Favorite Medium-Sized Midwestern cities (living in, suburbs, medical)

[metro223]

Originally Posted by Ben Around

"Driving through" usually doesn't give one a good sense of a city, particiularly since when you drive thru most cities, you are on some ugly freeway that takes you thru sprawlville. (Guessing you were probably on I-94, I-90 or US 151/12. To know Madison, you have to get off the highway, go right to the center of town, by the capitol, the campus, State Street, Willy Street, the lakes, etc.

When I've passed through Madison on the freeway - I liked it, even the suburban areas. I thought they were clean and beautiful. I feel the same way about Des Moines. I guess freeways aren't ugly to me.

[kite eating tree]

Originally Posted by Ben Around

"Driving through" usually doesn't give one a good sense of a city, particiularly since when you drive thru most cities, you are on some ugly freeway that takes you thru sprawlville. (Guessing you were probably on I-94, I-90 or US 151/12. To know Madison, you have to get off the highway, go right to the center of town, by the capitol, the campus, State Street, Willy Street, the lakes, etc.

I agree. Omaha looks great driving on I-480, I-680 and the West Dodge Expressway (these, however, are parts that are only generally used by people that live here). The city looks awful driving along I-80 (which is the part most people see when driving through), the Kennedy Freeway and the North Freeway. These last three being characterized by train tracks, lots of industrial areas (like large factories, etc.) and grain elevators that have sat decaying from disuse for decades. It's pretty terrible.

Anyway...

Omaha aside, I like Sioux Falls and Des Moines. Lawrence, Kansas, if it counts, is awesome.

[metro223]

Kansas is a definitely a Midwestern state - Lawrence counts.

[ajf131]

Originally Posted by tallguy924

How in the world could you not list Fort Wayne, South Bend, Indiana, but you could put Terre Haute? and how about some other ones everyones heard of.. kalamazoo Michigan?? Akron Ohio?? and how about Rockford Illinois, does that ring a bell? it should over bloomington, or youngstown anyways...

Note that I mentioned forgetting Fort Wayne earlier...and I didn't really bring up Akron because I essentially think Akron and Cleveland are basically one and the same...the same type of relationship as St. Louis and St. Charles, MO.

[El Rhino]

In no particular order:

Des Moines, IA (duh) It's home and usually "pretty good for a city this size" in almost every category.

Duluth, MN - I like the Northern/Nautical (Lake Superior) thing they have going on there. Lots of nice scenery, a few decent things to do and although it is Midwestern, this part of the country feels like an entirely different region.

Omaha, NE - Des Moines' arch-nemisis. Another city that gets a lot of "pretty good for a city this size" comments.

Iowa City, IA - Gotta love our hard-partying left wing friends.

St. Paul, MN - May be a controversial choice considering it's part of a very large metro area, but I like the more gritty blue collar feel St. Paul has compared to Minneapolis (although I like Minneapolis as well)

[Jay See Double You]

Okay, I'll answer the question in the next post, but first, I think it's important we have a fixed definition of what constitutes midsize.

I definitely think Metro population is far more reliable than city population. A big city can be a mid-sized metro if it's suburban network is small, examples would be Omaha and El Paso (I know, El Paso's a different region, but it's a good example: city proper is almost 700k, but the metro is only 800k....relatively nothing in the way of suburbia.) Omaha, ELP by city proper are bigger than many/most of the cities proper of "Large" metros, yet, by metro, they're only mid-size*.

On the other end of the spectrum, you've got Metros where the city proper is a relatively small portion of the metro. Portland Maine is only about 60k city, but about 515k metro. Salt Lake City, Utah city proper is smaller than Des Moines city proper, yet, SLC has such a robust suburbia that using the metric I'm using, it's a large city, while DM is only mid-sized. Even Des Moines city proper only makes up about 1/3rd of its metro population (pushing 600k...I'll bet when the 2012 estimates come out, we see DM having exceeded that).

So I think we should forget about city size, and go with metro size. Urban core would probably be even better than total metro, but those numbers are harder to tie down, and I don't have a good metric for Urban Core, so Metro will work.

