I currently work in GR as a software developer so if you want the inside scoop contact me.
I will say Grand Rapids currently has some issues around software developers that are associated with our growing pains. Because of the rust belt depression of wages, we still haven't caught up. Wages for software developers here lag by about 20 percent. Most employers are used to paying a much lower wage than I would expect elsewhere. Senior developers might make 80-90K and juniors can expect to be making 40-50K. If you are an ineffective negotiator you might be lower. Many of my contemporaries have chosen to get remote jobs with the usual suspects. Zapier, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, Slack and others all have local people.
That said, this is a wonderful town that is changing all the time. The cost of living is low, though our real estate market is out of control and has been for a couple years. The developers here tend to have a strong sense of community and we generally support one another rather than tear each other down. We have some great local developers.
If you would like the low down on our growing town or are interest in moving, setting up a remote shop or building a company in our town let me know. I'd be happy to help you or get you in contact with those that can. (see profile)
> Wages for software developers here lag by about 20 percent. Most employers are used to paying a much lower wage than I would expect elsewhere. Senior developers might make 80-90K and juniors can expect to be making 40-50K.
I can't speak to the senior level, but compared to California those junior salaries are lagging by 50%, not 20%.
I can believe that. But I tend to not measure things by the California/Valley standard. Things there are just too exceptional and GR so small in comparison.
As another data point, in Portland (of the Oregon variety) junior developers are roughly ~80K, midlevel ~110K, senior ~130K and up. Still expensive, but about half of SFO.
Not looking to move, but just out of curiousity, how would you say developer salary / cost of living compares, to, say San Francisco? No surprise that both will be a lot lower in Grand Rapids, but I'm wondering how the ratio looks.
You can get a studio apartment for $700, no problem. You can get a cookie cutter 4 bedroom house in the suburbs in the $200's.
You'll need a car, of course, and as long as you're not eating at trendy places downtown, everything else is pretty cheap. Bars have $1 beers and burgers at happy hour.
Doesn't the city fine you for not having a green lawn though? Power also seemed to be significantly more expensive at nearly 14 cents per kWh, which can get spendy with AC being nearly mandatory with how hot it gets in the summer.
Additionally, another downside I noticed when I was there was that around 2am in the summer, the streets are often flooded due to people watering their lawns. Besides the absent or poor pedestrian infrastructure, this made my after work walk quite a bit more complicated.
I've never heard of the city fining you for not having a green lawn. You can get in trouble for not mowing, and if you're in an HOA, maybe they require watering, but my lawn stays plenty green without any sprinkling.
My electric bill is about $80 in the summer to keep my $125k, 2000 sqft house at 72F. Not too bad IMO.
And everyone (40% of the houses in my neighborhood?) who waters their lawn does so at dawn and dusk, not 2AM. If you water in the middle of the night when the grass is cold and dormant, you can get mold.
If you think that's expensive, try living in Australia.
Air conditioning is mandatory some areas, with temperatures in Sydney peaking over 40 C (105 F) in the summer, and electricity costs 27 cents per kWh (US$0.20).
That's ridiculously cheap electricity! I assume that's just the lowest tier? Can most people make it through the month at that rate, or do the rates typically jump mid-way through?
It's not really cheap. 20 cents per kWh is double the US average.
Australia has some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world, as Australia is completely incapable of managing its infrastructure properly.
Ridiculously cheap power to me means 2 to 4 cents per kWh. I consider 11 cents per kWh (which is what Seattle's rates are) to be extremely high, especially compared to areas just outside Seattle proper.
Well, I guess I'm in for a price cut someday when I move to a different part of the country. My electric starts at $0.27/kWh, then goes up to $0.48, then $0.55 for higher usage. I have no idea what the cutoffs are for hitting those higher tiers, as I've never done it.
Imagine that salary in San Francisco is $9000 / month and cost of living is $7000 / month. The ratio of salary : cost of living is 1.286.
Imagine salary in Grand Rapids is $3000 / month and the cost of living is $2000 / month. The ratio has "improved" to 1.5, but the more important figure of (income - expenses) has fallen in half.
I wasn't looking at the slash so much as the question "No surprise that both will be a lot lower in Grand Rapids, but I'm wondering how the ratio looks".
There are four numbers to compare, salary_SF, salary_GR, living_cost_SF, living_cost_GR, and two obvious ratios you could take. You chose to divide salary/living_cost for each, but you could also divide salary_SF/salary_GR for ratio_1 and living_cost_SF/living_cost_GR for ratio_2.
