Having lived in Boston an NYC for most of my life, here are my thoughts.
Life here is really, really easy - good quality of life, great jobs, and a fairly low cost of living.
The metro area is 4.5M people, so it is not as big as Boston, but it is plenty big enough that you are not going to the same restaurants over and over.
The downtown area is classic Midwest, it is like Boston's financial district or FiDi or Downtown Brooklyn (pre-housing boom) - very quiet at night and on weekends. While there is no Back Bay, Beacon Hill or analogous Manhattan neighborhoods in the "downtown" - there are plenty of great adjacent neighborhoods, like Northeast, Uptown, North Loop, Linden Hills, etc.
Getting out into the countryside is easy. The metro is shaped sort of like a round blob and I live on the western side of the city, so in less than 30 minutes, I can be in literal open farm country like you see in the movies, rolling fields, with red barns and grain silos, etc. It looks like something out of a movie if you are Northeast born/raised.
Our state fair (one of the largest in the country and held in the city of St Paul), fall season pumpkin patches/apple picking/hay rides/etc. are all undefeated.
Our airport is excellent, is a Delta hub, and is about 25-30 minutes of light traffic driving for most people in the metro.
Winter - the 800-pound gorilla.
It is about 8 weeks of terror. November and the first part of December are like Boston winters. The end of February and all of March are like Boston winters. The roughly 8-week period in between is a total wildcard. Last year, the end of December was below zero for a week. The year before it was in February. My first winter it was in January where daytime highs did not go above zero for a week. It is in the teens a lot - and this was argued a lot on a previous page here, but the lack of dampness and intense wind you get in Boston and NYC just does not exist. We also get a lot of sunny days - not much grey gloom. 20 degrees - dry, sunny and a 2mph breeze is actually quite nice. You have to buy a heavy coat, but then you are good.
We don't get a ton of snow here - it is too cold to snow. Also rock salt barely works here - you have to buy a special kind that works in super-cold weather. However, once you get a hard freeze in November and a small storm in mid-November, you don't see your lawn again until April.
Return on investment: Spring, Summer and Fall - the weather across all 3 seasons is awesome. Typical summer days are mid-80's, dry and sunny.
During the summer, the sun goes down after 9pm and is light out past 9:30. The sun also comes up really early and at 5am it is perfectly light outside before sunrise.
I live near 3 lakes, biking paths, and as I said earlier, getting out of town for camping, fishing, etc is very easy. Everybody is out doing something after work and the weekends.
So Minneapolis is one of those cities I've considered visiting, but I've been reluctant only because from what I've seen, the street life...particularly in the downtown area, seems completely lacking. I've done a lot of exploring on street view and watched a few videos on You Tube of people touring the downtown and it just seems jarringly devoid of people on the sidewalks. I realize that the weather there is brutally cold for 4-6 months out of the year and there is an extensive skywalk system (not dissimilar from the RESO in Montreal, only above ground), but as someone who enjoys walking around neighborhoods with lots of people in them, it just seems like the options there are few and far between?
Happy to learn that I'm off base if others have any insight?