I ---really--- wish the US Census Bureau would come up with a definitive standard so we could put a stop to all the silly "this is mid-size/this isn't mid-size" debates that are out there. I've seen Des Moines occupy all quadrants of the "midsize" category, show up as literally the #1 biggest city in the "small" category, get punted deep into "small" territory, and even show up once or twice on the lower extremes of the "large" category. And of course, the metro size isn't in flux, but the various standards that it's applied to.

It seems to me that most of the wildly divergent metrics are put forth by individuals, rather than organizations. These individual metrics tend to be very "foxhole" in their perspective. Los Angeles is about 20x the size of Des Moines, and Des Moines is about 20x the size of Marshalltown. So, to Marshalltown, Des Moines is going to seem very big, and to L.A., Des Moines is going to seem very small (or, as I've put it before: "Des Moines is Marshalltown to L.A., and L.A. to Marshalltown.")

This may be a bit of a simplification, but the problem with a lot of these foxhole views, using these three cities as representative examples (L.A., DM, M-town) is that people from L.A. don't account for M-town in their analysis of DM, and so, DM seems small, and they classify it so. Likewise, people from M-town fail to account for L.A. in their analysis of DM, and so, DM seems big, and they classify it so (this isn't perfect, since people from Marshalltown are at least aware of L.A., and so the effect isn't as strong in that direction as in the other, but you get my point, and I think it's a solid one in macro).

People also don't tend to think in mediums, but only in big and smalls. That said, most people from the big think of the medium as just a bigger small, and the people from the small think of the medium as a smaller big. Or if they do think of medium, they tend to use the smaller big cities as their medium (someone from L.A. may think of KC or Salt Lake City as medium, and Des Moines as small), or the bigger small cities as their medium (Marshalltown may view Waterloo, or Owatanna (sp?) as medium and Des Moines as big.)

While I'm flattered by the Des Moines = big, and offended by the Des Moines = small voices out there, frankly, I flat out reject them both as foxhole perspectives.

Organizations tend to do better at thinking nationally, of thinking "big picture." There is, of course, still variance between entities on how they define things, but they don't diverge to nearly the wild degree as these individual voices. MSNBC defined a mid-sized metro as anything in the range of 1,000,000 to 250,000. This seems to be fairly consistent and representative of other metrics I've seen in the wild from organizations. This metric would put Tucson, Honolulu, and Tulsa as the top three, Omaha in the top ten, El Paso just outside the ten, Des Moines, and Madison at about the 75% mark, the Quads at about 40%, and Cedar Rapids in the bottom ten. This metric would exclude places like KC, and St. Louis on the one side, and places like Iowa City, Sioux City on the other. So, KC's out, IC's out, Omaha and Cedar Rapids make up the bookends, and Des Moines is fairly prominent in the class: near the top 1/4. That sounds just about perfect to me! :-)

So, unless or until the Census bureau comes up with something official, this is the metric I will adopt, and champion.

[Jay See Double You]

Frankly, I really need to get out and visit more midsized midwestern cities. I have not been to Madison, and Madison MSA is not only the next smaller metro in the midwest, it's the next smaller metro in the entire US. The city's bigger, but the urban core is smaller. I do hear really great things about Madison, and its skyline looks nice.

I recently visited Omaha, and even more recently, Cedar Rapids. One thing that struck me is that they had similar feels to me. They both felt old, and run down. In fact, when I entered Cedar Rapids, the first thing I thought was "Man, what a dump!" Now, after spending a weekend there, I actually never changed my mind about Cedar Rapids being a dump. Instead, I changed my mind about whether Cedar Rapids being a dump was a good thing or a bad thing. I ended up finding Cedar Rapids to be quite endearing. In other words, I found it to be run down in a good way. It had an old, dirty, scrappy feel, which made it feel [to me, anyway] like it was bigger than it really is. In fact, I felt less safe walking around downtown Cedar Rapids on a Sunday afternoon, than I do on my regular strolls through downtown Des Moines on thursday nights round midnight after me and the boys are done recording our radio show (Welcome to "a Rebels Cause Radio"). But there is a charm to that scrappiness, a grit that I think Des Moines lacks somewhat. I got a very similar vibe from Omaha.

