For big metros:
Minneapolis: Clean from the sky and the ground! (One of my favorite US skylines -period-)
St. Paul: Clean from the ground, kinda blah from the sky.
Washington DC: Dirty. I was very underwhelmed by DC.
For medium metros:
Omaha: Dirty - run down and old. I hear the zoo is fantastic, and I loved the old market (and Jay Welter's Cigar Shop)...otherwise, unimpressed.
Des Moines: Clean! Nice mix of old and new, very little disrepair downtown (just enough so that it doesn't seem overly sterile), a lot of renovation, epic skyline for a city in its size category. Only beef is that as it gets bigger, certain parts of the city proper are beginning to fall into neglect (portions of east, south, and north - north being where I'm from)
Cedar Rapids: Dirty....very, very dirty. I found the grit and dirt to actually be a virtue though as it made the city feel bigger than I probably otherwise would've.
For small metros:
Ames: Clean! Alive and Vibrant!
Iowa City: Clean! Even more alive and vibrant!
Ottumwa: Dirty....nuff said.
Clear Lake: Super Clean! Man what an awesome little place! I almost had an ironic typo and called it "Clean Lake". :-)
Grinnell: Mixed. Clean downtown, and amazingly big for a city of less than 10k. Unimpressed with the rest.
Pella: Clean! If they wouldn't arrest you for doing so, it'd be a great place to "tiptoe through the tulips!
Newton: Dirty, but in sort of a charming virtuous way (Newton feels like a miniature Cedar Rapids to me, which in turn, felt like a smaller Omaha.) (Note: Newton and Pella are not considered part of the Des Moines MSA, but they are part of the Des Mones CSA...Ames, though equidistant, is not)
p.s. defining big, medium, small by MSNBC's metric of medium = 1,000,000 - 250,000. So big and small would be anything outside of that.
Downsize your life in one of these cities - Business - Local business | NBC News
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