Grand Rapids has become a midwestern economic star generating industrial jobs
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I will say Grand Rapids currently has some issues around software developers that are associated with our growing pains. Because of the rust belt depression of wages, we still haven't caught up. Wages for software developers here lag by about 20 percent. Most employers are used to paying a much lower wage than I would expect elsewhere. Senior developers might make 80-90K and juniors can expect to be making 40-50K. If you are an ineffective negotiator you might be lower. Many of my contemporaries have chosen to get remote jobs with the usual suspects. Zapier, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, Slack and others all have local people.
That said, this is a wonderful town that is changing all the time. The cost of living is low, though our real estate market is out of control and has been for a couple years. The developers here tend to have a strong sense of community and we generally support one another rather than tear each other down. We have some great local developers.
If you would like the low down on our growing town or are interest in moving, setting up a remote shop or building a company in our town let me know. I'd be happy to help you or get you in contact with those that can. (see profile)
So, about half the cost of living.
[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
It's true, the market is becoming pretty flat with globalization for costs in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZs4NDC4yrI
Air tickets are significantly cheaper in NY than ruralish areas in my experience
That's a massive cost difference, especially when you're looking at 2-4 person vacations. That's a problem in pretty much every rural area (flying out of Ithaca was expensive as heck). I'm able to travel way more as a result.
I had to buy a family member a flight from Seattle -> Detroit for next month, it cost $600. I'm about to fly myself from Istanbul to San Francisco, that flight cost $500.
There's a reason they're called the flyover states.
Imagine that salary in San Francisco is $9000 / month and cost of living is $7000 / month. The ratio of salary : cost of living is 1.286.
Imagine salary in Grand Rapids is $3000 / month and the cost of living is $2000 / month. The ratio has "improved" to 1.5, but the more important figure of (income - expenses) has fallen in half.
So, you might find that it's a 50% lower salary, and an 80% lower living cost. That would be informative.
That said, you can probably move from here to a non-SF tech hub and get a 50-100% bump in your salary with only a 20% increase in cost of living.
You'll need a car, of course, and as long as you're not eating at trendy places downtown, everything else is pretty cheap. Bars have $1 beers and burgers at happy hour.
Additionally, another downside I noticed when I was there was that around 2am in the summer, the streets are often flooded due to people watering their lawns. Besides the absent or poor pedestrian infrastructure, this made my after work walk quite a bit more complicated.
My electric bill is about $80 in the summer to keep my $125k, 2000 sqft house at 72F. Not too bad IMO.
And everyone (40% of the houses in my neighborhood?) who waters their lawn does so at dawn and dusk, not 2AM. If you water in the middle of the night when the grass is cold and dormant, you can get mold.
Air conditioning is mandatory some areas, with temperatures in Sydney peaking over 40 C (105 F) in the summer, and electricity costs 27 cents per kWh (US$0.20).
Australia has some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world, as Australia is completely incapable of managing its infrastructure properly.
I can't speak to the senior level, but compared to California those junior salaries are lagging by 50%, not 20%.
That said, our roads are still shit. Like the rest of Michigan.
I was born here so I am fine but I have met SE Asian, Indian and Japanese people here who were kind of miserable. But you get used to it after a while.
Lake Michigan has a large impact on weather patterns. Grand Rapids on the east and Chicago on the west do not have the same weather in the winter. Lake-effect snow is rare in Chicago, and the colder it gets the higher the likelihood of sunshine. Many days it will feel as though sunglasses are a safety item.
Here is Grand Rapids [2].
[1] https://www.usclimatedata.com/
[2] https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/grand-rapids/michigan/...
It rampages through the city like a plague every December through March.
Leave home in the dark, get home in the dark, it's overcast when you do go outside.
Snow comes and goes, it gently falls constantly due to "lake effect", and you'll have a few 10" snowstorms from November through February. Plus a couple random 40-60 degree days where it all melts off.
There is a ski hill (Cannonsburg) half an hour away, but it's only a hill - not a mountain. People ice fish, snowmobile, play hockey, and generally enjoy the winter - but you have to get out and use the right lights, or else you'll join most of the rest of the city in some mild depression.
When my son graduates high school, and our network of great schools, family, and friends becomes less of a tie, I'm running.
Now the summer time is a completely different story...
Salary is one part of that, but unless you grew up in the area, most non-hub-city regions are a hard sell for young folk, and Detroit hasn't yet recovered enough to be "hip". People used to have for move specifically to find a job, but in tech there are so many jobs available currently that you kind of get your choice of destination if you're a capable engineer, especially with remote work available.