Now, Omaha is a big city land-wise, and so I certainly can't attest to having seen all of it. But what I saw definitely felt gritty, and run down. I spent some time in downtown, drove way out west, and headed up to that memorial exhibit on this huge hill (can't remember the name, I'm afraid.) I know that the zoo's awesome, but I didn't go. Other than the zoo, the only real redeeming factor to Omaha for me was the old market. Now -that- was an awesome experience! I would go back there again just for the old market. It really takes what's good about Des Moines' Court District, and East Village, and combines them into a nice compact area, complete with cobblestone roads. Very cool. I was very underwhelmed with the rest of Downtown Omaha (except for Jay Welter's Cigar shop on the south-western end.)

I also don't like the skyline of either Omaha, or especially Cedar Rapids nearly as well as Des Moines, although I have some compliments for them here too: I love the view of downtown Omaha from that huge hill in Council bluffs! I really wish we had a vantage point like that for Des Moines! The tallest building in Omaha is pretty cool, and a whopping four feet taller than 801 Grand, but I don't think it's as stylish, nor does as much to just make the overall skyline "pop" as 801 Grand does. In fact, four feet is kinda insulting, it's like a neener neener move. I've said it before that all we'd have to do is a mount a life-sized statue of Danny Devito at the peak of 801 Grand, and it'd be taller than that building in Omaha. Cedar Rapids doesn't have as many buildings or as tall of buildings, nor as stylish of buildings as either Des Moines, or Omaha, but their layout makes the downtown seem bigger than it is. Moreover, like Minneapolis, the interstate points you right at downtown as you're coming into town, which also adds to the illusion of size. Also, C.R. has a double decker bridge, and a spillway (a la Red Rock, or Saylorville), as well as the cool points for being one of the few cities with municipal buildings on an island. Plus, the bright blue glow off the tallest building and one of the other taller ones lights up the night in an attractive way, and looks lovely reflecting off the Cedar River.

Des Moines has a much cleaner, more polished feel than either of these cities, with a better mix of old and new, worn out and dazzling, and so, I like it the best of the three (from what I hear, Madison is kinda like Des Moines in this way.) However, I can see why someone would like it the least of the three, if they prefer that older, grit feel. I would not think anyone crazy who liked Des Moines the least of the three. Hopefully they will not find me crazy for believing just the opposite.

I have been to and through the quads, though not with a tourist mentality. The only part of the quads I can remember is the area immediately around the river. I don't have any meaningful memories of downtown Davenport, and don't think I've even seen the other downtowns. I promised my wife that the next place we went would be Denver (which is outside the scope of this discussion), but she promised me the next place we'd go after that would be the Quads. So I'll report back then. On the whole, I remember being not all that blown away by it. I remember being more deeply impacted by Cedar Rapids...then again, I was actively touring Cedar Rapids, so I'll withhold judgment.

Per the metric in the post above, I do not consider Iowa City to be midsized, but small. However, small is not always bad. I actually liked Iowa City very much. I was very impressed with all the culture there, and I really liked the topography, especially in the downtown area. In reality, downtown Iowa City is much smaller than Downtown Des Moines, but it's amazing what hills will do to the perception of size. Downtown IC is very hilly, and downtown DM is mostly flat. This gives downtown IC the illusion of size. In fact, it "felt" almost as big as downtown DM in terms of sq mileage. It seems to me that when you put big colleges in small towns, that it really makes those small towns feel much, much bigger than they are. It makes them very lively! I've never been to Cedar Falls, but Iowa City was certainly this way, and Ames as well. I love both of those cities. Des Moines is technically a college town since it has Drake, AIB, Grandview, and DMACC. But a) these colleges are so much smaller, and b) Des Moines is so much bigger that it doesn't have a real "college town" feel. You pretty much only feel it (and not as strongly, at that) in the immediate neighborhoods of those schools (Drake neighborhood is pretty cool.)

Again, by the MSNBC standards, Sioux City and Waterloo would be small, rather than medium...yet, I very much want to visit them and see what they're all about. I will plan on doing that when I can and reporting back.

So, my ranking of the midsized cities discussed:

1. Des Moines, IA
2. Cedar Rapids, IA
3. Omaha, NE
4. Quad Cities, IA/IL

small cities (per the MSNBC metric...we didn't discuss all of these):

1. Iowa City, IA
2. Ames, IA
3. Sioux Falls, SD
4. Rapids City, SD
4. Newton, IA
5. Marshalltown, IA
6. Grinnell, IA (an amazing downtown for a city so small!!!)

