For most of my adult life, I lived in San Diego, California, or in Chula Vista, one of its suburbs. In 2016, C and I moved to Riverside, California. Earlier this year, we moved to Lawrence, Kansas. We had decided in 2018 that we had to get out of California, because it was becoming prohibitively expensive, and also because we didn’t like its policy environment (this became catastrophically worse in late 2019, with the passage of AB 5, which essentially prohibits most forms of freelance work, including mine—but we were already committed by then). We spent several month doing research on US states and cities, starting with a list of 36 cities, and narrowing down; in the fall I flew to our top choices, Boise, Idaho and Lawrence. I liked both of them, but C pointed out that housing costs in Boise had risen since we first looked at it, and we learned that it had become a popular destination for Californian expats, who both bid up housing costs and voted for the same kind of policies we wanted to get away from. So Lawrence it was.
On one hand, Kansas was rated in the top ten in the Cato Institute’s ranking of states by economic freedom (California is in the bottom five). (Kansas is also ranked #12 on the U.S. Nerdchart.) On the other, Lawrence is a college town, with university libraries, a variety of cuisines, and other desirable cultural attributes. It also is the home of two very old friends, who in fact put me up on my two pre-move visits.
So what is Lawrence like? Geographically, it’s mildly hilly, though by Riverside standards it’s pretty flat; there are no mountains in sight. It gets a good deal of rain and is quite green much of the year. Architecturally, it’s influenced by New England (it was founded by anti-slavery activists from there), with pleasantly diverse materials:
It reportedly has an excellent city library, now unhappily closed, which is more modern looking:
It’s the home of the University of Kansas, which has some very nice stone buildings:
We live right next to Free State High School, one of the two high schools, named for the antislavery days; and across from it is a shopping area with a Sprouts, a supermarket that calls itself a farmer’s market and sells a lot of bulk foodstuffs and organic products—and has a variety of other things that I like (I have no personal interest in organic foods). It has some decent restaurants; when we were staying in a motel before the movers got here, we discovered that just next door there was a Chinese restaurant that had dishes such as cumin lamb and dry-fried green beans, which we had encountered at our favorite restaurant in Riverside, Frice, and hadn’t thought we would even see again. And not far from there there’s a good Mexican restaurant. We’re looking forward to having things open up so we can see more of the city.
I’m really looking forward to the days when both the city library and the university libraries open up, and when the estimated risk of socializing goes down enough so we can see our local friends face to face. (The Dusty Bookshelf, shown in my first photo, is starting to move toward opening up now.)
*quickly ducks away in case Cardiff citizens hate Torchwood*
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