$1000 to move ANYWHERE is already a lowball. Much less to a city that consistently ranks among the top 5 most dangerous large US cities by violent crime, has brutal winters, and a blight problem.
I recommend visiting Detroit to update your priors. I first visited in 2000 and it was blighted. I visited again in 2025 and it’s actually nice (downtown Detroit and surroundings). There’s even a Microsoft office there.
> One surprising thing is how quickly it got blighted.
I don't think this is actually true - either that it happened quickly, or that how quickly it happened was a surprise. Detroit (the city, which was always the "problem") depopulated from the 1950s onwards as the major industry moved to the suburbs, and the effects were obvious even in the 1960s. It took another 40-50 years to hit the bottom though.
That said, the population is now growing again (since 2021).
It's further north than a small part of Canada, but Michigan is lake effect central, and the Detroit metro is a heat island. It's not usually that bad during the winter, but it does snow.
I’ve lived in Michigan most of my life. I always hear people talk about lake effect snow, but it doesn’t seem that bad. I shoveled maybe 6 or 7 times this past winter and only bothered to pull out the snow blower one or two times. Even when I lived on the west side of the state, it wasn’t that bad. I only remember one time where is snowed about a foot… the roads were cleared and the rest of the winter was pretty uneventful.
There are some areas up in the UP that are bad, but very few people live there and they know what they’re signing up for.
Meanwhile, the people I know who live in NJ got wrecked by snow repeatedly this year, multiple feet at a time. I don’t recall ever getting anything like that around Detroit.
I live just west of Lake Michigan, and what you described would be a high-snow winter here. The lake effect is real. I grew up in the Cleveland area, and I was surprised how much less snow we get in Wisconsin. Longer, colder winters, though.
I lived in Chicagoland for a few years as well, I didn’t notice much of a difference. I would assume that’s similar to Wisconsin.
Of course, I was in apartments with covered parking and snow removal services the whole time, so I didn’t need to care too much.
I do remember the guys in the Chicago office talking about when they got a foot or so of snow and had to walk to the nearby hotel to spend the night, because it wasn’t safe to drive home. I heard stories like that from people in the Michigan office too, but in my 20 years working I still never ran into it. Just lucky I guess.
Lake effect precipitation effects the entire Midwest, but the temperature moderation predominantly effect the peninsulas. We did get more than a foot on the ground earlier, but it all melted, then froze again, then 70 degrees, now 20... the weather is crazy everywhere.