[Chicago60614]

My favorites:

Des Moines

Madison

Iowa City

Ann Arbor

Omaha

[Chicago60614]

Originally Posted by Jay See Double You

I recently visited Omaha, and even more recently, Cedar Rapids. One thing that struck me is that they had similar feels to me. They both felt old, and run down. In fact, when I entered Cedar Rapids, the first thing I thought was "Man, what a dump!" Now, after spending a weekend there, I actually never changed my mind about Cedar Rapids being a dump. Instead, I changed my mind about whether Cedar Rapids being a dump was a good thing or a bad thing. I ended up finding Cedar Rapids to be quite endearing. In other words, I found it to be run down in a good way. It had an old, dirty, scrappy feel, which made it feel [to me, anyway] like it was bigger than it really is. In fact, I felt less safe walking around downtown Cedar Rapids on a Sunday afternoon, than I do on my regular strolls through downtown Des Moines on thursday nights round midnight

Really? I grew up about 20 miles south of Cedar Rapids in Iowa City, and while I always though of it as a little boring compared to Iowa City, the last thing i ever thought was that it was dangerous. It's a city of nearly 130,000 people and a metro of 250,000 people where if they even get 2 murders in a year it's a pretty damn big deal. I never really thought of it has old or a dump. It was always just a "nice clean city". Just kinda ho-hum. Maybe the floods in 2008 that devestated the central areas of the city really changed things. We always ended up on the fastly growing north and northeast areas of town with all the retail and new construction.

Cedar Rapids' metro area has grown by 26% in the past two decades. For the Midwest that's actually some pretty decent growth. The metro has doubled since the 1950's. I think it must come off a lot more stagnant than it really is unless you get around to the northern and northeast areas.

I always wonder if Iowa City and Cedar Rapids will join metro areas. It's only around 10 miles from the northern burbs of Iowa City to the southern fringe of Cedar Rapids. When I grew up it always seemed so far, but I made the drive between the two when I was back visiting a few years ago and laughed that it's less than a half hour. Iowa City has grown by 60% since I was born around 1980.

Those two areas and Des Moines are the only two moovers and shakers in Iowa for the most part.

[Jay See Double You]

Originally Posted by Chicago60614

Really? I grew up about 20 miles south of Cedar Rapids in Iowa City, and while I always though of it as a little boring compared to Iowa City, the last thing i ever thought was that it was dangerous. It's a city of nearly 130,000 people and a metro of 250,000 people where if they even get 2 murders in a year it's a pretty damn big deal. I never really thought of it has old or a dump. It was always just a "nice clean city". Just kinda ho-hum. Maybe the floods in 2008 that devestated the central areas of the city really changed things. We always ended up on the fastly growing north and northeast areas of town with all the retail and new construction.

Cedar Rapids' metro area has grown by 26% in the past two decades. For the Midwest that's actually some pretty decent growth. The metro has doubled since the 1950's. I think it must come off a lot more stagnant than it really is unless you get around to the northern and northeast areas.

I always wonder if Iowa City and Cedar Rapids will join metro areas. It's only around 10 miles from the northern burbs of Iowa City to the southern fringe of Cedar Rapids. When I grew up it always seemed so far, but I made the drive between the two when I was back visiting a few years ago and laughed that it's less than a half hour. Iowa City has grown by 60% since I was born around 1980.

Those two areas and Des Moines are the only two moovers and shakers in Iowa for the most part.

Born around 1980, huh? I was born -in- 1980, so that makes us about the same age.

Yeah, maybe C.R. was different before the floods, but the place seemed totally old and run down to me. But again, that ended up being a significant factor behind my loving the place. I really liked that feel.

Yeah, it did feel kinda sketchy downtown while I was there. Who knows? Perception and reality do not always agree. But yeah, after the boys and I finish recording A Rebel's Cause, we grab our pipes and pipe tobacco, and just go strolling all over downtown Des Moines. Show's over at 10, and we're often out and about til about midnight...and I feel safer here at midnight than I did in Cedar Rapids in the daylight.

It will be interesting to see if IC and CR merge. With CR MSA being about 260k, and IC MSA being about 150k, that'll be enough for it to take 2nd place from the Quads. Frankly, from what little I remember about my zips through the Quads, it really feels more like 3rd anyway, so why not make it official, right? :-)