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Comment by mfer | Hacker News Reader

I live in Michigan so I have a few thoughts about living there...

If you love urban centers than Michigan might not be for you. There is Ann Arbor but it's a college town and not likely what you want.

Michigan has over 10,000 lakes. There are lots of parks and open state land. It's not just the tourist places like the dunes (where you can take off road vehicles on sand dunes) or rivers you can canoe on camping trips. Not far from me is a dog run (wouldn't really call it a park) that's over a hundred acres of state land. It's a chunk of a much larger thousands of acres section just meant for dogs. Other areas have horse trails and stuff.

There is a lot of opportunity to enjoy the great outdoors.

This is also going to mean that you aren't going to have great public transit in these places. The options are limited because it's off the beaten path.

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I lived in Michigan until I was 35 and moved south in 2013. I have a litany of reasons for moving including soul-crushing endless winters, lack of reasonable summer, depressed economy, and a political landscape without an identity and with an extremely short memory (shorter than average in my view). I also spent my summers in Northern Michigan camping and have extremely fond memories of that. For the beauty that Michigan offers, you have to really, really enjoy the winter months and do OK with a lack of sun to make it there. I struggled something awful with Seasonal Affective Disorder [1] as an adult along with Vitamin D deficiency [2]. It's also worthwhile to look at things like insurance rates, vehicle registration, and cost of utilities for the municipalities listed. Take into account school systems if you have little ones - Michigan is not widely considered to have the best around, and routinely ranks in the bottom 1/3 of the States [3].

I clearly have a lot of bias against Michigan, so please take this for what it's worth. I did try to provide some backing for my bias, but I spent a long time saving to escape and if there's anyone aligned with my concerns, I hope I saved them a trip they'd regret.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seasonal-affe... [2] https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Michigan/annual-days-... [3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

> I have a litany of reasons for moving including soul-crushing endless winters, lack of reasonable summer, depressed economy, and a political landscape without an identity and with an extremely short memory (shorter than average in my view).

Cheers from Southern Urals, had a good laugh.

I live in Southern Ontario and now I'm wondering if I should be more depressed.

Honestly, same. I've been thinking about dipping to a coastal town somewhere with an English, French, or Spanish-speaking population.

GTA suburbs aren't bad but I love 10–20ºC and friendly people more.

GTA housing/rental market is beyond abysmal. A small 1bd costs you close to 2k CAD, and not to say the pay in tech here is much less than what you would get down in South.

Down to 1600-1700 now!

The bad tech pay continues to confuse me. It’s not for lack of talent imo.

Winter is going to be depressing without any getaways to Kuba though...

At the risk of sounding like a xenophobe, it is high rates of points based immigration. There's a lot of talent pouring in every year. There's definitely other factors too (Canadians don't seem great at starting tech companies that become big that usually pay higher wages).

It's not xenophobic to say that the market got flooded.

What's GTA?

Greater Toronto Area

Brighton in the UK is nice. :-)

Honestly it's less the weather and more the lack of sunlight in certain places in the midwest over the winter. After the two-three week autumn, it's just grey and brown and mud and salt for nearly half the year. Then sporadic snowstorms that your employer and school district makes you drive through.

Well I can address each point for my situation, do you have: temperatures below -30°C for at least a week straight each winter, your summer starts in late May and ends mid August, the furthest window of planning for any private business is exactly one year, you have the same president for 21 years who was the head of a Homeland Security before that and is a leader of a political party which has a nickname "Swindlers and Thieves" in the opposition?

No. Feeling better now.

Glad I could help.

I think one thing which helps is indeed the sun, with SAD.

-30C does suck, but... and this is one downside of remote work, if you have to get out daily, drive to work, drive home, you're going to catch sun some of that time.

In many parts of Southern Ontario, you still get sun with the cold. Lots and lots of sunny days.

As a counter, I moved to Vancouver which is always 10C+ essentially in the winter, often 15C days, yet rain and cloud.

There, I experienced SAD for the first time in my life. And I ran away, moved back to Ontario, after 10 years of it.

And a day on the radio when the announcer said "It's now been 32 days since we've seen the sun". The guy wasn't kidding. It had been more than a month since the clouds parted during daylight hours.

That. Really. Sucks.

There was a stretch of 40 days or so where there was no sun even in the Bay Area. It is very rare, but it has happened (circa 2006).

Southern Ontario (assuming you mean GTA and SW Ontario) is a bit milder than most of Michigan. Detroit is usually a degree or two colder than Toronto in the winter months, for instance, and it's warmer than most of the state.

This gave me a solid chuckle, thanks for that.

Grass is always greener! Cheers amigo, thanks for chiming in. Syracuse, NY

Word. I moved from Michigan to northern Europe (Berlin) and miss Michigan's long, bright winter days. ;-)

Michigan's big cities are on about the same latitude as the French Riviera.

Latitude isn't everything, the Gulf stream and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation keeps western Europe much warmer than it otherwise would be just based on it's latitude.

