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I have lived in semich all my life in various cities and towns. Ann Arbor is great. College town lots of amenities. Taxes are high. Crime is low schools are the best in the state every year. Almost anywhere from aa to toledo is a very good place to live. it depends on what you want or need. Farmington, Livonia,Troy, Birmingham are 75 miles from toledo. can't be used for comparison. Old Monroe is marvelous. Parts of Luna Peir are great. Lake Erie is no longer the cesspool it used to be when the cayuhoga caught fire. Atleast give this person new and pertinent info. Temperance is nice. there is good shopping in toledo and in monroe or Dundee, saline dexter. If you have to be close to toledo remember AA is still 40 miles one way.
Monroe is not a good area. Ann Arbor is probably the closest city to Toledo that I would want to live in. AA has been rated one of the best places to relocate several yrs now. I keep seeing it come up on different relocation sites. I currently live in SW MI... I have family in the greater Detroit area (farmington, novi... all that) and I would recommend moving to that area right now. It is very economic depressed right now. Jobs are hard to come by. People arent the friendlest. Stores are closing up.. Which makes people on edge.. In the rough ecomony.. living by detroit would NOT be on my top priority...lol.. Granted there isnt hard crime/murders outside of the detroit city limits but its only a matter of time before things spread... As far as Ohio... My sister lived in Cinncinnati for a while so I used to drive down there once a month. Traffic is hard on their few interstates. The police pull everyone over there.. The whole state is a speed trap. Toledo/ Cleveland area is hard hit with this ecomony too.. Not to mention Lake Erie is full of pollution from all the factories on the lake shore dumping into the lake. As a whole I would steer clear of this area.. I would choose Ann Arbor or Cincinnati (which I know is not in the Toledo area)
MI's Property taxes as a whole are cheaper then Ohio.. but it depends where in Mi too.. Gross Pointe area is VERY expensive.. So are all of the burbs around Detroit.. My uncles lives in Birmingham and pays over 20,000 a yr in taxes!! I have friends in Farmington and its hard for them too...
Closest to the inner cities area is rough with crime/drugs... But it spreads to the outter areas too. I dont hear too much about crime in Ann Arbor area though.
Everywhere in the bigger cities you can find a walmart or Pizza Hut. Plus all your other shopping centers/malls... Dundee area is an up and coming but still a small town.. It has the only areas Cabelas store and is quickly growing but is far enough away from the bigger cities to have it still be safe.
Good luck on your search. Personally I cant wait to leave MI. It just seems like its been going downhill for the past 20 yrs now...
Sorry, but take it from someone who has lived in exactly the area where you are looking all of my life, this post is filled with inaccuracies from top to bottom. I will try to address some of them:
Monroe is not a good area.
In reality, Monroe is a historical city that is the county seat for a lovely, safe, rural county. Cornfields, small towns, Friday night football, and farmhouses, that is Monroe County. I live there, trust me, I know firsthand. There are some rough parts of the city of Monroe, just as there are in any small city, but there are also beautiful areas with gorgeous homes. As a whole, unless you venture into the very old, run down neighborhoods on the city's east side, Monroe is quite safe. The people of Monroe have a strong appreciation for their history and there are many historical reenactments, festivals, etc. and a pretty good historical museum. There is a nice but small mall, and of course, all the other chains, such as Walmart, Target, etc. as well as all of the main restaurant chains. There is a great state park, Sterling State Park, that has a beach on Lake Erie. The Monroe County Fair is considered one of the best in Michigan, a true, old-fashioned country fair, with tons of 4-H activities and other things to do. People travel from all over the area to come to the Monroe Co. Fair. The city of Monroe also has a safe, busy, thriving downtown, which is not all that common in this age of the "Walmart-ization" of America.
I have family in the greater Detroit area (farmington, novi... all that) and I would recommend moving to that area right now. It is very economic depressed right now. Jobs are hard to come by. People arent the friendlest. Stores are closing up.. Which makes people on edge.. In the rough ecomony.. living by detroit would NOT be on my top priority...lol.. Granted there isnt hard crime/murders outside of the detroit city limits but its only a matter of time before things spread.
