I'm mostly in agreement with this if you choose to live in said city, but I would argue that traffic will be better even in one of the "big" cities of the Midwe

I'm mostly in agreement with this if you choose to live in said city, but I would argue that traffic will be better even in one of the "big" cities of the Midwest (I currently live the greater D.C./Baltimore metro area and am amazed at what people in the Twin Cities metro area consider to be bad traffic). As a result, it would be much less time-consuming to commute into the city from the countryside in the Midwest than it would be to make a commute of similar distance in SV/NY/DC/etc.