Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
The whole reason I ask is because I'm moving to the US from Canada later this year to be with my significant other, who is American. She currently works in Buffalo so she can drive to be with me weekly when not working. We want to move to a Red state, but neither of us have job offers or family (at least not family that we'd want to move to be near). I have no work history besides my BA degree and no idea what I want to do; she has a BA in biology and a work history as a lab tech.
It's easy enough to find a decent state (pretty much any red Midwest state, in our case). The real daunting task is finding a place within a state. Ruling out large cities because of personal preference, that still leaves dozens of cities per state. I'm having trouble figuring out how to systematically filter these hundreds of possibilities. The options that come to mind (e.g., income per capita, growth rate, and other things I've mentioned) don't seem obviously important to me, but I could be wrong. I have no experience in this area.
In my experience, I think a city population of about 100k, being an hour or 2 drive from a major million pop city is the sweet spot.
Concerts/sports/Ikeas/IMAX theaters are still within reach, but your day to day is quiet and chill. Short commute, typically low housing costs but still decent employment prospects. The city is big and serviced, but not too big - you can call one of your city counsellors on the phone, you can get a hold of someone at the city to fix your water main or a street light in a day or two. You get decent services at a scalable level.
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I'm curious what the preference here is specifically. Suburbs of large cities function quite a bit like their own small city but with lots of benefits from being attached to a major hub like access to well connected airports and niche but useful amenities. It's a very popular choice for a reason.
I'm wary of suburbs for a few reasons, not all of which I'm super confident about.
I'm concerned that most of the jobs are in the large city itself, which would be unacceptable to me. Like, let's say the suburbs have 50,000 people. I'm concerned that the number of jobs in those suburbs are vastly fewer than the jobs that would be available in another city of 50,000 that's far away from a large city and thus whose jobs can only be in the 50,000 city itself. I hope that makes sense.
I'm concerned that the large city's growth will, in years or decades, envelop the suburbs in ways I don't want (zoning, culture, traffic, demographics).
I'm concerned that the suburbs of a large city attract highly educated blue tribe people, many of whom probably commute to the large city and were priced out of it or wanted to raise a family.
Precisely because suburbs are popular, I'm concerned about the price of homes. Me and my significant other may very well end up with a household income of like mid-five-figures or something.
This may practically be the opposite for the point you followed it up with, the people commuting to the city still do much of their consumption in the suburbs. It'll depend on what kind of work you ultimately do but they're going to need all the well paid blue collar labor like plumbers and electricians as well as all the service industry jobs. White collar offices also end up in the suburbs sometimes.
Suburbs tend to be somewhat static, unless you're right on the border of the urban parts of a city you really probably don't need to worry about this. They're places built by people who don't want to live in the urban core run by people who don't want to live in the urban core. Many of the suburbs have tens of miles of not much between them and the urban core.
This seems like the kind of thing you're going to be ruling out on anyways, no need to toss suburbs out of the heap for this reason when it'll already be filtered by your price constraint. If you take a upper mid tier city like Columbus Ohio or Dallas Fort Worth you'll easily be able to find suburbs that don't trigger most of these concerns.
Uh, DFW growth rates are so high that suburbs do get enveloped into the urban core quickly and regularly, and this is true in every direction except south-southeast(which is caused by very high crime rates).
If @helmedhorror can deal with climate and a bit of culture shock, then there's three smaller, economically prosperous red tribe cities in Texas to consider- Corpus Christi, Lubbock, and Tyler. All of these are cheap places to live with a generally good labour market and are deep, deep red politically- they get used by the state government to make controversial proclamations specifically because they're much farther to the right than Austin. If a hot climate, southerners, or Hispanics are an issue, I'd recommend looking in Michigan's upper peninsula- the state might be blue, but the local area is not, and the state government is shier than average about imposing progressive policies on deep red towns geographically separated from the core population.
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Try Kansas City, Missouri- it’s a very very light shade of blue in a very red state and has lots of white collar admin-type work there. If you’re sure you can handle the climate and cultural differences, Tyler, Lubbock, and Corpus Christi in Texas have growing economies and are much more solidly red, and commuting into Fort Worth would be the other option to maximize softening the landing.
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The Labor Dept publishes job forecasts for industries; they might do so for metro areas as well. Obviously they are speculative to some extent, but less so than your own efforts would be, since they have more data and no more expertise than you do.
But, really, your best bet is a place with a well funded community college with vocational programs that will eventually allow you to get a good job in a local industry.
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I see. Well, standard responses in this area are typically stuff like minimizing commute, maximizing access to preferred leisure activities, preferred housing, shopping, low crime rates, and good public schools. Not every city of the "dozens" mentioned will have a Costco, Sam's Club, Walmart, Best Buy, whatever you like. Not every city will have a board game cafe or video game store or rock climbing station. Not every city will have lake views or mountain views. Most non-cities will have relatively low crime rates, but not all. You may not care about public school quality but maybe you will in the future.
Barring considerations like that, you can always just follow the efficient market hypothesis and find the most expensive housing you can afford, and get that on the assumption that there must be some good reason for it to cost what it costs.
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This sounds like an analogous problem to the way my wife and I chose a London neighborhood to buy a house and settle down in. (Any given Midwestern state has a population of the same order of magnitude as Greater London). Key points:
Know what you want - for us it was a manageable commute to Central London, houses with gardens affordable on a UMC salary, and proximity to woodlands for walking.
Know what you don't want that other people are willing to pay a premium for, and avoid it. I grew up using London commuter trains, so I wasn't willing to pay a premium to live on the Underground network. Given that other people are willing to pay a large premium for this, we could rule out any neighbourhood with a tube station as poor value for money. Obviously relevant examples are good schools if you are not planning to have kids (or are planning to homeschool), walkability if you are happy living in American auto-orientated suburbia, a lack of rush hour traffic if you work remotely.
Make a shortlist of suitable towns based on your criteria. You are doing internet research at this point unless you can ask someone who lives in the general area. Relying on stereotypes is fine - most stereotypes are mostly accurate.
Visit the places on the shortlist, walk around a lot, try to understand who lives there (Are they like you? Mostly like you with less money is also okay. Mostly like you with more money is dangerous unless you are early-career and expecting large payrises), do the things that matter to you (hiking in the woods for us).
If you experience a "problem with no name" in most or all of your target areas, then one of your criteria is wrong and you need to go back to step 1. After looking at some outer-suburban neighborhoods in SE London we realised that we cared about neighborhood walkability more than having a large garden, and went back to more inner-suburban neighborhoods with smaller gardens. (We now live in Greenwich, and love it. The small garden is quite large enough for the kids and we do indeed have a wooded park which the kids will be able to walk to on their own by the time they outgrow the garden).
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