This is one of the greatest and saddest misconceptions that people who don't know about our area have, that the entire SE corner of Michigan IS Detroit. In reality, the entire extreme SE corner of the state, including the areas of NW Ohio that you are inquiring about, has very little, if anything, to do with Detroit. You could realistically live within 30-40 miles of Detroit and never go there, and never be affected by anyone or anything there. I happen to live in a small, farming community 40 miles from Detroit that is smack dab in the area where you are looking, and I could literally leave my doors unlocked 24/7 if I wanted to. Detroit's infamous crime hasn't even spread to its outerlying suburbs (the city of Troy, which is relatively close to Detroit, is consistently rated in the top ten safest cities in the US, to provide you with just one example), much less to the neighboring counties. The economy here is on the rebound, to a certain extent. It is going to take time, but it definitely seems as if we have seen the worst of it now and are slowly coming back. Hiring is picking up, and new stores are opening in some areas. Tourism is picking up, as it does every summer, and the Big Three are coming back strong, with the possible exception of Chrysler, which remains to be seen. In case you missed it, a report from J.D. Power and Associates came out just last week ranking both Ford and GM products above both Honda and Toyota in quality. My husband has a job that is related to the domestic automotive industry and his company is so busy they can't keep up with demand, same reason why only two of GM's plants could take their customary summer shutdowns this summer-demand for GM's products is literally too high for the other plants to take time off. Links to that story, as well as the story about the new quality rankings, are both provided in another thread that I started here last week, and ran in both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News.
The thing that I find funniest about this part of the PP's post is the comment that "it is only a matter of time" before Detroit's murders, etc. spread to the outerlying areas. Well, Detroit is now just over 300 years old and it hasn't yet, so please, pp, define "a matter of time". LOL.
Not to mention Lake Erie is full of pollution from all the factories on the lake shore dumping into the lake.
Yet another outdated misconception held by people who don't know our area. This may have been true some 20+ years ago, but great strides have been made in cleaning up the western basin of Lake Erie in the past few decades, culminating in factories no longer being allowed to dump waste and the water becoming at least as clean as that in the southern tip of Lake Michigan. One good indicator of how clean a lake is is the presence of mayflies, those tiny, irritating, flying insects that emerge from the lakes every June and fill the communities along the shores. A large presence of mayflies indicates that the lake is clean enough that there are great oxygen supplies at the bottom, where these insects spend their larval stages. If the lake is very polluted, the mayflies don't appear because they literally don't survive the larval stage in the stagnant, oxygen-depleted water. Ask anyone who lives in one of the communities immediately along the western Lake Erie coast about mayflies, particularly right now. They are so abundant that in some communities they coat the homes and businesses and they literally have to be scraped off of the streets to prevent cars from sliding on them. They only appear for a couple of weeks out of the year and don't bite or sting, in fact they only survive about 24 hrs. out of the water, but yes, they are here by Lake Erie in droves, something that never happened when the lake was truly dirty.
As far as Ohio... My sister lived in Cinncinnati for a while so I used to drive down there once a month. Traffic is hard on their few interstates. The police pull everyone over there.. The whole state is a speed trap.
I grew up in Ohio and go there very frequently to visit family now. The above entire excerpt is patently false. Ohio is no more of a speed trap than any other state. I have traveled their well-maintained interstates for my entire adult life and rarely seen anyone pulled over, much less been pulled over myself.
