The OP has pretty nearly described Portland and surrounding areas to a tee. I can’t speak to the schools, but all the other criteria are met. Housing can be a bit expensive, depending on where in the city you live.
To expand on my pre-coffee post:
Want
*Mostly temperate climate. Snow and heat are both OK, but Fargo and Phoenix are probably too much. Houston’s higher humidity and lower (but still high) temps are much more tolerable than Dallas’s long, hot, dry summer. *
Check. Lovely spring through late fall weather. Occasional heat spikes, usually one to two weeks during summer, perhaps less. Occasionally Portland will get snow, but usually not much and it goes away quickly. Significant rain in winter, but some nice breaks.
*At least moderately large. More than +/-250,000 population, in the metro area, not necessarily in the particular municipality. *
Check. Greater Portland is about 580,000, but it’s broken up nicely into self-contained neighborhoods and feels much smaller.
*Opportunity for outdoor recreation. Not necessarily ski slopes right up in town, but just somewhere green and pretty to goof around for a couple hours after work. Dallas City parks are mediocre, and there are very few natural areas. It’s kind of flat and ugly here. *
In spades. Portland is known for its urban forest, including parks everywhere. There are two just in my neighborhood that include extensive kid playground areas, ball fields, tennis courts and picnic areas. Portland sits on the Willamette River and the Columbia River, so kayaking and other water sports are available. Skiing is about an hour and a half from here at Mt. Hood and other areas.
*Forests, mountains, or water close enough for weekend or day trips. Man made lakes full of algae and drunk boaters don’t count. *
Pretty much describes Oregon. As mentioned, the Cascade Mountains are about an hour and a half away, with tons of lakes, and the gorgeous Oregon Coast is about the same, with well-maintained public campgrounds and plenty to do, including four-wheeling at the Oregon Dunes area. Then there’s the Columbia Gorge with its waterfalls and the town of Hood River, which is a kiteboarding mecca. There are endless wineries and breweries, fruit orchards, etc. all around this area and in the eastern part of the state.
In eastern Oregon, there are the Painted Hills, Smith Rock State Park, the Wallowa Mountains area and much more. South of here, of course, is Crater Lake, and just over the California border is the Redwood Forest.
*Museums, zoos, aquaria, botanical gardens, etc. *
Portland Art Museum is nicely curated and Portland Zoo is world class. There’s the Rose Garden, the Japanese Garden, and the Chinese Garden, just to mention a few. Forest Park is full of hiking trails.
*Good private schools, Montessori/IB or similar curricula. This is not negotiable. We both got good grades at good public schools in good school districts, and while they were safe, they didn’t provide much of an education, especially not serious college prep. Dallas has several academically excellent private schools, but they are terrifically expensive and selective. *
You’d have to research that, as I’m not in touch with the school system.
Do Not Want
*Insane cost of living. If it’s not possible to have decent quality of life without being wealthy, it’s out. Manhattan, for instance. *
Cost of living isn’t that bad here, although housing prices are climbing in the city proper. Food carts are a way of life and a lot of them have better food than brick and mortar businesses. Speaking of houses, I love the lack of crappy subdivision snout housing. Most 'hoods are full of Craftsman style houses, Victorians, bungalows, etc. It give the place a lot of character.
Don’t care
*The performing arts. *
It’s there if you want it. There’s a waterfront blues festival every year, a jazz festival, and various film festivals, along with a great orchestra.
*Politics, religion, and sports. As long as you can make friends or have a business meeting without being subjected to, and expected to agree with, other peoples philosophies. This eliminates Oklahoma and Berkeley.
*
Live and let live is the way it seems to roll here.
Conspicuous consumption. We don’t participate and don’t care, as long as it’s not a social obligation the way it is in Dallas. Again, do what you want, just don’t give me shit for driving the wrong car.
Well, it’s known to be hipster central. There is an element of well-to-do, certainly, but most people really don’t give a damn. The city streets are better suited to smaller vehicles, but that’s your business. There is a very good public transit system of buses, street cars and light rail.
