The Lansing area isn’t bad. You’ve got East Lansing for a college town and diversity, and the southern half of Clinton County (Dewitt, especially) is really nice. You’re two hours from Lake Michigan and there are smaller lakes all over the place on which to build a house. Plus there’s the Knob Hill Tavern…but that may be more of a “me” thing. Sparrow Health has just been merged with UofM hospitals, and Henry Ford is 90 minutes to the east for those quirky cardiac rarities.
West Michigan has great hospital systems. Downtown Grand Rapids has what’s referred to as the Medical Mile (maybe 30 minutes from Holland). But those health care systems extend into Holland/the lakeshore, and Holland itself has Holland Hospital and all of their affiliates and clinics. My recently retired in-laws moved to Holland from South Florida two years ago and they’ve both needed health services (pops for a mini stroke, mom for skin cancer), and they’ve both been very happy with the level and convenience of treatment. This isn’t podunk-level health care.
Can’t speak for Traverse City’s healthcare system, as it’s a bit north of me.
My statements/assumptions about smaller communities and medical care come from ignorance. I have lived in large metro areas all my life - Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Portland. I honestly have no idea what living in a small community is like. I’m thinking about being 80 years old and having some major medical issue, but living hours away from a major city…
I guess that’s kind of silly now that I think about it. There are obviously millions of elderly people who don’t live in or near big cities. So I guess I’m being unreasonable by focusing on Duluth and Green Bay. I will rethink this!
I’m in Kent County, MI just 25 min from downtown Grand Rapids. Living the salt free life on an inland lake. GR has gone through a bit of a renaissance in the time I’ve lived here. There’s a lot happening for a city of its size. Alas no big water views but plenty of opportunities to view river and lake.
Hospital/medical systems Id rate 4/5 stars. Cardio/ transplants/ cancer treatments and a children’s hospital and rehabilitation hosp.
Michigan state government is all blue right now. RW crazies have always been here, unfortunately. But that just keeps the electorates engaged to stay ahead of the reds.
Michigan is kinda flat. Our glaciated history left behind some plains some hills and river valleys. Big dunes on Lake Michigan shoreline.
Traverse City, great to visit but idk too crowded too expensive, nurses always striking at Munson.
Id say for big water views and interesting terrain go to da UP! Marquette is remote but a thriving city in its own right. Those Lake Superior views are out of this world. Winter happens, maybe not as cold as Duluth and certainly snowier?
Lifelong Chicago(area)an. I’ve spent a ton of time vacationing in SW Mich. Other than the crazy red politics in some areas (including pockets in land) the area is great both along the coasts and inland if you want acreage/privacy. And there is a fantastic oldtime music scene along the Grand River.
For whatever reason, lately it seems I’ve been hearing more and more people relocating to Traverse City. Just a datapoint that it seems to be th emost popular at the moment.
If you tend to be liberal and if that matters to you, I second (third?) the suggestion that you consider NE.
Born and raised in Duluth. I now live about 10 miles north. Duluth is beautiful. But there is no perfect place. When it gets hot it’s usually humid. BUT we haven’t had a lot of humidity this year. The summer nights are usually cool so we rarely run AC. This week the morning lows were in the low 50s. We moved further from the lake because we probably get an extra month of summer weather. When there’s an east wind in the summer the temps can be 30 degrees different from our house to downtown Duluth. I’ve never noticed black flies. But there are mosquitos, deer flies and horse flies that can drive you bonkers. No matter where you live you are within 1/2 hour or less of many inland lakes, hiking trails, and biking trails. If you want a “real” winter, you’ll get it here. But it will also drag on into April. We had a record snowfall this past winter - 140". I think the last snowfall we had was at the end of April. Spring finally came in the middle of May. Spring is the shortest season. It goes from spring to summer pretty quickly…usually.
Essentia just finished building a beautiful medical campus. Your medical needs will be met! There are a lot of great restaurants and micro breweries if that’s your thing.
So if you like outdoor recreation, lakes, woods, beautiful autumns, cold/snowy winters, ever changing weather - (you will always be bundled up in the winter, but in the other seasons, no matter what the temp is when you leave your house it can change in an instance. ALWAYS have a jacket in your car) you will love Duluth. It’s a pretty nice place to live.
After 30 years in Southern California, I moved to Wisconsin and now live on the sandy shore of Lake Michigan in Door County, a few miles north of Qadgop. If I had a boat, I could visit QtM, shore-to-shore.
Door County has many of the advantages – and disadvantages – of Green Bay as others have mentioned. It is a peninsula, surrounded on three+ sides with fresh-water Lake Michigan, so the climate is more stable than inland Wisconsin or Michigan – warmer in Winter, cooler in Summer. The coolness is exaggerated if you are really close to the water – I can even detect the temperature change if I walk from the water’s edge up the bank to my house, a few hundred feet. For that reason, air conditioning isn’t a big concern except for a few days in August.
Door County, Wisconsin, is a playground and tourist area, drawing heavily from Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, and Green Bay, all within driving distance, or plane travel if you have your own plane (small airport)! It has many summer concerts, most outdoors and free, as professional musicians from elsewhere like to come here to work and play. The quality of entertainment and restaurants exceeds what you might expect from the small year-round population.
Door County is also a haven for those concerned with ecology, with several state and local parks and preserved natural areas. It has been called the boating capitol of the Midwest, since it is surrounded by water. If you like boats and water sports or fishing, this is the place to be!
Speaking as someone who moved from coastal California to inland New England, I would say that winter is simply a season to be prepared for.