Ann Arbor is a nice city in terms of things to do, but is not the utopia that this poster describes. I work there, I do know. It is safe but definitely not crime free. Actually, I always feel safer in Monroe than I do in AA, and AA in and of itself is not a crime-filled or dangerous city, just a busy city full of people with, as in any other city, some rough areas. It might be a good place to live if you want to live in an area with a high density of people, but it is also an expensive place to live because of the U of M campus being located there and attracting people from literally all over the world. Dundee is nice, but the property taxes tend to be high because they tack on a village tax. I know, I live there. The cities in Ohio that you mentioned, Sylvania and Holland, are both nice. Sylvania is one of Toledo's more upscale suburbs and has relatively high property taxes, as does Perrysburg, on the city's extreme southern end. Holland is a nice suburb with everything from million dollar homes overlooking a quarry to section 8 apartments, so quality of life there varies somewhat, but it is overall pretty safe. I might suggest Bedford Township, an area just over the state line from Toledo that contains the towns of Lambertville and Temperance. We used to live there and the property taxes as compared to other suburbs are pretty low. It is a very safe area. We lived there for 12 years and never remotely felt unsafe or had any crimes committed against us, nor did any of our neighbors or acquaintances. Ditto in Dundee. Detroit's crime and other problems have not, and are NOT spreading to the outlying areas, please don't believe that and accept it as fact. We are surrounded by friendly, hard working people and farm fields, not gangs and murders. Ay yi yi....
Personally I cant wait to leave MI.
This line pretty much sums up why you might want to take this poster's post with not a grain of salt but more like a pound of salt. I have lived in one of the "warm" states that people who tend to have never left states like Michigan assume is paradise. Trust me, Michigan is truly a gem. Usually it takes moving away to realize it, but it is. Hopefully this poster will have the opportunity to leave this great state and see just how much greener that grass really is.
Good luck in your search. I have lived in the NW Ohio/SE Michigan area my entire life, with the exception of several months in the afore mentioned "warm" state, so if I can help in any way, please let me know.
Last edited by canudigit; 06-26-2010 at 03:52 AM..
SE Michigan is where most of the people live, always have. Business and heavy industry has and still is the mainstay of the area. For the most part any area south of Detroit city will be old and industrial. Thats where the jobs are...and the people who work in these factories...... There is an oasis on the south side and its called Grosse Ile, nice place to live, lots of woods, surrounded by water.I have friends that live there,have for a long while. Its a long drive to the north burbs for activities, but if your work is on the south side, thats the place.
SE Michigan is where most of the people live, always have. Business and heavy industry has and still is the mainstay of the area. For the most part any area south of Detroit city will be old and industrial. Thats where the jobs are...and the people who work in these factories...... There is an oasis on the south side and its called Grosse Ile, nice place to live, lots of woods, surrounded by water.I have friends that live there,have for a long while. Its a long drive to the north burbs for activities, but if your work is on the south side, thats the place.
But only until you get out of the outskirts of the Detroit metro area, because from southern Wayne County down to the Ohio state line it is mostly rural farmland. I don't know if people visualize Detroit as literally filling up the entire SE corner of the state or what, but it most certainly doesn't. This poster is quite correct in saying that Grosse Ile is a wonderful place to live, but actually, the entire area from Grosse Ile on down to Ohio it is all quite pleasant. There is a green oasis that stretches from the southern reaches of the Detroit Metro all the way to the state line that I think sometimes gets overlooked and lumped together with Detroit, which is not accurate.
Last edited by canudigit; 06-27-2010 at 08:41 AM..
But only until you get out of the outskirts of the Detroit metro area, because from southern Wayne County down to the Ohio state line it is mostly rural farmland. I don't know if people visualize Detroit as literally filling up the entire SE corner of the state or what, but it most certainly doesn't. Not saying that this poster doesn't know what he is talking about, simply clarifying what he said, since he doesn't mention that from Grosse Ile on down to Ohio it is all quite pleasant.
I was painting the whole SE Michigan area with a wide brush. Thats not fair, I know , but most people want to live near where they will be working. There are few upscale places on the south side of Detroit that meets that requirement,Grosse Ile being one of the few..... yes , there is still a lot of farm land down to the Ohio border...not everyone wants to live in a rural setting however. The corridor I-75 between Detroit and Toledo is among the most heavily traveled stretches of Interstate in the Country.... Picking Ann Arbor as a nice place to live, when you work in say Monroe , could be a commuting nightmare.