There is state income tax and property tax, but no sales tax. If you live across the river in Vancouver, there’s a hefty sales tax, but no income tax, and most people who live there do their shopping in Portland. Problem with Vancouver is the god-awful commute if you work in Portland. Portland was recently rated #10 in worst commutes in the country.
Oh, and you can’t (by law) pump your own gas in Oregon. Weird, I know.
I think the Kansas City metropolitan area has alot of what you want. In my area of Johnson County Kansas there are good schools, low unemployment, low crime rates, and is overall a good place to raise kids.
Chefguy beat me to it.
I live in downtown Portland. It’s safe, quiet (for a city), and… yeah. Everything he said.
I’ll add to his list Forest Park. 5000+ acres, 8 miles long with 70 miles of hiking trails—and it’s just a few blocks (yes, just a few blocks. Not miles and miles and hours by car) from the city center.
The only thing on your list I haven’t experienced personally is the schools, but a grade school friend of mine is a Montessori teacher and moved here several years ago because she liked the educational offerings both as potential employers and as a parent. She’s still here and loves it.
So yeah. Portland.
I will say this: you aren’t going to find the St. Marks/Hockaday experience for less than St. Marks/Hockaday prices. You won’t even find the St. Johns/ESD experience for less than that. They are crazy expensive, yes, but in terms of elite private school experiences, they are pretty standard. Honestly, and somewhat ironically, if you want something beyond the typical suburban “good school experience”, Dallas ISD Magnets are surprisingly good, and different, closer in some ways to what the private schools do–but you have to get into the right ones, and that’s not automatic.
Thanks for the responses, everybody. Holiday stuff got in the way of an earlier response.
When people want to know why they should bother with “antiquated” social media like message boards, I’m going to point at this thread. Overly broad question? People give useful answers. Overly constrained question? People give yet more useful answers.
I’m not all that familar with the Midwest. My perception has been that it’s part rust belt and part Smallville, but clearly it’s not and deserves further scrutiny.
Arkansas, who knew? We need to take a weekend trip up there … any suggestions?
As a onetime longtime North Carolinian, our southern neighbor is a punchline to me, which is unfair. Columbia looks like a nice place. Like a scaled down, quieter Raleigh.
I’ve had so much fun visiting the Pacific Northwest and the Rockies, that I was starting to think the cities were some kind of elaborate Potemkin village to convince unwary vacationers to move. It’s good to hear that they are, in fact, qute nice to live in.
Some follow up questions:
For those of you in cities that have had or are experiencing a big influx of transplants, do you think the population growth has ruined the place? Would you be better off if people stopped relocating there? I keep picturing the sterotypical Austin native who tells everybody how great it used to be, or the “It’s over!” sketch from Portlandia. Any truth to it?
Anybody have any experience with living in Alaska, specifically Juneau or Anchorage? A friend lived there for a while and would go back immediately if he could. I think his recollections are rose-tinted because he was in college at the time and that I’d go nuts from the relative isolation. Third party opinions are welcome.
This is exactly what I was wondering, too. Specifically about Portland or Austin.
I’m kinda in your boat right now. I’m in the Chestnut Hill area. While nice, it is definitely way too pricey to live here, so we are probably going to have to go further out on the suburbs. The question, now, is where.
What’s difficult is I was born and raised in California, so everything is new for me out here. The wife loves the seasons, though. I could do without all the cold and am waiting for summer and heat.
My favorite place was when we lived in Davis, California. Amazing public schools, incredibly walkable/bikable, there was an excellent farmers market each Saturday. On Wednesdays they had “picnic in the park” that was like a mini farmers market plus local restaurants would sell food and the park was full of families and kids running everywhere, etc. It only had around 65 thousand people, but it was a ten minute drive to Sacramento or an hour to San Francisco. It was safe. Besides a bunch of students being pepper sprayed there wasn’t anything to worry about. I think one summer there was a mugging and an assault. The entire city flipped out.
So basically, I’m looking for:
Great schools
Family friendly
Not out in the boonies but not in a city
Affordable. We aren’t looking for a giant house, but I would like to not spend 2,000 a month for a not great two-bedroom condo.
