Des Moines, Iowa

Des Moines has a river, an art museum, a symphony orchestra, an opera company, lots of insurance companies and a botanical garden with a geodesic dome. It has buildings by I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano as well as Eero Saarinen and his dad, Eliel. It has a gay bar called the Blazing Saddle.

There is a lot of buzz about Des Moines, as a place for normal people with normal incomes to rent or buy normal homes and lead their lives. Des Moines is one of those cities gentrifying its downtown. Great smells are spilling out, festivals are scheduled year-round and rehabbed lofts are fetching high prices. In recent years Des Moines has been named the best for young professionals (Forbes), families (Kiplinger), home renters (Time), businesses and careers (Forbes). It has the highest community pride in the nation, according to a Gallup poll last year, and in October topped a Bloomberg analysis of which cities in the United States were doing the best at attracting millennials to buy housing.

Des Moines is a major hub of the US insurance industry, plus there are significant financial services and publishing sectors. As such, the downtown landscape is still filled with office buildings rather than walkable retail. Historic preservation has caught on now but the city is catching up from the previous hollowing out.
It’s not big, just over 200,000 people. You need a car but you won’t have to drive for long.

From affordable, ample housing to easy-to-navigate interstates with little traffic, DSM is easy livin. Cool restaurants and boutique movie theaters and yoga studios — Des Moines has all those things, but you don’t have to spend 40 minutes stuck on an eight-lane freeway to get to them.

Here's a review from someone who grew up in Des Moines:
Other than Iowa City, there is no other city in Iowa where I would willingly reside. It has the amenities and attractions of a city 3–4 times it’s size and a surprisingly large and varied cultural scene. Is the winter a drawback? Not really. Road clearance is a science and art in the Midwest and Des Moines’ ability to keep traffic moving in all but the worst weather is top notch. As one responder noted, there are no major professional teams, but most of the mainstream sports have minor league or developmental teams in the area. It is conveniently located close to Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City and St Louis, so you are a short plane ride to more urban areas. While it is a relatively small city to be the largest in the state, the ease of travel, burgeoning cultural scene and great schools more than compensate for what some may miss in a metropolis.