Because from my experiences in Australia and New Zealand, the majority of people work a 40 hour week. Everyone in my office has cleared out by 6 PM.
$50k a year for working 40 hours a week in the midwest with its lower cost of living sounds like a fine deal. Those kinds of wages are fairly normal for software developers to earn internationally in other developed countries like Australia or Germany.
I earn the equivalent of US$55k (plus bonus) here in Australia (I could be earning more, long story) as a relatively junior developer.
But then you have to add my annual leave entitlement, I get 4 weeks annual leave plus 2 weeks of public holidays (this country is so amazing, they give me a day off to watch the horse races). I hear that the standard in the USA is 2 weeks for a professional job. So I essentially get a 10% bonus in holiday pay. I also get 10 days of paid sick leave a year, and 3 days of bereavement leave for deaths of close relatives.
I also have 9.5% superannuation on top of my salary, and I don't have to pay health insurance. For the luxury of (almost) free healthcare, my tax burden is only $700 more than it would be in Grand Rapids. According to a random website I found, I'd be paying $3,000 per year for health insurance in Michigan [1].
So my income, adjusted for superannuation and annual leave, is around $67k, add the health insurance to that and I'm at $70k. Apparently cost of living in San Fransisco is about 40% higher than Melbourne [2], so on that comparison I'm not doing poorly, but Melbourne is about 20% more expensive than Grand Rapids [3]. I'm always skeptical of Numbeo though, because the numbers are quite off. Basically though, I have US$20k (plus bonus) per year of disposable income after I pay for food, rent, and utilities.
[1] https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-cost-of-health-insuranc...
[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
[3] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
These articles typically state something along the lines of the low COL (cost-of-living) luring young people back from coastal cities. Some even overstate their case quite a bit by projecting they'll be the next Silicon Valley or startup hub. I wonder how folks here feel about such articles?
I can't help but notice there's some element of boosterism that misses a something fundamental. To be sure, it makes people who live in rust belt cities feel better about themselves (I was one of those people), but it doesn't seem to really move the needle in attracting the very ambitious to these places. In my observation, the truly ambitious are insensitive to cost-of-living arguments.
Paul Graham wrote an article entitled "Cities and Ambition" [1] which speaks to this. It tracks with my observation that people at the top of their games tend to cluster, and are willing to suffer discomfort to live among their peers.
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Some quotes:
"How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time."
"No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do."
I'm not sure of how some cities are more expensive correlates with overall ambition so much as it does class. People from all classes can be very ambitious even if they're unequal in wealth.
On a related note, I suspect cities primarily relying on cost-of-living arguments to attract people may actually be subtly signalling the reverse of what ambitious people are drawn to. A city's primary signal should be the vibrancy of the place, not the low cost of living.
In my old rust belt city, many were proud of the fact that folks who left for New York City were coming back because we offered a low cost of living. But the people returning were also those who had "given up" on their ambitions... whose dreams were broken by NYC. I realize this is a bit of an unfair generalization, because it's not universally true (some ambitious chefs who returned -- and they are very good -- were those who trained in NYC but simply found NY's restaurant economics too oppressive). But supposing we were subtly attracting folks who had "given up"... in large enough numbers, they are likely to set a certain cultural tone for the city. Great cities are not built on low cost-of-living is all I'm saying.
Side: as a historical example, consider Canada vs U.S. -- Canadians are generally a more risk-averse people than Americans, and it's partly because the United Empire Loyalists were American loyalists who chose the safer route of siding with the British, whereas U.S. Americans forged their own path. The Loyalists set the tone for much of the country.
As to your second point, cities with ambition tend to be expensive because people want to live in them, often in spite of the expense. However, the reverse is not true -- just because a city is expensive doesn't mean it attracts ambition. Nantucket's pretty expensive but it's not brimming with ambition. Not sure about expensive cities correlating with class... New York is very expensive, but still manages to attract ambitious working class people who are trying to make it there.
Yes. What makes me unlikely to return to Michigan long-term, as much as I liked where I lived, is the limited career options I would have there. I am apparently willing to put up with a rather high cost of living to work on what I find interesting.
However, I will also point out that low COL can have advantages of it's own for the ambitious, particularly for those pursuing their own ideas rather than climbing the corporate ladder.
When rent is $500/month (or less with a roommate) and bars, restaurants, etc are also cheap, it requires much less difficulty to pursue your idea. Even modest savings will let you live a normal life and last you years of trying to make a go of it, and you could get by indefinitely with a part time job if you don't have that.