So, you might find that it's a 50% lower salary, and an 80% lower living cost. That would be informative.
Numbeo is a great site for cost of living comparison. Here's SF versus Grand Rapids[0]. To sum, if your takehome is $7800 in SF, you can live a similar lifestyle on $3700 in Grand Rapids.
That of course depends on what you're going for. The 'lifestyle' comparison only takes into account basic goods. It doesn't take into everything else that actually affects your personal quality of life (cities vs more rural life each have vastly different benefits).
Not only that, but many things have a constant price: international air tickets, cars, and computers don’t vary in cost much between GR and SF (some are even more expensive in the lower cost place).
Arbitrary example:
GRR -> Copenhagen roundtrip is ~$1,100 USD.
From NYC or SF I can do that for ~$400-$500. Pretty much anywhere else I could pick has a similar differential.
That's a massive cost difference, especially when you're looking at 2-4 person vacations. That's a problem in pretty much every rural area (flying out of Ithaca was expensive as heck). I'm able to travel way more as a result.
All good points! And since each person has their own take on these other factors, I guess it explains why people live different places. (Besides our west coast snooty "flyover states" attitude -- lots of people really do want to live where they live!)
You have never flown anywhere but Canada, then. I Have to come to GR 2x per year from abroad, and in order to afford it I fly into Chicago and take the train, or buy separate tickets on the 45 minute puddle jumper (which is an Embrayer Air 150, most uncomfortable plane in service in the states). Flying into Detroit or Grand Rapids from SFO is always 50% higher than flying to New York.
I had to buy a family member a flight from Seattle -> Detroit for next month, it cost $600. I'm about to fly myself from Istanbul to San Francisco, that flight cost $500.
There's a reason they're called the flyover states.
I also notice that is the cost for renting in both places. If you want to buy a house, and if (for example) you wanted that house to have a yard, it might impact that differential. But, interesting site, thanks!
Our state government is not great. But the local GR government has been generally decent. Utilities work and are maintained. Grand Rapids also owns and maintains its own water plant and direct connection to lake Michigan. The local government has also been responsive to our local housing bubble. Though it remains to be seen if they will be effective.
That said, our roads are still shit. Like the rest of Michigan.
Power and water seem significantly more expensive than out in the PNW, which can get spendy considering the city mandates green lawns and AC is needed for most of the summer.
PNW is kind of special with all the dams providing power and abundant fresh water compared to most of the rest of the USA, I can remember reading about aluminum plants and data centers moving there for the cheap electricity.
40k-50k as a junior developer? Would a junior at your company have the same skillset as a junior at Google/Facebook/Amazon? Are you not expected to work 60h+ a week? Is it pretty lax? I just can't fathom how it could be so low. I'd understand 65-75k for a junior in Michigan.
As a UMich grad, most of us left because of the low salaries. It’s appalling how little software engineers make in the state and how much companies complain about an inability to find talent.
I left because I never had interest in staying in Michigan in the first place, though Ann Arbor is absolutely gorgeous and if I wanted to live outside a major city it would be one of my first choices.
Salary is one part of that, but unless you grew up in the area, most non-hub-city regions are a hard sell for young folk, and Detroit hasn't yet recovered enough to be "hip". People used to have for move specifically to find a job, but in tech there are so many jobs available currently that you kind of get your choice of destination if you're a capable engineer, especially with remote work available.
Is it considered normal for developers to work 60 hours a week in the USA?
Because from my experiences in Australia and New Zealand, the majority of people work a 40 hour week. Everyone in my office has cleared out by 6 PM.
$50k a year for working 40 hours a week in the midwest with its lower cost of living sounds like a fine deal. Those kinds of wages are fairly normal for software developers to earn internationally in other developed countries like Australia or Germany.
$50k doesn't go far. Other countries have taxpayer funded healthcare (easily worth $10k per year), 1 year maternity and paternity leave, 6 weeks of vacation, and stronger employee protections (so that you actually are working 40 hours a week).
I earn the equivalent of US$55k (plus bonus) here in Australia (I could be earning more, long story) as a relatively junior developer.