If you live rurally, the salty filthy slush is not an issue – snow stays beautiful, only the main roads are salted around here. But you need to make sure you live right next to a regularly plowed road. Avoid a long driveway you will need to plow — not snow blow – at your own expense. Buy a house with a garage. That one thing is a major labor saver in winter.
Where we live, studded snow tires and 4WD cars are pretty standard – getting up the gravel road to or farm, some winter days, won’t happen if you don’t have both.
More heavy clothing than you would believe is an absolute necessity. But you adjust.
If you love snowy winters, you will probably have fun until about February, when you’ll be sick of it but there’s still a couple months to go.
Do not underestimate how muggy and hot the summers are everywhere in the US except the deserts, high mountains, and the west coast. If you’re a west coaster you will be unpleasantly surprised.
@GESancMan, if it’s financially viable, you might consider renting out your current house, and renting something in MI/WI/MN for a year to make sure you really like it before making the commitment. Visiting this summer is a good first step, but you really need an extended stay through all seasons to gauge if it’s the right move for you.
Also consider transportation. Being 10 minutes away from a hospital is pretty useless if you can’t get to said hospital when you need to. When you’re 50 it’s not something most people think about. Being 80 and unable to drive changes things. Having Uber/a taxi/public transport available that can get you to medical appointments or the hospital can literally be lifesaving.
Related, and you may have touched on this and I missed it, but also consider how easy ingress and egress from your home will be in the dead of winter. If you’re 80 and have limited mobility and can no longer drive, living in a home with a driveway that needs shoveling before you go anywhere is far different from living in a condo where the Uber driver can pull up into the porte-cochère and you can exit the building and into the car with no hassle.
I learned that living in Chicago, that January in brilliant sunshine, with a -5° wind blowing off the lake and making icicles in your beard, wasn’t really the bad part of winter; instead, that was six weeks of gray skies and frozen rain in March.
You forgot the world-renowned Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. I spent my childhood in the Cleveland area, but moved in 1983. Back in 2017, I came back to run the Cleveland Marathon, and I was utterly blown away by how pretty, vibrant, and exciting the city was. If I were single, and didn’t have all my family in the South, I’d move back in a shot. I cannot tell you how tremendously proud I am of my native city.
Living where QtM/Musicat live strikes me as about as good as it gets. I am truly envious.
As I near retirement, we’ve discussed this at length, and have decided that where we live - near a kid and grandkids, and near O’Hare, is what we wish. Tho, to be honest, as I age, living in a northern clime 12 months out of the year poses its challenges. The past couple of years, HARD LONG winter has been pretty much of a non-event here in the Chicago area. But for me, perfection would be being able to live someplace warmer from January thru March.
The OP would be well served to think long and hard about the type of winter he desires.
And yet, the mild winter we had this year still had me going crazy as we didn’t see the sun for months at a time. That combined with the 4:20 PM sunsets can drive anyone insane.
Yeah - far from ideal, but I’m able to handle that much better than when the snow piles up, turns grey, and sticks around for months. Or when it is single digits or lower for days at a time. My sister and I were able to bike many times each month - which greatly helps (what little is left of) my sanity.
And it drove me nuts, because I want a WINTER. The lack of sun isn’t so much a big deal, but I want cold and I want snow, dammit! This is what I signed up for and why I love it here. Seasons. Fucking seasons. Not whatever bullshit we have now.
I’m in Portland. I’m used to seeing the sun only during Summer. I prefer gray, cloudy skies to sunshine, anyway.
When you all tell me how humid it gets, I believe you. But I’m trying to reconcile what you’re saying with the various statistics I’m reading online. For example, according to Wikipedia, the average relative humidity in Portland in July is 62%. The average in places like Duluth, Green Bay, Holland, Muskegon, and so on, all appear to be in the 70% - 76% range. That doesn’t seem drastically worse than what I experience here. So what am I missing, or not understanding? Maybe I’m more acclimated to humidity than I realized? Or, maybe a 10 point increase is a lot?
You can definitely tell the difference in 10 points. Wet bulb temperature is also a better measure than humidity of how miserable it feels. I found wet bulb temps for Portland but not for the Midwest cities, but if you can, that will be better info.
But mostly, I think it’s a matter of worst case versus average. If Portland’s average is 62%, I bet it almost never gets over 70% in the heat of the day. In Michigan, you can get plenty in the 80-90% range. As I said above, I’m never bothered by humidity in Portland. I’m very bothered by it on the bad Midwest days.
Dew point vs humidity. Coastal Wisconsin isn’t the Texas Gulf Coast by any stretch of the imagination, but its worst days will definitely be somewhat worse than Western Oregon’s.
Average isn’t everything, the distribution also matters. Maybe in Portland there’s little variation around the average, so it’s say 55-70, whereas in the areas you’re looking at it’s 60-90, for example. But i think a lot of it is just bias in our memories - the humidity might not be 80-90 as much as we think, but we tend to remember the miserable days more.
When you sum up your wishes: snowy winters, big water, cool summers, liberal politics – it sounds a lot more like New England than the Great Lakes. Another option is high mountains like the Rockies or Sierras, but there no ocean up there.
In my opinion, Portland has one of the most livable climates in the US, as long as you are okay with never seeing the sun in the winter. To find a climate with snowy winters AND cool summers is going to be difficult, and you might have to figure out which wishes you are going to compromise on. You are not going to find a cool summer in the upper Midwest, not West Coast cool, so if that is non-negotiable I would definitely rent for a summer before investing.