After not going to the company picnic over the course of few years (BBQ) it's easy to get outed as the Company Vegetarian.
And then, because it is Grand Rapids, and the corporate world is very different from the local public university, you pretty much get shunned. They won't make your life completely miserable, but you will feel the affects of being an permanent outsider.
YMMV, but I was batting 2 for 2 and have stories from others. I'm sure there are some good employers around.
Generally, I tell people to just say "I go to Fountain Street Church". Even if you don't know what that is, even if you've never set foot in the place, just say those words anyway. It's essentially a community shared codephrase that means "you aren't going to harass anyone about their religious beliefs".
It lets the strict Christians sleep at night (because you 'go to church'), but it usually prevents any follow-up questions (because it's somewhat well known as the 'overly-accepting' church, and they usually won't want to get into orthodoxy specifics).
Meanwhile, that same phrase lets most of the non-religious locals know that, regardless of whatever your actual beliefs are/aren't, you are a polite person who doesn't want to face religious discrimination and is claiming not to do so to others.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, it's not right to make people jump through these silly hoops. But that's sort of how the game is played in Grand Rapids.
I will probably have a long wait! The problem as I see it is that companies need to be run with a ‘remote first’ culture, where people in outlying offices are not second class citizens.
I recently was in NYC working for a few days, and while the environment is a lot of fun, many people who work there have very long commutes. When I worked as a contractor at Google in Mountain View, I came into the office at 6am to beat the traffic. The cost of living in tech centers is awful compared to non-east/west coast areas.
It seems like there is not much middle ground: either have everyone in one or a few urban areas or have a distributed culture. Currently the business model of concentrating workers in high cost areas is winning over distributed teams.
They’re a big employer in the region, so locals do tend to “look the other way.” But this is far too generous a portrayal of the families/company that have created decades of devastation in the wake of its scam.
While the area is still pretty conservative that has changed mightily in the last forty years. The city now has a lively downtown and all those breweries have made the place a magnet for young people from the surrounding areas.
The 'lake effect' does mean they get a lot more snow than the eastern part of the state.
I couldn't understand it why he didn't try being open on Sunday. He told me he could be open on Sunday but if he did he wouldn't have the business to stay open the other six days of the week.
I mean, anywhere with a plentiful supply of other young adults gives you approximately equal opportunity to socialize, right?
As someone who used to live in the rust belt, I found my social life to be vastly improved after moving to Chicago.
It's true you can be lonely in a big city, but the same is true in a small town. The difference is that in a big city, significantly more options exist if you are willing to step out.
After moving to a big city, I was able to connect with more people of like-mind. The diversity of people I meet now is an order of magnitude greater. The Meetup groups are significantly better (I can go to a technical meetup and talk shop with people at my level). If I wanted to hang out with friends, the scope of activities possible are also much wider. If I wanted to learn a skill, take language classes, take evening classes at a world-renowned university, etc., I can and have -- and have met interesting people through these activities. If I wanted to go on a trip with friends, flights are much cheaper out of a hub city. Job opportunities are also much more abundant -- if I decided to change jobs tomorrow, I could do that without moving away.
The intellectual and cultural climate in a dynamic, thriving city is vastly different from that of a single-industry town.
It's not just dining out.
Another thing that differs between cities is the nightlife varies a lot. The health of a city's nightlife isn't just a population thing though, but also zoning and licensing have a big factor in that.
For example, practically everything has to close at 3 AM in Sydney, which has had a massively detrimental effect on the nightlife. Meanwhile in Melbourne you can still party from Friday night to Monday evening without stopping if you really want to. There's not a lot of cities around these days that still have clubs with 24 hour licences. All the places I regularly go to here in Melbourne close at 6 AM at the earliest.
Not to mention it's a small town with a lot of bigger city amenities, close proximity to Detroit, and with it being a college town the average IQ is pretty high.
Pittsburgh couldn't turn around like it did without Carnegie Mellon.
Monroe has like a sixth the population in the city limits and still less than half the size comparing the two metro regions. Ann Arbor is in a different class than Monroe. Monroe is a small town. Ann Arbor is a medium-small city (over 100,000 in city, over 300,000 in metro area).
Ann Arbor is centered around the University of Michigan, consistently ranked the #2 public school in the country, just behind UC Berkley. It has around 45,000 students. And yet Ann Arbor is big enough that students are still a minority of the population.
The UofM hospital is generally ranked one of the top 10 in the country, so it's not surprising for someone to go their for some special visit.
But sure, it's small and quaint compared to any real big city.