Southwest Ohio here.
No mountains. No ocean. Harsh winters.
Most people don’t want to live here. They find it boring. “There’s nothing to do!” But I love it: lots of good-paying jobs in nearby cities, low taxes, low cost of living, lots of space, low crime rate, no traffic, lots of small, quaint villages, small colleges everywhere, no hurricanes or earthquakes, lots of ground water, and friendly people. I ain’t leaving.
The OP will understand some of this better than the general reader, for reasons that are obvious.
I grew up in Northeast Baltimore, a place called Gardenville. I went to the local Catholic school, then to a somewhat ritzy Catholic high school in Towson, MD. I spent my adult life until age 46 living in northern Baltimore, and then Towson.
In late 2000, I moved to a small city in southern Ohio, in the hilly, Appalachian part of Ohio.
Living in a small city of 20,000 people is very different from the life I knew before. Because I am upper middle class here, only because the cost of living is so low, I know all of the political leaders and business owners of our town. Anonymity, which I took for granted in Baltimore, is non-existent here. Every time I leave the house to run an errand, I see someone I know.
I live much closer to nature and to farming than before. I am surrounded by foothills, creeks and hiking trails that are five minutes from my home. Many of the prominent citizens in my area are farmers. This is all very different from Baltimore.
Born and raised in Alaska, so everywhere else is different to the point of being on another planet. I lived in many different parts of the world, but retired to Portland, OR after an additional eleven years in Anchorage. The traffic is awful, but at least I don’t have to get on a plane to go visit somewhere else, and the politics, entertainment and food is much better. Also, the winters are much milder. Overall, it’s an improvement over Anchorage.
Like the proverbial umbrella, I was born in Baltimore and raised all over the world. I’ve lived in suburban, urban, and rural places.
Where we are now is far from ideal. Very small rural town in a totally agricultural area. The only thing for teenagers (and college students from the even smaller town down the road) to do on Friday and Saturday night is go to a movie and play at Walmart. An Indian casino of questionable legality (one guy bought a piece of land and claimed to be a representative of a tribe) has broken ground a mile or two down the road, but I have no interest in that. The only state and national parks near us are a couple of hours away, and we’ve pretty much exhausted those. We’ve been to all the small-town historical museums around. The bigger town up the road is about an hour away, so there’s little going on there with enough appeal to make us go that far. Better activities are even farther away, more than 100 miles. The house we lived in the most (home base between all the moves for Dad’s job) was 25 miles NW of the city and close enough that we didn’t need to worry about finding something we needed or wanted. It was also close to many cultural and historical sites, so there was always something to do.
The only thing holding us here now is work. Until I find a good job closer to where we want to be, we don’t have much incentive to move.
I grew up in the WV mountains in a town of 300 and I liked it. It was rural and beautiful. People were friendly.
I lived most of my summers in NW Indiana near Chicago and it was fine too. Chicago is still one of my favorite cities and I loved living there as a kid and we were far enough out of town not to have to worry about Chicago 80s and 90s crime.
Now I live in a university town of about 30 thousand residents and 25000 students also in WV and it’s just about perfect. Small enough to know people, but large enough to have things to do, especially with a university in town. We’re an hour south of Pittsburgh, so that’s actually where my family is today and we go there enough when things are slow here. We’re 3 hours from DC, so we make it down there every few months as well. The weather could be more pleasant and it is overcast here much more than in Chicago, but the snowfall is relatively mild and the summers not too hot (It’s 74 out right now, but that’s chilly for August, usually in the low to mid 80s in August.) I’m ten minutes from rock climbing and wilderness, ten minutes from an 11 mile long lake, half an hour from whitewater rafting and kayaking and 45 minutes from a ski resort. Crime tends to be relatively low (though not non-existent) and we have probably 50 local restaurants and just as many chains. Most of the major chain stores are here as well. We have a minor league baseball team and college sports for the winter. Our 3 high schools in the county are ranked as 1,3 and 13th best in the state (The 13th best is a rural school with fewer than 70 graduates. We rank so highly because we’re relatively prosperous and relatively liberal as West Virginia goes, so we pass excess school levies every five years to fund higher teacher salaries and facilities.) We have three playhouses in town (as well as the University) and there is typically something playing every couple of weeks. The quality varies, but we’ll get a few touring shows a year, so that’s nice. I’m not much of a concert guy, but there are two different music venues that have musicians every weekend and they’ll each get a couple of bigger names a few times a year. There are also a couple of music festivals in the surrounding area. We also will get two or three actual ‘stars’ at the arena every year. We have a farmer’s market somewhere in town almost every day of the week in the summer and every weekend in the winter. We have a number of art galleries and a couple of small museums. We have a trauma 1 hospital in town, so as I get older, that has some appeal. It has some negatives, like the weather and the fact that everything is on a hill, but overall, it’s a pleasant place to live. I’m happy to be here.