But then you have to add my annual leave entitlement, I get 4 weeks annual leave plus 2 weeks of public holidays (this country is so amazing, they give me a day off to watch the horse races). I hear that the standard in the USA is 2 weeks for a professional job. So I essentially get a 10% bonus in holiday pay. I also get 10 days of paid sick leave a year, and 3 days of bereavement leave for deaths of close relatives.
I also have 9.5% superannuation on top of my salary, and I don't have to pay health insurance. For the luxury of (almost) free healthcare, my tax burden is only $700 more than it would be in Grand Rapids. According to a random website I found, I'd be paying $3,000 per year for health insurance in Michigan [1].
So my income, adjusted for superannuation and annual leave, is around $67k, add the health insurance to that and I'm at $70k. Apparently cost of living in San Fransisco is about 40% higher than Melbourne [2], so on that comparison I'm not doing poorly, but Melbourne is about 20% more expensive than Grand Rapids [3]. I'm always skeptical of Numbeo though, because the numbers are quite off. Basically though, I have US$20k (plus bonus) per year of disposable income after I pay for food, rent, and utilities.
Thanks for the numbers! The US is great if you're in the top 20%, especially if you're married to another in the top 20%, but otherwise I think most people would be better off in more equitable countries.
You're right. This is definitely low. I currently live in Pittsburgh. We hire our junior devs at about $65k starting with pretty good benefits. I threw Grand Rapids in a cost of living calculator and it had that salary at about $61k in Grand Rapids (5% cheaper). I'm pretty sure you could get entry level jobs in places like Cleveland and Rochester for similar costs. I haven't looked, but I'd be willing to bet you could get a similar starting salary in North Carolina or Virginia. Everyone is different and I don't want to knock anyone for being happy, but I personally would look to one of the other cheap COL areas if I was starting my career.
It rampages through the city like a plague every December through March.
Leave home in the dark, get home in the dark, it's overcast when you do go outside.
Snow comes and goes, it gently falls constantly due to "lake effect", and you'll have a few 10" snowstorms from November through February. Plus a couple random 40-60 degree days where it all melts off.
There is a ski hill (Cannonsburg) half an hour away, but it's only a hill - not a mountain. People ice fish, snowmobile, play hockey, and generally enjoy the winter - but you have to get out and use the right lights, or else you'll join most of the rest of the city in some mild depression.
When my son graduates high school, and our network of great schools, family, and friends becomes less of a tie, I'm running.
Couldn't agree more with this comment, it's why I left and dread ever moving back (my entire family still lives there). I will be taking monthly trips to warm destinations during the winter if I ever moved back.
Now the summer time is a completely different story...
Here's a good site for looking up the temperature, rain, snow, and sunlight data on US cities [1]. They have pretty fine grained coverage--around 170 cities in Michigan, for example.
If you hate snow, stay away. Winters are usually bad for at least 2-4 weeks sometimes much more. Weather constantly changes and can be unpredictable. Chicago is the same.
I was born here so I am fine but I have met SE Asian, Indian and Japanese people here who were kind of miserable. But you get used to it after a while.
> Winters are usually bad for at least 2-4 weeks sometimes much more. Weather constantly changes and can be unpredictable. Chicago is the same.
Lake Michigan has a large impact on weather patterns. Grand Rapids on the east and Chicago on the west do not have the same weather in the winter. Lake-effect snow is rare in Chicago, and the colder it gets the higher the likelihood of sunshine. Many days it will feel as though sunglasses are a safety item.
I lived in a rust belt city in for many years, and in recent years have been witnessing a slew of "rust-belt renaissance" articles pop up every now and then about how things are turning around in deindustrialized cities (Pittsburgh is often cited as a shining example of a city that has seen a turnaround).
These articles typically state something along the lines of the low COL (cost-of-living) luring young people back from coastal cities. Some even overstate their case quite a bit by projecting they'll be the next Silicon Valley or startup hub. I wonder how folks here feel about such articles?
I can't help but notice there's some element of boosterism that misses a something fundamental. To be sure, it makes people who live in rust belt cities feel better about themselves (I was one of those people), but it doesn't seem to really move the needle in attracting the very ambitious to these places. In my observation, the truly ambitious are insensitive to cost-of-living arguments.
Paul Graham wrote an article entitled "Cities and Ambition" [1] which speaks to this. It tracks with my observation that people at the top of their games tend to cluster, and are willing to suffer discomfort to live among their peers.
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Some quotes:
"How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time."
"No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do."