Fun fact that current is weakening somewhat because of climate change so European winters may get much worse. [0]

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ocean-current-keep...

I heard that more important than ocean currents is the Rocky Mountains, which causes the jet stream to go south, then north.

It's probably both I'm not a climate scientist so I can't really say one is more important than the other but the AMOC does bring warm water up the coast as well and if that goes away and the water cools the air brought over by the Gulf Stream will probably be colder as well.

OK, but I hope you realize that the Gulf stream is a water current whereas I,m talking about an air current.

They're about 4,500 miles (7,400km) apart so I'm fairly confident latitude isn't the only factor in their weather.

As someone who lived in Michigan for over 25 years, let me just say that I share your biases, for similar reasons. Moving to California was the best thing ever for me, because the winter months didn't make me want to die.

As someone who grew up in Minnesota then lived in Wisconsin for many years I relate. Moving to Florida was the best thing for me, winter months no longer make me want to die.

yeah, but summer in Florida is hellishly hot, humid and buggy

Eh, if one can handle the humidity in Michigan, one can handle the humidity in Florida. It's just that you don't get much of a break from it (two months in the "winter" down here)

My thoughts exactly. I remember some summer mornings in Michigan where I felt like I was swimming through the air. It only got worse later in the day once it got warmer.

100%. The cornfields of the Midwest sweat as much as the humidity in many parts of Florida. Just thinking about the temperatures in MN and WI today (below freezing already!) causes tension in my back and my shoulder blades to flex. No thanks. I'll take relaxed muscles any day. It's a bit confusing to me to think my family is bundled up in winter outerwear already. I forget it's almost November thanks to upper 70 and lower 80 degree temps here(panhandle).

Meh. Depends where in Florida you are. I'm in the panhandle a few miles from the coast. Summer temps and humidity are comparable to the Midwest, except our humidity lasts for more than 5 months. The bugs (mosquitoes) where I'm at are actually less than where I came from thanks to, for better and for worse, the county spraying to keep their numbers down.

I left Utah for exactly the same reasons and would never live there again under any circumstances.

London is further north than Toronto or Michigan and we don't get anything this bad. Thank you, Gulf Stream.

Same reason NE Scotland is so lush at the latitude of Southern Alaska. :)

It is mad and being UK born and bred I sort of took it for granted.

In my head I had a mental picture that London was level with NY. Until one time when I was reading a discussion on here about farming and someone called the UK "the far north" and said that we are further north than all of the continental USA. Mind blown.

As an American this only hit home for me when visiting England in July. Sunset at 10pm and sunrise at 4am was lovely, But I wouldn't much like to visit in January with only six hours of daylight.

Latitude is 41° to 48°, it's not even proper north.

I live in Spain, and I can relate having good weather and plenty of sun light increases life-quality :)

I looked into it. There's literally only 5 zip codes this applies to. Benton Harbor, St. Joseph, Bridgman, Berrien Springs, Stevensville.

We do like the general area so my wife is now pushing for us to take advantage of this. I'm hesitant mainly because I don't want to move in the middle of a pandemic/get our house ready to be sold right away.

Where are the large dog runs at?

I'm in none of those zip codes and I've visited numerous places that were not there.

Unfortunately, I could not find the large dog run on a map. I know where it is and the signs call it out if you are there.

Different places have a different culture. It all kind of depends on what you're in to. For example, I know some people who love the Traverse City area and some others who have been there for a bit and are ready to move. That's an area worth looking at.

If you want to be close to things and like urban-ish then there is Ann Arbor. The train to Chicago goes right through town. The express ways also make it easy to get to a lot of places as fast as you can in Michigan. While it's about as urban as it gets in Michigan you can also get out of it pretty quickly into the outdoors.

Michigan has a fair amount of variety. That's why people can have such different experiences.

I visited my parents the other day. On the drive down their street I passed a couple dozen wild turkeys. While I was at their house an 8 point buck walked through the back yard. The deer there know it's safe enough that you can be outside, reading, and drinking a coffee and the deer wont run off.

It's a different pace of life where I am at. Not every place is like that.

I mean the $15k moving incentive applies only if you move to one of those 5 zip codes. It's near the bottom of www.movetomichigan.org.

I think I may have passed by a dog run sign, come to think of it. Whenever we've visited we didn't have our dogs with us, though. If we moved we would try to hunt them down though.

We live in the suburbs, not downtown, so we're not super urban. It would still be a bit of a culture shock to live there I think, as SW Michigan is significantly more rural than where we are at, but we mainly went for the nature.

You know those stories about cities emptying out and leasing prices dropping?

Thats because millions of people are moving in the middle of a pandemic, even inviting movers into their homes and driving shared uhaul trucks.

If you’re “at risk” then caveat emptor, if not then “middle of a pandemic” is not an excuse for everything.

Without saying what specifically, there are risk factors in the family.