I grew up in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. It’s an okay small city; it’s eclectic, with an odd population of university students, soldiers, and weirdos. It is not a rich city.
I live in Oakville, Ontario, which IS a rich city. It’s not super exciting but it’s lovely and if you live downtown, which I do, it’s a great place for walking to things. If you need excitement, Toronto is 40 minutes away. Being in a metro area, there is everything here.
We plan to eventually move to Ottawa, anyway.
Our area of Overland Park Kansas (suburb of Kansas City) has been atop 100 Best Places to live and to raise children. Great schools, low crime, decent cost of living.
However its changing and getting much too crowded. Housing prices are soaring. Areas I remember being farms and gravel roads are now 4 lane roads packed with traffic.
I cant wait to retire and move to the country.
My wife and I attended college in Boston and then she continued to work there for several years. She then moved to CT and started working for the state.
When she moved down to NC after her retirement, she immediately told me, “Everyone is so friendly down here! It’s hard to get used to.”
I have often asked her if she has ever wanted to move back to CT or MA, where her daughters still live. She says, “F*** that! Nobody retires to CT.”
I grew up in suburbs in the Midwest and then in suburban Ft Lauderdale in high school. I’ve bounced around quite a lot as an adult. But, I now live in Chicago and love it. Would I move? Sure, it’s a consideration since I’m actively job hunting. I’m visiting Washington DC next month and I’ll be checking it out for possible relocation. But, I know I’ll be living in a busy urban city with good public transportation. Boring suburbs or even places like Phoenix that is basically a giant suburb aren’t for me.
I’m in WV which is in many ways culturally southern and the north really feels unfriendly and cold. Like everyone only cares about themselves. I might be pumping gas at the gas station and strike up a conversation with the guy filling up across from me. You do that in many places in the north and they act like you’re trying to rob them. It’s very difficult for me to get used to and I’m someone that travels a decent amount. You just feel like a number.
The other thing that really gets me and this might be WV specific is self-deprecation. Here, self-deprecation is a cornerstone of speech. It’s really, really weird to be in places where it’s not. Every compliment here is deflected or at most simply acknowledged and any positive thing you do should be hidden. If you say to someone, “That’s a nice shirt you have on.” I expect a response like “My wife must have picked it out. I don’t know checkers from stripes.” If it’s a neutral response like “Thanks.” I’m OK with it. But if it’s a positive response like “Yeah, I think I’ve been doing well with my wardrobe lately.” I just want to punch them in the face. If you were the President of the US, in WV you would describe it as “I work down in DC. Office work.” If someone is talking about how well they did x or they went to <Ivy League> school. I really just want to say, “Who the heck do you think you are? Must be nice that your farts smell like roses.” It is really disconcerting and I completely get that it’s just some cultures are more comfortable talking about their accomplishments, but to me it is really, really grating. I posted on here a few weeks ago about things about me that are above average and I have literally lost sleep over it. I would have deleted it if it would let me. It has made me uncomfortable to a great degree. Anyway, I’m really off on more of a tangent than usual.
I grew up on the Atlantic coast of Central Florida. It was okay I guess, though I didn’t really know any different since I hadn’t traveled much other than the yearly trip to suburban Chicago where my grandparents lived.
I went off to college to a small liberal arts college in Michigan. I truly experienced culture shock, and the endless winter about killed me. I transferred to a university back in Florida and graduated. I always figured I would end up coming back to my hometown and living there forever, and I did move back to my hometown due to already having a job hookup. I married my high school sweetheart in our hometown as well shortly after graduating college.
But, I started to become very dissatisfied with life there. The cost of living is high and going up all the time. The property taxes are crazy. My memories of the place growing up in the 80s and 90s to what it had become in the mid 2000s was completely different. It was also becoming clear to me that the job I had was not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
My wife and I decided that our future was not in our hometown, so we temporarily moved back to Tallahassee (where we had gone to college), basically to buy time while looking for something permanent.
After almost a year in Tallahassee, I found a job in Alabama, and we’ve been here ever since.
We absolutely love it. We are in a small, quiet and friendly town where a traffic jam means waiting for the train at the railroad crossing. It’s a great safe place to raise our children, and we have a big yard for them to play in. My job has excellent benefits and a great retirement plan, and because of the low cost of living, my wife can stay home and take care of and homeschool the kids. I always correct people when they say my wife doesn’t “work”. I assure you, she works a lot harder than I do, and at a much more important job.