Know any good places within New England?
Born in Juneau and grew up in Anchorage, left for 30 years and spent another eleven years in Anchorage from 1998 to 2009, much of which was spent traveling throughout the state. What are your questions?
I only arrived in Portland five years ago, so can’t tell you if it’s “over”, other than perhaps to people who always complain that things aren’t like they used to be. To me, it’s a vibrant city that attracts chefs, musicians, artists and students. I’m fairly certain that you could eat in a different restaurant every night for a year and not have a bad meal (assuming you choose well). A lot of the neighborhoods retain the small-town feel. In my particular 'hood, I can walk to the following:
My doctor, dentist and optometrist.
Three food outlets.
My mechanic.
Three beautiful parks.
An amusement park.
Several excellent restaurants and several equally excellent food carts. These include two of the best sushi places in the city, plus a third that’s a distant third, two Italian places, two barbecue places, four pizza places, and many others.
Bus stops for two bus lines, and a stop for the light rail that’s going to be finished by September of this year.
My credit union, and a number of banks.
Pubs.
A fitness center.
A yoga place.
Coffee joints.
A bakery.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
No! Don’t listen to them! No more transplants! 
We relocated to Portland 10+ years ago, mostly because we wanted a better place to raise kids, and have never regretted it. I can’t imagine being anywhere else. No disagreement with any of Chefguy’s points.
To answer the question that Chefguy and Lancia couldn’t, public schools here are decent - not amazing, not terrible. It’s by neighborhood, so you can choose one of the better schools (although housing prices will be higher). Some of the surrounding areas (Lake Oswego for one) have very good schools, comparable to private schools elsewhere. There are some excellent private schools including Montessori. I wouldn’t say they’re cheap, but they aren’t cost-prohibitive. Waaay cheaper than San Francisco which was our comparison point, but probably more than the Midwest.
Yes and no. There are certainly issues with growth that are concerning - more traffic, gentrification, lack of affordable housing for lower-paid people like service workers. Transplants from CA are a handy villain, and you’ll still see the occasional crotchety letter to the editor about how they’re ruining it for everyone. But we never experienced anything directed at us when we were newcomers, and have never heard first-hand complaints about it in anything other than a joking manner.
Sure, some things would be easier if the population held steady. And you can always find something that used to be better and now sucks. But lots of new things are better than what was here before, and no growth comes with a cost - any city needs newcomers to keep it alive and dynamic. Pretty much everyone I encounter would agree with this (except when trying to score a reservation for Langbaan); it’s a small minority or someone having a bad day that actually thinks we’d be better off with no more transplants.
We had considered the suburbs of Portland, ME and we traveled up in the area to check it out. It was truly lovely but a bit farther away from family and friends than we wanted to be. Portland also wasn’t nearly large enough a city for us to be comfortable living near. If you aren’t concerned about those things I’d highly recommend it. We looked online and found decent houses in the surrounding 'burbs for 100-150k which was almost enough to convince us to move there, but in the end Boston is a much better fit for our needs and MA has the best schools in the nation so we settled here instead. If Maine is too far for you head south of Boston and come check out the South Shore area. You might find it is more affordable than your current city and it is still on the train lines to Boston.
You Portland folks deserve a commendation from the city council.
Here’s a question for anybody who lives somewhere that has decriminalized marijuana: have you seen an increase in pot use among young people? We don’t care about the adult use or the politics of it (do you sense a trend?).
I’m not trying to be contentious, but based on our experience and that of friends who work with kids, we suspect that marijuana, like alcohol, is not good for the developing adolescent brain. Unless some good data to the contrary is presented, we will err on the side of caution, and want to avoid moving anywhere with unusually high levels of use among youth.
Next I’m going to ask if there’s a marine biologist in here.
Wikipedia shows the Anchorage MSA is over 10X the size of the Juneau MSA, way bigger difference than I thought. So some of these questions may be pig-ignorant with regard to one or the other.
