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Could be wrong but my sense is that's largely a function of how many wealthy towns MA has. Sure, there's Wellesley/Concord/Bedford, etc. but you're not buying/renting there if you're middle class.
There are plenty of underwhelming school districts in MA (no one raves about Springfield or Lawrence), and while there are some "middle-class" cities in the metro with good schools like Reading, middle-class is relative - there's still not much available to buy in that town under $350k. In MN you can potentially buy into Edina for that kind of cash.
That's really a perfect "chicken or the egg" scenario though. You're saying that the good education is a function of there being so many wealthy towns...but you could argue that so many towns are wealthy due to the good education of the area, which allows the residents to achieve more professionally. They're products of one another.
However I think it's also fair to argue that education has been paramount in Massachusetts from the very beginning. That's why it's home to so many top-level colleges & universities, including the country's oldest (Harvard). Mark Twain's quote: “In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?” exists for a reason.
I thought MSP was a fast paced area in general and heard there's lots of traffic, although not quite as bad as Boston metro.
You know, I honestly never got the "fast-pace" feel in Minneapolis like I do in somewhat nearby and comparable Chicago. People seemed to be courteous and patient in Minneapolis. Minnesota,Wisconsin, and Iowa drivers are slow pokes, that's for sure.
I mean remember that Massachusetts is TEENY TINY compared to Minnesota. Even if only 28% of Minnesota is forested, that's still 40,000 square miles - more than twice as much area as the entire state of Massachusetts (about 17,000 square miles). If there's a lot more unremarkable prairie and farmland in Minnesota, well... there's basically a lot more of everything else too.
Its like a more developed, more flat version of Alaska.
Isolated and peaceful but you are still kind of near humanity.
only a 1 hr 45 min flight from Duluth to Chi Town.
MA has a beautiful area in the Berkshires, which is definitely just as nice as most of the Northwoods and just a short drive to NYC and Boston as well as the mountains of upstate NY, VT, and NH. The Berkshires definitely don't have any answer for Lake Superior, but then MA is right on the ocean...
The bulk of the MN population in the MSP metro definitely has the cost advantage against MA with the bulk of the population in the Boston area. But then, Boston offers vibrancy and an urban environment that is much more dynamic and vibrant than MSP.
I like how natives pretend that a good 2/3 of the state of MN isn't flat treeless farmed plains. Certainly there are beautiful forests up north, and the chunk of the Driftless is gorgeous, but you could fit numerous Massachusetts on top of what's basically North Dakota. It's a big state with some very nice nature in places (east), but well over half is quite boring and ugly, from a scenic standpoint. Massachusetts is tiny, but has a lot of variety as such and very little of the North Dakota style look.
Will you come off it? Most of Minnesota is not treeless prairie. Below is a map showing Minnesota's terrestrial biomes (dark green is coniferous/mixed forest, light green is deciduous forest, and yellow is tallgrass prairie):
As you can see, only the extreme western and southwestern portions of the state are prairie. Even on the prairies, the landscape isn't entirely treeless (lots of oak savannah and wetland groves). Nothing in Minnesota looks like semiarid North Dakota — and even extreme eastern North Dakota (the Red River Valley) doesn't really look like North Dakota.
Right, that was the original vegetation of the state, and those are the main regions. Much has changed since the 1700s. If you look at any satellite (like Google's) you can see that more than half the state is pretty much indistinguishable from the eastern Dakotas. And that's how it looks on the ground, as well.
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