We’ve been here about 9 years and have no plans or desire to move, at least until I retire.
Our (my wife and I) first home was in Hamilton, between Old Harford and Harford Road…she grew up in Armstead Gardens…
FairyChatMom walked the same grounds we did…
As far as the Catholic school in Towson, I know it well, my cousins all went there, I went to the Quaker school on Charles Street…
I’m in the same general region I grew up in, though I have changed towns and lived in a few different places. Whoever said the future was going to be hot, flat, and crowded was right about SoCal. (Except maybe for the ‘flat’ part.)
Remind me to come back to this thread in about a month.
I was born and raised in Springfield, Illinois, a city of about 130,000 people. I now live in Viburnum, Missouri, a burg of about 800 people, about 100 miles south/southwest of St. Louis. We moved so Mrs. Homie could be with her family.
Just as there were many things I loved and many things I hate about Springfield, there are many things I love and hate about Viburnum.
Cons
[ul]
[li]Everybody knows my business. Everybody. People at the grocery store - people who I have no idea who the fuck they are - recognize me as Luke’s brother-in-law and ask me how Luke’s kin are doing.[/li][li]Cardinals fans. 'Nuff said.[/li][li]This is Donald Trump’s back yard. 'Nuff said.[/li][li]I wildly suspect that this is a Sundown Town.[/li][li]Time is meaningless here. When Aunt Diane says “Be at my house at noon for lunch,” she means “The oven might be turned on by 1:30.” When my farmer friend said “Be here at 11:00 to help me dress this goat I’m going to slaughter,” he meant “…after we watch YouTube videos of my favorite heavy metal band, drink a pot of coffee, watch more YouTube videos, smoke a couple of bowls, and feed the dogs.”[/li][li]People talk over each other and finish each other’s sentences here - even strangers (although let’s be real, there are no strangers here). And Og help you if a someone is here, and they want to go from here to there, and you’re in between here and there. They won’t say “Excuse me,” they’ll just shove your ass out of the way.[/li][li]The cashiers and the customers will talk all day like old friends catching up, regardless of how many people are in line behind.[/li][li]It’s a 35-mile drive to the nearest stop light.[/li][/ul]
Pros
[ul]
[li]The peace and quiet. My god the peace and quiet.[/li][li]The gentle beauty of the Ozark mountains is breathtaking.[/li][li]During thunderstorms, the thunder echos across the mountains. It’s amazing.[/li][li]The climate here is much more agreeable. You would think 225 miles would make that big of a difference, but it does. Winters here are much more forgiving that central Illinois winters.[/li][li]I’m in a Dungeons & Dragons group, something I never did when I lived in Springfield but always wanted to do.[/li][li]Missouri’s gloriously freewheeling fireworks laws, which allow me to buy them any time, and local cops, who look the other way when I launch them.[/li][/ul]
I’m in San Jose, it’s where the job is. I’ve bounced between SJ and San Diego 4 times since I was a teenager. Both places have their pros and cons but I prefer San Diego, mostly because I love hanging out at La Jolla Shores and Mission Bay Park.
I was raised in central LA. There are things to like about LA (museums, weather, beach), things not to like (my area was not particularly safe, air quality, traffic). I remember some things about my childhood fondly, and I had an outstanding education (scholarship). I can’t imagine ever going back.
I moved to the Bay Area for university and stayed there for over 20 years. It wasn’t crazy crowded yet, but it got there. 10 years of that time I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains. Of all of the places I have lived, that is the one I’d go back to in a heart beat. I had some acreage. I lived in a town of a few thousand, but that was spread out. The downtown was a few blocks long. It had a stop sign, a gas station, a small store and a few restaurants. Beautiful redwoods, enough elevation that we had seasons, short drive to the beach, to SF, to Silicon Valley, to Monterey. I could go to the city if I wanted to, but I wasn’t living in it. It was awesome.
After that I moved around some. I love Oregon, but it doesn’t agree with my health. It’s a beautiful state and I’ll miss it. We’re leaving in a month.
It’s amazing what a difference 50 miles can make.
I grew up in Paradise. Now I’m only 50 miles away, in a shit-hole.
But it’s MY shit-hole. 
I grew up in West Texas, a shithole deluxe. Since then I have spent literally decades in Thailand, mainly Bangkok, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Did a 16-month sojourn in Albuquerque, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Am now living in Hawaii for the second time, Waikiki this time around, two years now, and I love it. All of these places are night-and-day different than West Fucking Texas.
Can we ask where you are going?
Must have been tuff leaving Paradise.
I am in paradise now. My pueblito and I love it. When it is hot here, which is always, I think about moving. But, the people are so great here. I would miss them. Better we sweat together.