I think these articles speak with the ambition of these cities themselves despite the loss of their industrial base; to my mind this ambitiousness is correlated with boosterism. And it does makes people feel good, and it might work, too, at supporting ambition. Just like how folks in NYC and SF often speak highly (as well as ill) of their homes. It feels good!
I'm not sure of how some cities are more expensive correlates with overall ambition so much as it does class. People from all classes can be very ambitious even if they're unequal in wealth.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think you're right -- positivity does create virtuous cycles.
On a related note, I suspect cities primarily relying on cost-of-living arguments to attract people may actually be subtly signalling the reverse of what ambitious people are drawn to. A city's primary signal should be the vibrancy of the place, not the low cost of living.
In my old rust belt city, many were proud of the fact that folks who left for New York City were coming back because we offered a low cost of living. But the people returning were also those who had "given up" on their ambitions... whose dreams were broken by NYC. I realize this is a bit of an unfair generalization, because it's not universally true (some ambitious chefs who returned -- and they are very good -- were those who trained in NYC but simply found NY's restaurant economics too oppressive). But supposing we were subtly attracting folks who had "given up"... in large enough numbers, they are likely to set a certain cultural tone for the city. Great cities are not built on low cost-of-living is all I'm saying.
Side: as a historical example, consider Canada vs U.S. -- Canadians are generally a more risk-averse people than Americans, and it's partly because the United Empire Loyalists were American loyalists who chose the safer route of siding with the British, whereas U.S. Americans forged their own path. The Loyalists set the tone for much of the country.
As to your second point, cities with ambition tend to be expensive because people want to live in them, often in spite of the expense. However, the reverse is not true -- just because a city is expensive doesn't mean it attracts ambition. Nantucket's pretty expensive but it's not brimming with ambition. Not sure about expensive cities correlating with class... New York is very expensive, but still manages to attract ambitious working class people who are trying to make it there.
On a related note, I suspect cities primarily relying on cost-of-living arguments to attract people may actually be subtly signalling the reverse of what ambitious people are drawn to. A city's primary signal should be the vibrancy of the place, not the low cost of living.
Yes. What makes me unlikely to return to Michigan long-term, as much as I liked where I lived, is the limited career options I would have there. I am apparently willing to put up with a rather high cost of living to work on what I find interesting.
I do agree that top-tier cities are not built on low COL as their prime selling point.
However, I will also point out that low COL can have advantages of it's own for the ambitious, particularly for those pursuing their own ideas rather than climbing the corporate ladder.
When rent is $500/month (or less with a roommate) and bars, restaurants, etc are also cheap, it requires much less difficulty to pursue your idea. Even modest savings will let you live a normal life and last you years of trying to make a go of it, and you could get by indefinitely with a part time job if you don't have that.
I think it's important to consider observations in the context in which they were made. PG made those observations back in 2008. Things have evolved substantially since then. SF (and other coastal cities) are much different today than they were 10 years ago, as are rust belt cities and those in the south, heartland etc.
I don't know if that can be generalised. I lived in GR and went to Grand Valley. I saw few churches with rainbow flag raised on them. Grand Valley is also very big on protecting LGBTQ. Had gay friends knew gay bars. For an immigrant like me, GR has been nothing but warm and nice. Sorry to hear about your experience.
After you get asked for the umpteenth time what church you go to, it's easy to get outed as the Company Heathen.
After not going to the company picnic over the course of few years (BBQ) it's easy to get outed as the Company Vegetarian.
And then, because it is Grand Rapids, and the corporate world is very different from the local public university, you pretty much get shunned. They won't make your life completely miserable, but you will feel the affects of being an permanent outsider.
YMMV, but I was batting 2 for 2 and have stories from others. I'm sure there are some good employers around.
> After you get asked for the umpteenth time what church you go to, it's easy to get outed as the Company Heathen.
Generally, I tell people to just say "I go to Fountain Street Church". Even if you don't know what that is, even if you've never set foot in the place, just say those words anyway. It's essentially a community shared codephrase that means "you aren't going to harass anyone about their religious beliefs".
It lets the strict Christians sleep at night (because you 'go to church'), but it usually prevents any follow-up questions (because it's somewhat well known as the 'overly-accepting' church, and they usually won't want to get into orthodoxy specifics).
