Pretty much. I used to live in a mid-sized mid-West city in the US and still keep in touch. Most everyone I know bought a house, even with the modest wages they had. Why? Because there are plenty of homes in the $100-$200k range, even now.
Hell, you can buy beautiful, updated small mansions in the heart of many small midwestern towns for under $200k.
The trouble is:
1) no local jobs to speak of (unless you want to clerk at the farm & feed or assistant-manage the McDonald’s out by the highway)
2) nearest hospital that can do more than stabilize you before shipping you somewhere better, is over an hour away.
3) the schools are really, really bad
4) no local services or amenities. Hope the nearest state park (if any) is really good. But if it’s a midwestern one it’s probably not.
Remote work, being young and healthy and willing to take a little extra risk, having no kids and planning to have none, and being kinda a home-body (or being really into readily available rural midwestern outdoor activities like hunting and fishing), can make it a viable way to go, but that’s a lot of qualifiers.
In our medium-ish sized midwestern city there are smaller slightly-run-down houses in the low $200Ks, but universally in bottom-half school districts for the city. Solid choice if no kids, though. But also local tech jobs pay at most 50% of big-city equivalents.
They exist, but they’re needles in a haystack. Especially if you exclude rural districts that aren’t cheap because they’re basically captured by the same folks who attend the country club the community’s centered around (there are a few of these, particularly in the Northeast)
There are lots of schools in rural Pennsylvania that still have affordable real estate. Most of them have AP, college in HS courses, clubs, sports, etc. The metrics might not look as good as suburban schools because of the lack of home support or need to work for the larger percentage of disadvantaged students.
I think that's a part that gets ignored in most school comparisons - the largest differences are due to the level of home support, which is highly correlated with better incomes. So we have a cycle of implicit financial segregation. Many schools (in my area) have similar scores and outcomes if we exclude the disadvanged group from the metrics (because unless your child fits that category, that metric doesn't apply to them). So most people end up counting the wrong metrics for their kids.
Plenty of examples of far better options in mid-sized cities that have level 1 or 2 trauma centers, very good school options and lots of local services and amenities. And housing that is under $300k for a single family home.