How pronounced is the relative smallness and isolation? Does it feel like a regular city with nice scenery, or like an outpost of civilization surrounded by empty wilderness? Do you see the same faces every day, and do people tend to know and get involved in each others’ business?
Are goods and services we take for granted in the rest of the US difficult to get or outrageously expensive? If you buy stuff from, say, Amazon does the package take an unusually long time to arrive?
Are there lots of “modern day frontiersman” type people? Like folks who hunt and gather as a way of life. How about an unusually large proportion of eccentric people?
We’re leery of raising kids in a small town, because of the impression that kids in isolated communities tend to get bored and do stupid stuff more readily than kids in a city, who already do too much stupid stuff. Any observations?
Well, I grew up in Houston, lived there for 3 years after college, and my extended family still lives there. My wife’s family lives in Austin.
I can’t stand Austin. It’s some sort of unholy combination of a huge amount of intractable traffic, a bunch of people who ought to know better trying to be cool, or hip or whatever, a bunch of environmental and social justice hippies who generally hinder or thwart any attempt at bettering the municipal infrastructure, and an all around smug “we’re cooler than you” attitude. Plus, people are flocking there like flies to a dumpster, and the city’s not doing anything to accommodate the extra traffic, etc… (probably the environmentalists again).
Houston’s cool though- it’s got an attitude and vibe kind of like Fort Worth, in that it’s a city that prides itself on working for a living. It also seems more racially and ethnically tolerant than anywhere else I’ve been, save maybe NYC. HISD is atrocious though, but chances are if you’re white and relatively affluent, you’d live in one of the suburban ISDs (or formerly suburban ISDs) like Spring Branch, Woodlands, Katy, Fort Bend, Spring, Klein, Tomball, Cy-Fair, etc… All of which are passable to good.
When it comes to Alaska, answers to questions can be problematic. I loved growing up there, but the perspective of a child and an adult bear no resemblance to each other. And Alaska has changed dramatically because of the oil boom that started in the 70s. It’s always been and boom-and-bust economy there, but oil companies brought a nasty dynamic to the state.
Assuming we’re talking about Anchorage here? Juneau is a small city with nowhere to go unless you fly or get on the ferry system. It’s very small-town, and I doubt you would like it there. Anchorage is over 200,000, with city amenities. That said, it’s a largely ugly town that is surrounded by spectacular scenery. It’s car-centric, with a totally inadequate public transit system that is constantly in danger of losing funding. Many people live in the surrounding communities of Eagle River and in towns in the Matanuska Valley, like Wasilla, Palmer, Houston, etc, and commute to Anchorage to work. There is a joint Army-Air Force base on the edge of the city, which prevents expansion to the north, and mountainous terrain south of the city.
Cost of living is high, but places like Costco, WalMart and Sam’s Club help. Most people spend their weekends running all over town to shop sales. Good restaurants are rare. I can recall three or four that had consistently good food. Most cater to tourists, and are uniformly bland or downright bad. A lot of chain restaurants have found a good home there, so there are no end of joints like Applebee’s, Outback, Golden Corral, ad nauseum.
Packages from Outside take longer to get to you. Things like ‘overnight delivery’ means three days. Figure on at least a week for most things. Ordering from someplace like the local Home Depot means a six-week wait, as it’s not economical for them to ship something like, say, a toilet, as a one-off. They will wait for a full pallet or container before shipping by boat. It can be very frustrating.
Hoo boy. There are tons of poseurs who like to think they are rugged frontiersmen. Most of them are just scruffy losers. There are people who live in “the Bush” and survive, but I’d guess 99.99% of them support that lifestyle with bulk purchases from Costco. Subsistence hunting and fishing is much more difficult and iffy than you may think. Alaska is enormous, and any game in the vicinity of where you set up living will soon move to where you’re not.
Lot’s of eccentrics, weirdos, and crazies; and that’s just in the legislature. Alaska went from a place with reasonable conservative politics to a place that’s overrun with whacko right wingers who complain bitterly about the government while taking every handout they can get. Alaska is presently suffering an economic meltdown because of oil prices. The new Republican governor is slashing budget items, including schools, but doing little to increase revenue; see Kansas, et al, for the inevitable failure of this model.
