The Cities That Surprise You. (Not Austin, Not Nashville.)

By Jay Kimbol · September 18, 2025 · More posts

Every time I tell someone I'm thinking of moving, the suggestions arrive in the same order. Austin first, almost always. Then Nashville, which has been the second-most-suggested city in this conversation for about five years now. Then maybe Denver, depending on whether the person hikes. Then they look thoughtful and say "Charlotte?" with a question mark in their voice, and we both nod politely and the conversation moves on.

Here's a thing I've noticed running numbers on the comparison tool for two months: Austin and Nashville keep finishing in the middle of the pack. They're fine moves. They're not the moves where the math actually screams. The moves where the math actually screams are in cities that nobody mentions at the cookout, and I want to talk about four of them, because I think they deserve more airtime than they get.

I have not lived in any of these places. I am working off public data and the limited research a guy can do on a lunch break. I'm going to be wrong about specific things and I welcome the corrections. But the bones of the math are real, and the bones are interesting.

Cincinnati. The cost of living index is 88. Eighty-eight. That's twelve points below the national average. Median rent for a 1-bedroom in a decent neighborhood (Over-the-Rhine, Mount Adams, Hyde Park) runs about $1,000 to $1,300. My one-bedroom in Logan Square is $2,390. The arithmetic is brutal. Ohio's state income tax tops out around 3.5%, lower than Illinois. And Cincinnati does have a city earnings tax of about 1.8% — that's a thing nobody mentions, similar to Chicago's local tax — but it's still less than what I'm paying combined.

The thing that makes Cincinnati interesting is that it's a real city. It has a downtown with people in it. It has a baseball team and a football team and one of the best zoos in the country. It has Findlay Market, which has been a continuously operating public market since 1855. It has FC Cincinnati, which is a Major League Soccer team that plays in a real stadium. It has the Procter & Gamble headquarters, which I mention only because P&G being there has propped up the white-collar job market in a way that other Rust Belt cities haven't gotten. Over-the-Rhine got a serious revitalization in the last decade and is now one of the densest, most walkable urban neighborhoods in the Midwest. People keep telling me Cincinnati doesn't deserve its reputation as a flyover stop, and the more I read, the more I believe them.

The honest downside: Cincinnati winters are not as bad as Chicago's, but they're still cold and gray. The summer humidity is real. Public transit is okay-not-great. And it's still in a state that's been politically volatile in ways that may or may not matter to you, depending on your situation.

Pittsburgh. Cost of living index of 92. Median rent for a 1-bedroom in places like Lawrenceville, Squirrel Hill, or the Strip District runs $1,000 to $1,400. Pennsylvania has a flat 3.07% state income tax. Pittsburgh has a 3% local income tax. So total state-and-local is about 6%, which is real, but it's working against rent that is half of Chicago's. The math still wins.

What I keep hearing from Pittsburgh transplants: it's basically 2012 Chicago by every metric except the lake. Affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods. Real food scene that's underrated. Universities (Carnegie Mellon, Pitt) keeping the population young and educated. A surprising tech industry presence, partly because CMU keeps producing engineers and Google, Apple, and Uber all have offices there. The bridges, which there are an absurd number of, are visually striking in a way Chicago architecture isn't trying to compete with.

Downsides Pittsburgh transplants own up to: brutal winters that are colder and snowier than Chicago in the worst years, a population that's been declining for decades (though that's flattened recently), and a topography of hills that is genuinely confusing if you're used to a grid city. People also mention the air quality, which has improved a lot since the 1990s but still has bad days. None of these are dealbreakers for the math but they're real.

Indianapolis. Cost of living index 90. This is the city I've been quietly suspicious of, because it sounds boring on paper, and it sounding boring on paper is exactly the kind of pattern-match that makes a city under-priced.

What I keep finding when I dig: Indianapolis has very low property taxes (around 0.85% effective, well below national average), Indiana's state income tax is a flat 3.05%, the property market is one of the most affordable in any major metro, and the city has been quietly building real urban density. Mass Ave, Fountain Square, Broad Ripple, and the canal walk are real walkable areas. The 8-mile Cultural Trail connects them. The pharma industry (Eli Lilly is headquartered there) has kept white-collar jobs steady. Median 1-bedroom rent in walkable neighborhoods is about $1,000 to $1,300.

The "boring" rap is the thing people from Indy push back against the hardest, and I think they're right to. The city is flat, which makes it easy to bike. The summers are hot but not Texas-hot. The winters are real but considerably milder than Chicago's. The food scene is not Nashville's, but Indy is also not pretending to be Nashville. People who live there describe it as a city that delivers on a quietly high baseline without trying to be anything it's not.

The downside is that Indianapolis is a sprawling city with a lot of car-dependent neighborhoods, and if you wind up in one, the lifestyle is suburban regardless of what the address says. Picking a walkable neighborhood matters more in Indy than in a denser city, because the dropoff between walkable and not is steeper.

Memphis. Cost of living index 84. The lowest of the four. This is the one I'm going to be careful with, because Memphis is also the one with the most asterisks attached.

The math is ridiculous. Median rent for a 1-bedroom in a decent neighborhood (Cooper-Young, Midtown, parts of Downtown) runs $800 to $1,100. Tennessee has no state income tax, which I covered in the last post but is still relevant here. Sales tax is high (~9.75%) and groceries are taxed, which eats some of the wage tax win, but on net you keep substantially more of your paycheck.

The asterisk: Memphis has a high crime rate, particularly for property crime, and that is not a stereotype someone made up. The data is real. People who live in Memphis and love it — and there are a lot of them — tend to navigate this by being thoughtful about neighborhoods, by not flashing valuables, by following the same rules that any urban resident follows but with the dial turned up. People who don't live in Memphis and have opinions about it tend to overstate this in ways that aren't fair to the city. Both things are true at once.

What Memphis has that nobody else on this list has: a music scene that is foundational to American culture, world-class barbecue, the Mississippi River, and a kind of unguarded Southern sociability that the more polished Sunbelt cities have lost. Beale Street is touristy but also still a real place. The Stax Museum is real. Sun Studio is real. If you're a person whose internal life is wired to those things, Memphis pays you in things that don't show up on any spreadsheet.

Memphis is the move I'm most romantic about and the move I'd be most cautious about. I haven't been there yet. I want to go.

Here's the thing I keep landing on with all four of these cities: they're not the cities people pitch you at parties because they're not aspirational in the way Austin or Nashville are. Nobody puts Cincinnati on a vision board. But "aspirational" is a function of marketing, not math, and the math on these places is some of the best in the country if you're a remote worker on a decent salary.

The hardest part of moving to one of these cities isn't the move. It's explaining to people why. You don't get the "oh, fun!" reaction at the cookout. You get the "huh." That's a real cost, weirdly. It shouldn't be, but it is.

I keep thinking about whether I'd actually pick one of these over Austin if I had to choose tomorrow. I don't know. I think Cincinnati or Indianapolis would be the most likely answer, with Pittsburgh as a wildcard if I could handle the winters. Memphis I want to visit before I form an opinion.

If your spreadsheet is also returning weird results, I think it's worth taking those results seriously. The boring answer is sometimes the right answer. That's not a clever framing, just a thing I've noticed.

Jay Kimbol still hasn't moved. He's now considering cities his friends can't pronounce. Next post: What $60K Actually Buys You Outside of Chicago — line-by-line budgets in three of the cities above versus Chicago.