Finding a Place to Raise a Family

Off Topic
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Hi all,

I’m looking for city/town recommendations for long term stability to raise a family. I’m originally from CA, but currently live in a small town (~8000 pop) in the Midwest. With my occupation, I can likely find work in pretty much any state of my choosing. The employment contract keeping me here expires at the end of 2025, and I would like to lock down a new job and place to live before then.

Basic criteria I’m looking for:
Lowish population density - somewhere in the 40-70k range probably, maybe max 100k. I would personally prefer to live in the middle of nowhere, but my wife likes being around people.

Conservative values - we have 3 young children and I don’t have high hopes for the overall trajectory of the country. Looking to land somewhere that would be sustainable after an inevitable breakup of the union.

Livestock in surrounding area - see above, but also for employment reasons.

The single biggest motivator here are my kids. Any and all opinions are welcome.

I am particularly interested in @twojarslave ’s opinion, as his recent diatribes against Maine are what spurred me to make a thread here. Lewiston was actually one of the places on my list to visit, but has since been crossed off thanks to his elucidation of their current political climate.

@twojarslave, would you recommend anywhere else in ME outside of Lewiston? And do you have any inclination of neighboring states up there in the NE?

Thanks to all responders

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since you said you have conservative values I’ll add simply that I reside in central Pennsylvania in a very rural farm community (our entire township has less than 2k people) and could not be happier . . I also have young kids and they are growing up with the ability to walk out back and explore our 12 acres of woods, ride their dirtbikes all around, play in the creek, etc. . . I couldn’t imagine at this point living ‘in town’ or in a development or somewhere without the ability to roam around and have my own space . . you kind of made mention of this but having land to raise livestock, chickens, a garden, fruit trees etc. also helps safeguard against eventual food shortages

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Whether or not I would recommend Maine to raise a family depends on your level of means. If you can afford private school or offer your children effective home-schooling, there are still many wonderful parts of Maine. Most of the dysfunction is concentrated in the largest cities, and alarming levels of dysfunction are present in every city that’s anywhere close to the 40k mark in Maine.

For yesterday’s local fuckery update, a guy was screaming at the air and hacking a telephone pole with a giant knife about 1/3 of the mile up the road from me in broad daylight at a busy intersection. This is normal now, and don’t expect to hear about any arrests.

If you could afford to send your kids to St. Dominics, settling somewhere on the outskirts of the Lewiston/Auburn area is still a nice little slice of life. A town like Minot isn’t much of a town, but you’re only 10-15 minutes to L/A and less than an hour to Portland. There are lots of little towns like that all over the area, and some still have pretty decent elementary schools.

There’s really no way to sugar coat the reality that Maine is in the midst of a massive game of human trafficking, saddling the population with as much of the costs as possible to import people who vote the right way and provide for their wellbeing, including having lots of children.

Lewiston, Maine will likely be Muslim-majority within a decade or two, and many other of Maine’s towns in the area have assumed the same trajectory. Lewiston Public schools is roughly 50 percent Muslim right now, up from <1% 25 years ago. Natives simply cannot have as many children as migrants who are paid to, and it doesn’t appear to be close. Depending on where you settle, the Maine your children grow into could be dramatically different than the one you first arrive at.

I believe it is possible that the political climate could become physically dangerous in Maine in the coming decades. It is already financially dangerous, as many of our fixed income retirees such as career public school teachers on a pension have recently learned. The budget shortfall at the state level was just announced as almost 1B.

Regarding physical danger resulting from politics, they are already importing new voters and subverting state law to enable non-citizens to vote on a massive scale. Of course they will do even more to hang on to power. Of course they will. This could all just be getting started.

At minimum, taxes will continue to go up and quality of service will continue to decline, barring some kind of political revolution. If you can handle all of the costs involved with that, Maine still rocks.

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What are some things you don’t like about where you are now?

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Boise or Pocatello, ID areas

St George or Ogden, UT

Redding, CA

Medford or Roseburg, OR

Grand Junction or Durango, CO

Marquette, MI

Duluth, MN

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Agreed. Great communities. Especially Boise/Nampa.

I used to live here. It’s a nice community, but was destroyed by a fire a few years ago, has become the drop off spot for overcrowded prisons and gets incredibly hot in summer. It’s beautiful tho. With conservative values, beautiful lakes and mountains nearby. Also, smells like pot everywhere

CA may be frustrating as it’s a very liberal state

Lived in Medford and completely agree. Jacksonville, Phoenix/Talent or Central Point would be good too. Fire season can be rough, but it’s an absolutely beautiful valley with lots of outdoors.

Roseburg is a nogo, imo. Low income and trapped without a larger nearby city. Population is former millers who just settled in the area. I definitely wouldn’t choose here.

