As another fellow Grand Rapids citizen, the above post is somewhat accurate, but ignores an awful lot of the problems that towns like ours have. (And that might not be obvious to folks on Hacker News)

Everything is not cheaper. Depending on what your comparing to, roughly 30-40% of things are cheaper. But 30-60% of your wages get lost at local employers. Depending on how you spend your money, you can easily come out ahead. But there's also a good chunk of people who won't.

Housing is cheaper. Land is cheaper. Parking is cheaper. Higher-end food / restaurants / entertainment is cheaper. This is all very true.

However, Gas is not significantly cheaper. Home / Medical insurance is not significantly cheaper. Food / groceries is not cheaper. Medical bills are not cheaper. Consumer products, electronics, automobiles are not any cheaper. Utilities are higher. Maintenance costs on houses and automobiles are much much higher. Your student loans actually jump (as a percentage of your monthly costs) out here.

Taxes might be higher in GR too, depending on where you come from. (I think it's higher than Seattle, for instance, which has no income tax, but higher sales tax than GR does)

Plus, the bad winters (which I don't mind, but I understand many people will).

You also loose nearly a lot of the benefits of real cities. For instance, Grand Rapids has no real public transit of any kind (we have a single commuter bus, that only goes from downtown to a run down part of town). To compare, GR has 25% of the population of Minneapolis, but less than 10% of the public transit that Minneapolis offers. You have to own at least one car in Grand Rapids.

The job market for technology is competitive, but not nearly as competitive as it is in real cities. So wages are lower than normal. More important than that, there's also there's very little room for improvement. If your happy just programming for twenty years straight -- GR is great. But if you'd like to get more autonomy, or lead projects, or similar, the opportunities for that here are very very small.

Do you want to someday start your own business? Watch out -- non-competes from your previous employer are still heavily enforced in Michigan, and unlike California, there's no state-level protection for you against this.

Do you have a spouse that works? Because while technology is hiring in Grand Rapids, most of the other industries are still significantly depressed. You'll see articles about how there's job growth in Grand Rapids, but if you read the fine print, you'll notice they're actually press releases from Manpower -- they're mostly just minimum-ish-wage temp jobs.

GR is still heavily religious and heavily conservative. For some people, this can be very off-putting. For instance, legalized discrimination almost became law last month - http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/05/1349672/-Michigan-H... . And I have literally been pressed about my religious affiliation in an interview for a programming position in Grand Rapids. There's enough open-minded companies that this won't be a complete roadblock in technology, but it cuts down on the available employers in a market that's already very small.

> has leadership failed to attract industry, has the community failed to advertise the wonderful things happening in them (Grand Rapids, at least, is a good place to live), or are people just unwilling to put up with the winters?

It's not that the community isn't pushing the wonderful things happening -- I think they are. Things like our extensive amount of meetup groups, or the work of GR Makers are wonderful additions to the community.

Most folks here just like to ignore all the things that still aren't happening. Even if we're doing the best we can in GR (and I believe we are -- I've seen lots of people doing amazing things) we're still one or two decades behind real cities.

People who aren't from here, are less skewed in their perception of where GR is at. They see things a lot more clearly than folks who are in Michigan.

You'll notice, in the article, they still work in DC. They're getting the best benefits of both worlds in their situation (cheaper living in Baltimore, good careers in DC).

You usually can't do that in Grand Rapids. You get most of the "small town" benefits, but you have to loose nearly all the "big city" benefits. (Unless you have remote work, but then you could choose from literally any small town to live in)

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I'm not trying to trash GR. There's a lot of benefits to it. But there's a lot of drawbacks too -- it's not an obvious winning decision.

You have to weigh whether the drawbacks are worth the cost savings. And for a large number of people/companies, I suspect they aren't.