Are you Proud of Where You Live? (Choosing a city)

Being proud of where you live is a discussion I've been having with myself lately.

We don't choose where we're born. We don't choose where we grew up. Some people can't choose to leave where they are either, they're locked into a place for economic, familial, or any other reason.

I, and most of the people I interact with are in a situation where we can choose where we live. I have agency over the city, state, and country if I really wanted to switch things up. (footnote)

This free-agency leads to a really interesting position. If you were looking at a map (lets stay within the US), which city would you choose to move to? How do you even compare different cities?

Of course, there's cost of living and employment options to consider, but I want to judge a place by it's soul - not simply by if it has an income tax or not.

Soul of a city is damn near impossible to place. I find myself continually writing "city" instead of state or region which I think subconsciously shows that I value downtown metropolitan areas more than living somewhere cheaper but further from the action.

I also place an outsized value on weather. Growing up in Chicago I LOVED summer time and would get super down in the dumps when the sun started to set earlier and it became painful to be outside because the wind-chill could literally kill you. So, I made it a goal to move somewhere warmer. I love my family and luckily Chicago is super accessible by plane from anywhere, so I can move away and fly home as often as I want. Win/win.

When my girlfriend and I were mulling over where we'd want to move in the future I discovered this website that has become my new obsession. https://weatherspark.com/

The website goes 100x more in depth than just this screenshot can show, so please check it out. It's awesome and you can find out more about your city's weather than you probably knew before.

But, this website is super useful for comparing the weather of different cities, which is a category I place huge weight on.

Now, I'm on a journey to find other "Weatherspark Comparisons" for every other category of a city that I would consider important. City growth, politics, demographics, size, etc. I've been manually asking our boy Chad. G. Petey to help me out with some of these questions but I'll just have to keep digging.

For now, Nashville is my top city. I don't want to move anywhere else but I don't know if this will be permanent. I'll have to keep finding more data and visiting more cities to try to really gauge their soul.

Chad was also able to provide this list of population growth of the 25 biggest cities in the US, which I think is also a good "Weatherspark Comparison". Will pick this back up with more extrapolation on "Are You Proud of Where You Live"