I’ll throw Redmond into the Oregon group. Absolutely beautiful. My favorite place in the country. Four real seasons, ranches, high dessert, the most beautiful mountains (7 in skyline), lakes, cliffs, etc.

OR may be frustrating if you’re conservative. A single county will out vote the rest of the state.

I’d add small suburbs outside of DFW. Can find great towns like Decatur, Sanger, Krum, Godley, Azle, Weatherford, Clerburne, but still be close to a city if desired.

Sioux Falls, SD is great. Doesn’t have outdoor activities like CA or OR, but great community.

Also agreed here. I loved my time in Ogden. Close to SLC as well. In the mountains, nice weather, clean cities, etc.

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I also lived in central PA for 13 years; the tail-end of my 20’s into my early 40’s. It checks the boxes you (the OP) describe, although I lived in a small University town bubble so it differed from the surrounding townships.

I’m also from CA, and that’s where I moved back to. I wanted the opposite of what you’re looking for which explains why I’m in the Bay Area. My ultimate goal is a beach town in NorCal or SoCal to spend the last ~10 years of working and then retire there.

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Maybe consider Rapid City, SD. I think the population is about 75k. It’s on the interstate if you want to easily travel to other places. It’s right next to the Black Hills and Wyoming if you want to have hiking/camping/wilderness nearby. Also not too far from Colorado if you want to travel down there. There’s plenty of smaller towns around there if you want to live in a smaller town but have a nearby city to do shopping. I think it fits the low population, semi-rural but still around people, good place to “survive” (wilderness, animals, rivers), and livestock (lots of ranches - my best friend works on a ranch 20 miles south of there) requirements.

@dchris mentioned Sioux Falls, which is a nice city but it’s probably like 200k. Probably getting to be like 1/4 of South Dakota’s population in that one town. I do like it there, though. It’s got nice features.

Look at some Minnesota towns - Duluth, Bemidji. I don’t know the population of Rochester but I’ve heard nice things. Mayo Clinic is there, if anyone in your family has any chronic or unusual health issues. And I know it’s not what you’re looking for but I think the Twin Cities are one of the best metropolitan areas in the country. Super green for such a large place, and lots of educational/cultural/fun opportunities for kids. I go a few times a year and always find cool things for my family to do that we can’t experience at home.

I like the Sheridan, WY area but I’ve heard from locals it’s getting hard to afford.

Missoula, MT is also very nice. Probably getting hard to afford as well.

Montana, Wyoming, western South Dakota will have mountains, more genuine wilderness, and animals. Some decent sized rivers, depending on where you are. A little further east will get you more lakes, forests (not that there’s no trees in the other states, but they’re not as forested) and quality farmland, if timber and good soil are features you would value in the future. And rural areas still have plenty of animals. I think NE S.D. has what is considered some of the best soil in the country, for now… modern farming practices are slowly destroying everything that made it good in the first place.

These are all northern Midwest. That’s what I’m most familiar with.

If you want to avoid people, stay between the Rockies and the Mississippi.

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EDIT: Another thought occurred, as I see what’s happening in NC. I live close to where SD, ND, and MN meet. The worst weather I experience is extreme blizzards and occasionally-colder-than-Antarctica temperatures (seriously).

And every few years a tornado might come through, but I’ve never actually known someone who’s been affected by one.

There’s no hurricanes, no tsunamis, no earthquakes, no wildfires that destroy entire towns… basically, there’s almost never weather events that would displace you or that one couldn’t, with some thinking, be prepared for. You can hunker down during a blizzard. You’re not going to lose your house like you might in a fire or a hurricane.

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In general the libtarded stuff happens in major cities. Usually populations in a given state are concentrated enough in major cities to define statewide election outcomes, but that doesn’t mean day to day life in smaller or rural communities reflects San Francisco values.

If your primary goal is to find a large town/small city with conservative values, pull up election maps at the state and even local levels and you’ll have a cornucopia of options to choose from.

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Some great responses in here so far. Thank you.

I agree, but my wife is a city girl, so we’re trying to find some compromise.

We’re not poor, but the more kids we have the harder it is to maintain middle class comfort. Especially with the ridiculous inflation the last few years. Currently our oldest is attending a local cheap private catholic school for pre-k. I would love to send all my kids to private school for their entire careers, but unsure if we will be able to afford it. Finding a place where the local public schools aren’t influenced by liberal agenda and aren’t populated by low IQ kids of meth and opiate addled parents that will negatively influence my children would be ideal.

This is mind-boggling and not at all what I would have expected thinking of ME. This is exactly the type of info I was looking for, and based on the entirety of your post, ME sounds like a no go. So thank you.

