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, it 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 to live in. Cool restaurants, 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.

Most people who live in Des Moines don’t actually live in Des Moines but rather in one of the city’s suburbs: Altoona, Ankeny, Beaverdale, Bondurant, Carlisle, Clive, Grimes, Johnston, Norwalk, Pleasant Hill, Polk City, Urbandale, Waukee, West Des Moines or Windsor Heights.

Lots of cute neighborhoods aside from downtown, like Waterbury, Beaverdale, Lower Beaver, and Sherman Hill. The "cool" place to live if you're single and young has to be the East Village side of downtown, several options for apartments/townhomes/lofts there, but you will pay more than other areas. Today, both young people and empty nesters are moving back to downtown and the adjacent East Village neighborhood into conversions and new buildings.

West Des Moines is “the place” for young, successful professionals. It’s very safe & homogenous, with little crime and good schools. Many of the older, historic neighborhoods like Waterbury or Waveland Heights outside Des Moines’ metro area are the most costly places to live. The least expensive neighborhoods are Fairground, King Irving Park, Kirkwood Glen, Carpenter, and Cheatom Park.

Downtown is a favorite area for singles and young professionals, as well as couples not quite ready to set up shop on a common suburb-style subdivision. Many of the homes are modern, plus there’s a healthy mix of apartments, condos, and traditional single-family homes. While rent is a bit higher in this area than in Waterbury and other areas a bit further out, home prices, on average, are lower for those looking to own. This community is a popular place for families with young children.

Check out the Des Moines calendar of events to see what locals get up to year-round.

We highly recommend visiting Des Moines and staying in the community in a VRBO rather than a hotel to get a feel for what it's like to live among the locals. You can receive discounted fares on travel via our partnership with Expedia as well.

Come for 80/35 music festival, stay for the massive farmer’s markets and an affordable Beaverdale Brick house.