Meanwhile, that same phrase lets most of the non-religious locals know that, regardless of whatever your actual beliefs are/aren't, you are a polite person who doesn't want to face religious discrimination and is claiming not to do so to others.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, it's not right to make people jump through these silly hoops. But that's sort of how the game is played in Grand Rapids.
Considering its been years since I've talked to anyone about church, let alone heard this kind of question asked, this would be a major culture shock. I don't think I'm the only person out on the West Coast who hasn't heard questions of that genre in years though.
I keep waiting for the Silicon Valley/New York/Boston/Seattle/etc. tech hotspot bubble to pop, and companies look to areas of the country with low cost of living, short commutes to work, etc.
I will probably have a long wait! The problem as I see it is that companies need to be run with a ‘remote first’ culture, where people in outlying offices are not second class citizens.
I recently was in NYC working for a few days, and while the environment is a lot of fun, many people who work there have very long commutes. When I worked as a contractor at Google in Mountain View, I came into the office at 6am to beat the traffic. The cost of living in tech centers is awful compared to non-east/west coast areas.
It seems like there is not much middle ground: either have everyone in one or a few urban areas or have a distributed culture. Currently the business model of concentrating workers in high cost areas is winning over distributed teams.
It’s very odd that this article goes out of its way to paint the Amway billionaires as “good” and not “extractive.” Everyone I know from the area has horror stories about friends or family members that got sucked into Amway’s cultish pyramid scheme and had their lives destroyed.
They’re a big employer in the region, so locals do tend to “look the other way.” But this is far too generous a portrayal of the families/company that have created decades of devastation in the wake of its scam.
Kalamazoo isn't doing bad these days, either. As someone who grew up in Michigan (Saginaw), I would love to move to either, but IT jobs I'm qualified for seem to be rather thin on the ground.
Saginaw is having issues, but there are a few consulting firms around the area. Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Lansing though are having strong comebacks. As someone from Standish, I look forward to the day that the MBS area is more than just Dow.
One of the interesting things about MBS is that there's a huge amount of under-employed or under-utilized talent that's basically (1) the "trailing spouse" problem (one half of a couple has a Dow job, the other doesn't) plus (2) Dow employees that have been lost in the shuffle and aren't in roles that are a good match. I never quite came up with the right idea to take advantage of the local talent pool... a startup incubator is a maybe. If Dow were the smart and forward-looking, they would encourage a local startup community, but that's not the pattern of decision-making that happens at Dow.
I'm also from the area - don't forget about Nexteer. The IT market is pretty bland, though. There's a handful of MSP's you can work at to build some experience, CRUD programming at accounting consulting firms, or be a one/two man IT shop at any of the smaller companies with 50+ people.
When I was younger Grand Rapids was seen as a dull place. Downtown closed at 5 pm and there wasn't much fun to be had for a young adult.
While the area is still pretty conservative that has changed mightily in the last forty years. The city now has a lively downtown and all those breweries have made the place a magnet for young people from the surrounding areas.
The 'lake effect' does mean they get a lot more snow than the eastern part of the state.
I still call it “Bland Rapids”, but I’m up there for work infrequently and it’s always enjoyable enough. Founders is almost worth the trek in and of itself.
> Aside from dining out, what fun is there to be had for young adults anywhere?
As someone who used to live in the rust belt, I found my social life to be vastly improved after moving to Chicago.
It's true you can be lonely in a big city, but the same is true in a small town. The difference is that in a big city, significantly more options exist if you are willing to step out.
After moving to a big city, I was able to connect with more people of like-mind. The diversity of people I meet now is an order of magnitude greater. The Meetup groups are significantly better (I can go to a technical meetup and talk shop with people at my level). If I wanted to hang out with friends, the scope of activities possible are also much wider. If I wanted to learn a skill, take language classes, take evening classes at a world-renowned university, etc., I can and have -- and have met interesting people through these activities. If I wanted to go on a trip with friends, flights are much cheaper out of a hub city. Job opportunities are also much more abundant -- if I decided to change jobs tomorrow, I could do that without moving away.
The intellectual and cultural climate in a dynamic, thriving city is vastly different from that of a single-industry town.
One advantage of large cities is that you're more likely to have a critical mass of people sharing a common interest to have a subculture or community. For instance, in my city there is a healthy film photography community that's large enough that there's still dedicated film labs and at least one camera shop that sells only film cameras.
Another thing that differs between cities is the nightlife varies a lot. The health of a city's nightlife isn't just a population thing though, but also zoning and licensing have a big factor in that.