Anchorage has all the same sorts of activities you’ll find elsewhere for kids, with the addition of winter sports, fishing and hunting to engage in. The problem you’re going to have with Anchorage is that it meets few of the criteria that you presented in your OP. There are hiking trails like the Coastal Trail and the Campbell Creek Greenbelt, but you’ll likely have to drive to them. There is Flattop and all the hiking trails that exist up there: again, you’ll have to drive to get to it. There are lots of trails along the gorgeous Seward Highway: again, a drive (plus a nasty grizzly bear problem).
No discussion of Alaska is complete without mention of the scenery. It’s absolutely breathtaking; gorgeous beyond description. Getting to it can be problematic, but even what you can get to on the road system is spectacular. The question is: can the scenery sustain you on its own? Can the substantial outdoor activities provide enough entertainment? Can you take the extreme politics, the racism, the homophobia that people toss your way as casually as saying ‘good morning’? The lo-o-o-o-ng winters and darkness (even people who have lived there all their lives need to escape to Hawaii or Mexico every winter)? The notion that no matter where you want to go in the US, you will have to fly a minimum of four hours just to get out of the state (Seattle)?
Most people have a romantic notion about Alaska and living there. Take a vacation there in February and see if it still strikes you as a place you want to live full time.
Charlotte or Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill is pretty good.
- Little to no traffic compared to the big cities
- Decent mix of cultures (good Southern culture, but lots of northern transplants which is also good)
- Very easy to find urban or suburban housing that is not completely cookie cutter
- Lots of trees
- Mild winters
- Good growth potential compared to Atlanta or other more mature cities
- Good public colleges
- Good cost of living (probably comparable or better than Dallas, but haven’t checked)
I have a friend who just moved back to Austin and does NOTHING but complain about the transplants - they’ve evidently driven real estate prices insane because they get paid in California dollars, the traffic is worse, the restaurants have huge waits at them, etc. He was so excited to move back (he went to UT) but he seems really frustrated with it now.
I assume you’d want one of the larger cities like Little Rock (state Capitol), or the Fayetteville area. I’m not sure what field you and spouse work in, so I can’t help with employment suggestions.
As far as just seeing the area, I’d recommend the following (both less than 2 hours from Little Rock).
This resort is near the town of Hot Springs. We’ve stayed there many times and really enjoyed it. The nearby lakes and mountains are surprisingly pretty, and interesting for hiking and camping. If you can, rent a boat for one of the days you’re there. There are many secluded islands where you can picnic for an afternoon, and then boat over to some good restaurants. FWIW: Hot Springs is about 4 hours from Dallas.
Even more beautiful, is the Petit Jean Mountain area (NW of Little Rock). We visit there sometimes and I’d recommend staying at Mather Lodge and taking the short hike to Cedar Falls. The whole area is amazing and great for quick day hikes.
Alaska is definitely out, I suspected it would be, but that description settles it.
Western Arkansas looks like excellent vacation fodder, thanks for pointing it out.
I lived in Raleigh about a decade past. It was nice and it looks like the region has managed to avoid the worst problems associated with population growth. We’d probably still be there if we hadn’t gotten the lucky break that has led, in convoluted fashion, to our living in Dallas.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room: Houston. We’re both petroleum industry lifers; too specialized to go into any related field and too old to go back to college. Can’t even get a job at Starbucks (tried when I was between jobs a couple years ago).
It may be time to embrace reality and accept that Houston is the best we are ever going to do. It has a more cosmopolitan feel than Dallas, the climate is wetter and greener, and the food is better.
This would have been useful information in the OP. I wouldn’t have bothered wasting my time with Oregon information.
Houston’s great if you can handle the humidity, the utter flatness of the terrain, and the lack of zoning. Plus, it’s somewhat grungier overall than Dallas. If you live in one of the northern Dallas suburbs, Houston proper will seem very dirty.