I was painting the whole SE Michigan area with a wide brush. Thats not fair, I know , but most people want to live near where they will be working. There are few upscale places on the south side of Detroit that meets that requirement,Grosse Ile being one of the few..... yes , there is still a lot of farm land down to the Ohio border...not everyone wants to live in a rural setting however. The corridor I-75 between Detroit and Toledo is among the most heavily traveled stretches of Interstate in the Country.... Picking Ann Arbor as a nice place to live, when you work in say Monroe , could be a commuting nightmare.
Well, you are very correct in the fact that Grosse Ile is a wonderful place to live, and I admit to being a bit overly sensitive in not wanting people to think of Monroe County as part of the Detroit Metro, not that I hate Detroit or any of its suburbs, but because it has such a negative connotation for most people because of how the media portrays it. And you are correct that not everyone wants to live in a rural setting. However, since the OP asked about the Toledo, OH area and the extreme SE part of Michigan, I wanted to let them know that the part of Michigan that is closest to Toledo is actually quite nice and very livable. I think that people sometimes picture Detroit and Toledo as kind of running together in one big, industrial blur, and I want to challenge that perception as much as possible, maybe to the point where I go a bit overboard.... It's just that the quality of life here, IMHO, is wonderful, and I want to get that message out there whenever I can.
Well, you are very correct in the fact that Grosse Ile is a wonderful place to live, and I admit to being a bit overly sensitive in not wanting people to think of Monroe County as part of the Detroit Metro, not that I hate Detroit or any of its suburbs, but because it has such a negative connotation for most people because of how the media portrays it. And you are correct that not everyone wants to live in a rural setting. However, since the OP asked about the Toledo, OH area and the extreme SE part of Michigan, I wanted to let them know that the part of Michigan that is closest to Toledo is actually quite nice and very livable. I think that people sometimes picture Detroit and Toledo as kind of running together in one big, industrial blur, and I want to challenge that perception as much as possible, maybe to the point where I go a bit overboard.... It's just that the quality of life here, IMHO, is wonderful, and I want to get that message out there whenever I can.
Well said.....except for the wonderful part...maybe a slight overreach ?
Well said.....except for the wonderful part...maybe a slight overreach ?
Honestly, to me it is wonderful. I can look out my back door and see a sweeping, green cornfield. I can drive uptown and visit our local farmer's market. I can attend safe, fun high school sporting events where everyone knows everyone else. The people around this area are some of the nicest, most "real" people that I have ever known. If I want big city amenities, I can drive less than an hour and be in Detroit. If I want REALLY big city amenities, I can drive four hours and be in Chicago. If I want to enjoy beaches and water activities, I can drive a short distance to one of the Great Lakes or one of Michigan's many inland lakes. I feel very blessed to be living where I do.
We lived in the Phoenix area for several months last year. Before that I would have said that the quality of life here was just good. Now I say, in all honestly, that it is wonderful. I am so happy to be home!
Honestly, to me it is wonderful. I can look out my back door and see a sweeping, green cornfield. I can drive uptown and visit our local farmer's market. I can attend safe, fun high school sporting events where everyone knows everyone else. The people around this area are some of the nicest, most "real" people that I have ever known. If I want big city amenities, I can drive less than an hour and be in Detroit. If I want REALLY big city amenities, I can drive four hours and be in Chicago. If I want to enjoy beaches and water activities, I can drive a short distance to one of the Great Lakes or one of Michigan's many inland lakes. I feel very blessed to be living where I do.
We lived in the Phoenix area for several months last year. Before that I would have said that the quality of life here was just good. Now I say, in all honestly, that it is wonderful. I am so happy to be home!
Thats a good thing. If everyone wanted to live in the same place...it would be very crowded ! I lived in the Detroit area ( city and Ypislanti) many years ago, off and on. Really hated it. Used to go to Perrysburg, Oh. every year ,over the years, ,found that quite nice. Not a Toledo fan ether..... Its nice you found a place thats home....many never do, they just complain, wherever they are.
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There is a green oasis that stretches from the southern reaches of the Detroit Metro all the way to the state line that I think sometimes gets overlooked and lumped together with Detroit, which is not accurate.
. It's just that the quality of life here, IMHO, is wonderful, and I want to get that message out there whenever I can. 
