Ann Arbor
Michigan’s current net migration is outbound, not inbound [source]. People obviously aren’t clamoring to move here–why did I?
East and West coasters are often shocked to learn that anyone who’s had the opportunity to leave the midwest would choose to return. The region is, after all, nothing more than a large swath of indistinguishable farmland with a few scattered cities–fly-over country (though they would like to visit Chicago sometime).
And growing up in Indianapolis, I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of the midwest. I thought people who stuck around were unlucky or unmotivated or just plain stupid. My friends wanted to leave too, and for the most part, they did. So I shipped myself off to Yale, expecting never to return and never to want to.
I found a lot of wonderful things on the East Coast, but I started to resent the way so many people would assume so many things about my background and so many stereotypes of the midwest without having seen it. Assume that I must be a farm girl (when I grew up in a city). Assume that I must have barely any contact with non-whites (when my high school was ~35% african-american, and I was one of only a handful of white people in my class in my inner-city middle school). And worst of all, assume that I agreed that the midwest didn’t matter.
When I left the midwest, I hated it and expected my new surroundings to reinforce my hatred. But instead I found leaving it taught me to appreciate it, to love it even. I thought the midwest was close-minded, but I discovered the east coast was just as (if not more) close-minded, just in different ways. I missed people who didn’t question why you would ever want to visit St. Louis or Louisville or Cincinatti… Who didn’t laugh unapologetically and assume I was joking when I suggest they visit Indianapolis.
I constantly confronted anti-midwest stereotypes, and I reacted by stereotyping the East coast right back: the pervasive snobbery, the unrelenting hierarchies. I didn’t care about designers, I’d never heard of Louis Vuitton or Jimmy Chu or Hermes. I wasn’t impressed by old money (wasn’t it more impressive to be self enterprising? To make your own fortune?). I was offended when people would chuckle condescendingly when someone at the table ordered their steak medium-well.
I moved to the West coast and found a different breed of snobbery–focused more on independent labels than designer names, that assigned prestige to non-traditional paths rather than ivy league credentials (the MIT drop-out turned entrepreneur, the uber-successful graffiti artist, the guy who gave up his life as a corporate lawyer to lead kayaking expeditions). The aesthetic appealed much, much more to me… I loved shopping at all the cute indie boutiques, running into quirky flash mobs, and exploring niche genre bookstores. I had to admit that I was not immune from snobbery myself. The East coast brand just wasn’t my style.
Still, I missed my family, now three time zones and a long flight away. I missed major family events because of the distance, my brother’s high school graduation, my great uncle’s funeral, my dad’s confirmation as honorary consul.
So I returned. I moved to Ann Arbor, site unseen, because it was 5 hours or less to Indy, Louisville, Chicago and Pittsburgh, where my family, aunts and uncles lived. And because it was the only office in the midwest where I could transfer within my company and department. And it seemed like a cute and relatively progressive town. And it had a fair community of young professionals and grad students around my age. And it was near a major airport with cheap flights to see my friends around the country and the world.
I stayed for two years and then moved back to San Francisco when opportunity knocked. But in San Francisco, I realized didn’t want to be a nomad anymore. I wanted to put down roots, and I didn’t want to put them down so far from my family. I didn’t want to put them somewhere so prohibitively expensive. And I didn’t want to raise my children in a culture that assumed the midwest didn’t matter (which West coasters did just as much as the East coasters had). So I quit my job and found a new one back in Ann Arbor.
I love Ann Arbor’s pace, the sense of community, its proximity to Detroit (which I’ve grown to love in its own right), and its values. It’s not perfect–it’s fairly homogenous, annoyingly cloudy, it strives for cloying levels of yuppy-friendliness, and the restaurant scene leaves a lot to be desired. But it’s home, and home by choice.
