I lived in Mayville/Portland, 45 minutes south of Grand Forks, ND, moved only because I had to for my job. The town is a great place to live, except for the winter weather, which is actually kinda cool once you get used to it.
Some people flee rural North Dakota for jobs, which makes sense in many situations. Others, especially young people, flee for nonsense. They want to be where it's happening, by which I guess they mean lots of franchise businesses. Fargo and Grand Forks have all the same franchise businesses that large cities do; they just only have one Wal-Mart instead of five. There aren't many cultural opportunities, but the Guthrie is five hours away in Minneapolis, and, let's face it, there are cities of 500,000 people all over America that don't have any cultural opportunities either, especially now that "culture" is almost entirely mass market and, therefore, the same everywhere.
Medicine is growing in North Dakota. There are more old people than young. Rural medicine is growing too. And the economy is not in shambles.
People live on less, but you can buy a nice house in my town for $50,000. There is a college, a grocery store, an active school system, a hospital. There are also a couple of good places to eat, churches, and a lot days under big sky without noise pollution, light pollution, and chemical pollution. The weather in the summer is beautiful, preferable in my opinion to most places I've been. The winter is bitterly cold, but we're all in it together, and there's still quite a bit of common sense.
Seriously, check out some of the home prices:
May-Port Insurance and Realty
There are places like this all over rural America. Once people get over SuperTarget, they're going to fill up fast.
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you obviously said a mouthful. Are you from ND!
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