Any thoughts on nearby states like NH, VT, or MA? I’ve always thought of the New England area as a silly ivory tower largely unaffected by a lot of the country’s problems which they love to opine on. ME was sort of the singular exception I was interested in looking at.

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I don’t follow state or local politics in any of the surrounding states to any meaningful degree, but NH might be worth looking at. I am unsure of exactly how woke they are or are likely to go, but every other state in New England is also on a trajectory of increasing costs and decreasing quality-of-life.

Lewiston is perhaps the most dramatic example in New England, as the initial Somali migration from Atlanta to Lewiston 20 years ago is what gave us a head start on our various “community partner” non-profits who go about the business of securing funding for the ongoing social experiments. Once we lined up Democrat from local to state to federal it all just accelerated, along with lots of other bad policies such as letting people shoot up in the parks.

I’m a huge fan of The Lord of The Rings, and the filmmakers cut out a very important part of the book called The Scouring Of The Shire. It made sense to cut it from the film as it was basically an entirely new subplot at the end of the story, but I kind of feel like I’m living through it right now. Saruman didn’t die in The Two Towers, he was spared and while everyone else was busy taking out Sauron, Saruman gathered up some of his swarthy henchmen and took over The Shire.

If there was a Shire in the USA, it was Maine. It was quaint, peaceful, populated by good people and seemingly immune from all of the craziness found elsewhere. We somehow elected Saruman and his henchmen to appropriate our resources for the benefit of people not from The Shire, who would then tell us all how things are going to be run in The Shire from now on.

I don’t think we’ll have any Merrys or Pippens to come along and kick these jerks out. The Shire is just a memory now, at least in my part of the state.

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Half of the population are either farmers or relatively ordinary people, which is great, but the other half are current, former, or future addicts who I want to have absolutely no influence on my kids.

The rural/small town population is fine with me, but it needs to be the right fit for long term. In general, the intelligence in the area is lacking, and decent future potential mating partners for my kids would be a scarce commodity. Most of the good kids grow up and move away.

Also, my oldest 2 kids are very intelligent (jury is still out on the infant lol), and I worry that outside of a half competent private school without significant extracurricular involvement they would get bored and fall in with the wrong people. I know from first hand experience how that works from growing up in the greater LA area. We are currently about an hour from a larger metro, which right now is fine, but the logistics of getting multiple kids up there for activities/events during the week with my work schedule would be tough. Especially if we end up having more.

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I’ll try to get to all the responses later, but keep em comin! I appreciate them all.

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I absolutely LOVE living in New England. It’s costly, yes, but my drives to work are breathtaking, the stars are glorious, I go to sleep to the sound of the trees, and live in many ways in 1950. I loved raising my kids here, and they loved it, too.

We moved them from an affluent school district in Mansfield, TX to an elementary school with a class size average of like 13, and they thrived in both environments. When we had to return to Texas for 2 years, we put them in an even more affluent school district outside of Austin, TX (Westlake), where they were perfectly well equipped for AP classes and such and my eldest was a co-captain of the Speech and Debate team.

There’s a pale underbelly of poverty visible in small places - you can’t keep it hidden as well when you all have to shop at the same grocery store. But mostly I keep my gaze focused on the positives. Below is maybe 1/10th of a mile from my house. It’s from last year, we’re a little earlier in leaf season currently. Under that are apples from our four apple trees. We have an Applefest every year and make cider with the kids. The barn in the picture is two doors down, and is where the cows live that we eat.

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You might want to check out Indiana. It is on my short list of likely destinations.

Obviously it lacks all of the natural features of Maine, but you are still within a short drive of some pretty cool stuff. I grew up in Indiana and my visit there one year ago was like visiting a different country compared to Maine. It seems to have grown and prospered and all of the cities I was very familiar with were still the same places I remember from my childhood.

Good schools, very nice public parks, safe communities and affordable living can still be found in most of Indiana. You might want to check out my hometown of Valparaiso and the surrounding areas as well as the greater Indianapolis area.

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You should check out some small college towns. Places like that tend to have more smart people running around.

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Bates College has made Lewiston so much smarter politically that we’ve enabled the student body to decide local elections. We’ve literally got a Bates College gender studies professor on our local schoolboard. We have also had a Bates College student on our local schoolboard.

Lewiston was a textbook example of a small college town, until it wasn’t.

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A town that’s a regional hub for healthcare so there are lots of doctors and college educated administrators running around?

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LOL Lewiston also has two hospitals.

I probably would have agreed with you on both counts when I moved here, when Lewiston was a peaceful college town with excellent access to healthcare and very good public schools.

It turns out that public policy is extraordinarily powerful, much more than I ever understood until I started connecting dots from local to state to federal.

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A town with a federal circuit court, but not a prison?