Plentiful Jobs + Affordable Housing
“Minneapolis-St. Paul is awash in economic plenty. The area has added more than 200,000 new jobs since 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The area’s unemployment rate in December was just 3.1 percent (not seasonally adjusted), compared with 4.8 percent nationwide. The median household income is well above the national median.
And here’s the really great part: Normal people can actually afford to buy houses there. According to the National Association of Realtors’Housing Affordability Index, a median-income family in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area had 217 percent of the income necessary to qualify for a conventional mortgage loan on a median-priced single-family home there in 2015. In metropolitan San Jose, California, the nation’s least affordable real-estate market, that figure was just 64 percent.”
–“Places Where You Can a Job and Afford a House”; Bloomberg View (2/29/2016).
Plenty of places have hot job markets (think, Silicon Valley, Austin, etc.).
Meanwhile, lots of places have affordable housing (Buffalo, New York or Detroit, anyone??).
The trick is combining the two.
As the Bloomberg article points out, the Twin Cities is on a short list of U.S. cities that manage to do that (others include Columbus, Ohio; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Louisville, Kentucky; Oklahoma City; Omaha, Nebraska; and Pittsburgh).
Of the above cities, I’d argue that the Twin Cities offers the best mix of big city culture, nature/outdoors, and quality of life (never mind about those nasty winters).