The downside of “doing what lots of other people are doing” during a pandemic is that when the pandemic ends, which may be a few months from now if a vaccine is effective, you’ll have placed yourself at a huge disadvantage when the same forces invert. I say this as someone who lived in NYC way back during 9/11 and thought the city would never recover. It absolutely did, almost immediately, and I felt very silly for the next decade or so.

You mean for an owner or mortgage holder?

Or you got underwater and tied up with life wherever you went to?

A little bit of column A a little bit of column B?

You mentioned a wife. I'm not going to presume that children are for sure in your future, but if that's something you and your wife have considered I would _strongly_ suggest you research the schools for those areas. I can comment via a previous teaching colleague that Benton Harbor was not a district you would want a child in if it could be avoided.

I don't know anything about Benton Harbor, but here in the United States being told a town has "bad schools" tends to be very highly correlated to large non-white population. I just looked it up and oh hey, Benton Harbor's population is 89% African-American.

Yeah. It’s a vicious cycle, particularly in predominantly-Republican/Southern states. There’s very, very, very little support for public education at a state level — or even nationally; I mean, our goddamn Secretary of Education is Betsy DeVos, who advocates for charter schools to a degree that is frankly sickening when the reality is that they are, on average, shit for the success of a community.

It’s gross, and has very recent racist roots. I went to high school with kids whose parents founded “white flight” private schools in my city.

It’s not that GP is racist, or something — but to deny the connection between race and public education in the US would be silly at best and malicious at worst (see, for example, Fox News/aforementioned DeVos)

"especially in republican states"...

meanwhile LA and NY public schools in black areas are among the worst in the country despite massive amounts of funding.

https://www.laweekly.com/california-is-home-to-some-of-ameri...

> A new analysis of the nation's public schools, by personal finance site WalletHub

That's a private company doing a performance on a public service? A personal finance company at that? How did they arrive at doing this analysis?

I even tried opening the linked analysis from two different IP addresses, but all I get is this message: [1]

> Oops! This IP address has been blocked due to too many requests. To unblock, please send your IP address via email to help@wallethub.com.

[1] https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/

Moving on, this is what the article says:

> The study was based on 17 metrics, including student-to-teacher ratio, dropout rates and average SAT and ACT scores. Compared with the other 49 states and the District of Columbia, California ranked 47th in reading test scores, 46th in math test scores and dead last in student-teacher ratios.

I'm very curious about those metrics. Because the three that are mentioned only give a superficial glance of what's going on. Correlation is not causation, for one. Are drop out rates or low SAT/ACT scores directly related to the quality of education? Or the poor social economic situation of the households in which children grow up?

Without follow up, I'd be very careful about drawing conclusions.

> “More resources do not always correlate with better academic performance, as our findings demonstrate,”

Of course not. Then there's also the larger debate whether academic performance alone should be the main goal of public schools? Isn't the purpose of providing an education, ensuring that the next generation grows up into stable, independent and healthy adults?

For instance, she push towards standardized testing in which private publishers such as Pearson have come to play a crucial role is something that does deserve a discussion in it's own right as well, no? [2]

[2] https://qz.com/398279/watch-john-oliver-dismantle-american-s...

I could access your [1] from wallethub, for what it's worth, and... you're better off blocked. I tried to find any sort of external link to citations but could only find this blurb at the end:

> Sources: Data used to create this ranking were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Education, National Conference of State Legislatures, National Center for Education Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative, Education Commission of the States, U.S. News & World Report, College Board, Ballotpedia, ACT, National Governors Association, State Educational Technology Directors Association and Zendrive.

Source: Secret Order of the Forsaken Keebler elves.

>Are drop out rates or low SAT/ACT scores directly related to the quality of education?

Like what, students know the material perfectly, but drop out and lower their scores for lulz?

So, funnily enough, Michigan ranks above California on USNews's k-12 education metric, 29:37. [0] So does Texas, at 33. And Missouri. And Virginia. And Florida.

I think your stereotype of "smart liberals spending money for a good education" and "dumb hicks throwing their kids futures away for a penny" might be a liiiiitle bit off.

0: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

whats your point? are you supposed to willingly condemn your child to a bad school because of that fact?

condemn them... its got just as much of a chance to save them.

Bad schools means the student population comes from households with low incomes, and hence are less likely to have home environments preferable for schoolwork compared to home environments areas with households with high incomes. i.e. "You are the company you keep", so people try to ensure their kids are surrounded by other kids with economically secure families, in the hopes that their influence will lead to higher probabilities of success.

Detroit and Grand Rapids are great urban centers.

The public transit in those cities is non-existent compared to urban centers like Chicago or Seattle.

"urban centers with mass transit" is moving the goalposts a little, isn't it?

For many people the car free lifestyle is the main appeal of urban centres. More not being specific enough than moving goal posts imo.

Public transit was mentioned in the original comment.

I'd actually compare GR at least closer to something like Asheville, only a bit smaller. It gets decent concerts, has a nice craft drink scene and lots of fun places to go, but won't compare to some place like a Chicago or Seattle if that's what you want.

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