around the concept of using your car to go anywhere. It’s like someone looked at West Covina and decided it was the zenith of urban development.
