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At the peak of the depression. they had jobs, and their company moved to a midwestern farm town, where they married soon after, and died 70 years later. They loved it, my childhood was idyllid.
I've lived in similar towns, and would never want to raise kids anywhere else.
My parents both ended up in Chicago for grad school in the '80s, that's how they met. My dad has always talked about how grateful he is that the cultural and intellectual diversity of the city lifted him out of his conservative Indiana suburban bubble.
I don't think my mom has any particular opinion. She grew up in NYC so it wasn't a new experience to her. She enjoys being able to go to random ethnic restaurants. She works with the city government and thinks it's dysfunctional, but who doesn't. I can't imagine her living in a small town or outer-ring suburb.
I grew up in Valparaiso, IN (about an hour from Chicago). My mom was a math professor at the University there. My parents thought it was the perfect place to live and raise a family. My parents liked it that it was small town with access to Chicago, has one of the best school districts in the state, is a university town which brings in lots of fun cultural and sports events that they loved, and in their case was just 45 minutes away from where my dad's parents lived and four hours from where my mom's parents lived. They both went to college at the University there too. In City Data forums Valparaiso is often mentioned as having a cute, thriving downtown.
In retirement the University activities were just wonderful for them too. And in their younger retirement years they went into Chicago for all kinds of things regularly (all those Grant Park summer concerts). In older retirement years, they and dad (still does. mom is deceased now) concerts at the University, downtown Valpo, and nearby.
I actually prefer a one to three million metro area vs. a small city like Valparaiso that is on the edge of a really large metro area. As an adult DH and I have lived in Indianapolis, IN (loved that), Erie, PA (a little small and not really enough cultural activities for us, but it has it's positives with Presque Isle State park right there), Denver, CO (loved that), and St. Louis, MO (We live in a close in suburb there and really like it there too, although we did miss the mountain the first few years we lived here).
My parents spent their entire lives living, working, and socializing within a mile or two of where they were born. The big "step up" was my mother moving from the Black Rock neighborhood to the adjacent North Buffalo neighborhood with her parents during the war, where she married my father (also from Black Rock) and where we grew up, in the downstairs unit below my grandparents. My mother's only complaint was that she wished she had lived "across the street" as the houses there were singles instead of the double we lived in, and had bigger yards. But in the next breath she would say that she had more privacy in the house we were in because of the way it was situated. At one time there was some talk of moving back to Black Rock, but overall my parents were very satisfied with where we lived. I even moved back into the same house after they both passed away.
They’d say Rochester was good enough for them even if it were trending in the wrong direction. There was still a large corporate presence with Kodak, Xerox and Bausch & Lomb supplying relatively easy access to stable jobs, as well as plenty of affordable community-oriented neighborhoods to raise a family in. The city would be compared favorably over many Sunbelt cities now considered major. Even over a decade ago when I first joined the forum, Rochester was a more common topic of discussion. Today it is slowly fading into irrelevancy not because of a dramatic collapse (some data suggests the opposite – it’s growing again), but because cities in other regions are outpacing the Northeast and Great Lakes dramatically. So very different.
My parents were both raised in small apartments in Chicago. They ended up in a large house in suburban Southern California, on the Los Angeles/Orange county line.
They loved the California weather and their big garden. They never once said a fond word about Midwest weather, such as missing the thunderstorms / snow etc.
They also liked having the space to spread out. They filled our house with nice furniture and lots of artwork, they liked having a big place to raise a large family and entertrain.
They missed having cultural opportunities (museums, galleries, concerts) nearby. We had to drive quite a ways to get to anything like that. My mom especially hated driving and did as little as possible. She wouldn't drive on the freeway at all, so she was pretty confined to our immediate area. She sometimes talked about how easy it was to get around on public transit in Chicago and she definitely missed that.
The work opportunities for my dad were better here, which is why they ended up here in the first place. When they moved out, he was working in the aerospace industry, but he later started a small advertising and marketing firm specializing in high tech accounts. The LA area was a good place for that.
All in all, I think they were happy here. They sometimes complained that people in California were sloppy, too relaxed, and didn't dress up nicely etc. as they had in Chicago, but I think that was a factor of the time (they grew up in the 1930s and 40s, and by the time I was around it was the 1970s and the culture had totally changed) than the place.
My parents moved from rural location to a county seat in NE Oklahoma in 1954. They would have said "this is a safe, clean town with good schools and good jobs".
But in the post war boom the same could be said for small to medium sized towns all over the country.
I don't think my parents ever second guessed their lives in the city of St. Louis or seriously considered moving to a different city. They moved to the suburbs in 1953 due to the post-war housing shortage but continued to work downtown. We took vacations to other places every year but the topic of moving never came up. Part of that was family connections. They all lived in the city. My dad was a baseball fan and the Cardinals and the (earlier) Browns were his teams. I remember going to Browns games at Sportsman's Park. Family roots in St. Louis went back to before the Civil War. I had one uncle that moved out of the city and eventually to California, but the rest stayed in St. Louis. I moved away permanently in 1976.
Late in my dad's career he was transferred to a city in Virginia, and they sort of considered it as a long vacation and moved back to the St. Louis area when they retired.
They worked 14 hours a day. They didn't have time to complain I guess.
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