For example, practically everything has to close at 3 AM in Sydney, which has had a massively detrimental effect on the nightlife. Meanwhile in Melbourne you can still party from Friday night to Monday evening without stopping if you really want to. There's not a lot of cities around these days that still have clubs with 24 hour licences. All the places I regularly go to here in Melbourne close at 6 AM at the earliest.
And suddenly I'm having flashbacks to one New Years eve party where I ended up flying from SF to Edinburgh and having a mate get me into it because he knew the bouncer, arriving just in time for the whole fucking place to be coming up at the same time coz everyone timed it for midnight and the pounding music and everyone off their tits and it was like that scene at the beginning of Blade but without the blood or the scary sword just hooj choons (it was a long time ago) and sure, no, just dining out mate. Dining out is the only fun to be had for young adults anywhere, I am so sorry, please tell me you are still young and if so get your arse to a large, culturally aware city.
When I worked in the fertilizer industry I was friends with another dealer who was in the Holland area. When crops were being planted we worked seven days a week.
I couldn't understand it why he didn't try being open on Sunday. He told me he could be open on Sunday but if he did he wouldn't have the business to stay open the other six days of the week.
I used to live in Toledo as a kid and we went up to Grand Rapids one time for a trip. I remember the forests surrounding the city were really nice, and of course there was a lake nearby with waves big enough to body surf on. I can't really say anything about the city, but that part of the Michigan has a lot to offer.
Currently living in Ann Arbor. As a software engineer it's vibrant and full of startups to join. Our javascript meetup usually has somewhere around 50-100 people every event.
Not to mention it's a small town with a lot of bigger city amenities, close proximity to Detroit, and with it being a college town the average IQ is pretty high.
The only thing I remember about Ann Arbor is my mom visiting a hospital there for some reason. It seemed like a small quaint town, definitely not as bad as Monroe.
calling Ann Arbor a small quaint town comparing it favorably to Monroe is just a misunderstanding.
Monroe has like a sixth the population in the city limits and still less than half the size comparing the two metro regions. Ann Arbor is in a different class than Monroe. Monroe is a small town. Ann Arbor is a medium-small city (over 100,000 in city, over 300,000 in metro area).
Ann Arbor is centered around the University of Michigan, consistently ranked the #2 public school in the country, just behind UC Berkley. It has around 45,000 students. And yet Ann Arbor is big enough that students are still a minority of the population.
The UofM hospital is generally ranked one of the top 10 in the country, so it's not surprising for someone to go their for some special visit.
But sure, it's small and quaint compared to any real big city.
Ann Arbor has a real tech scene for sure, and Google's office there is significant. But whatever presence they have, Nokia and Expedia are not based in Ann Arbor (as someone might infer from your post)
University of Michigan has a lot of medical research and top medical facilities. It is a good place to go for medical care, especially for newer procedures and testing.
Absolutely. I lived the first 25 years of my life anywhere from Grand Rapids to Kalamazoo, and it's a lovely, quiet, and still somehow cheap place(West Michigan that is). I will always be fond of my time there, but the longer I am away the less I feel attached to it.
I was visiting friends just west of Grand Rapids, seems like the industry , major foundries Aluminum etc. are polluting the waters. The fishing sucked. The locals were blaming pollutants in the water as well. The party popular in those parts isn't big on regulations. -- Pure Mich. my as#!
Not surprising at all...the paper mills from the last century in Kalamazoo (South of GR for those who want context) has rendered the Kalamazoo river pretty much unusable for the foreseeable future.
I will say Grand Rapids currently has some issues around software developers that are associated with our growing pains. Because of the rust belt depression of wages, we still haven't caught up. Wages for software developers here lag by about 20 percent. Most employers are used to paying a much lower wage than I would expect elsewhere. Senior developers might make 80-90K and juniors can expect to be making 40-50K. If you are an ineffective negotiator you might be lower. Many of my contemporaries have chosen to get remote jobs with the usual suspects. Zapier, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, Slack and others all have local people.
That said, this is a wonderful town that is changing all the time. The cost of living is low, though our real estate market is out of control and has been for a couple years. The developers here tend to have a strong sense of community and we generally support one another rather than tear each other down. We have some great local developers.
If you would like the low down on our growing town or are interest in moving, setting up a remote shop or building a company in our town let me know. I'd be happy to help you or get you in contact with those that can. (see profile)