Is the Rust Belt Right for Your Affordable Retirement?

Other recent reports tout Rust Belt cities as ripe to welcome or retain retirees.

U.S. News & World Report’s 2024 ranking of the best places to retire, which measures metro areas on affordability and quality-of-life criteria like housing costs, crime rates and access to quality health care, gives major props to old steel towns like Allentown, Pennsylvania (No. 5), and Youngstown, Ohio (No. 9), cities so linked in the popular imagination to the perils of deindustrialization that Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen, respectively, wrote songs about them.

Cities in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois occupy eight of the top 10 spots in a February 2024 report from Homebuyer.com on the most affordable places to buy a house, spotlighting what Dan Green, the online mortgage company’s CEO, calls “hidden gems” for retirees.

“The Rust Belt is undergoing revitalization, in part to rebuild a tax base, even as its housing costs have remained reasonable,” he says.

Giant swings beckon strollers to take in Ohio River vistas in Cincinnati's Smale Riverfront Park.

Alamy Stock Photo

‘Welcoming vibe’

Green, whose firm is based in Cincinnati, is a big fan of the city and the relative value it offers retirees.

“This isn’t rooted in data, but a lot of these reinvigorated cities have a friendly, welcoming vibe,” he says. “They’re wonderful museum and restaurant cities. People who grew up here are more likely to stay — or move back when they retire.”

When an airport in Blue Ash, a suburb north of Cincinnati, was decommissioned in 2012, local and state planners turned it into Summit Park, a mix of green space, entertainment and shopping with an adjacent, privately developed independent and assisted living community. Closer to town, Cincinnati’s German heritage has been tapped to spur an explosion of brewpubs and retail areas where it is legal to carry a beer from shop to shop. Retirees are regular customers, Green says.

Kansas City's historic City Market bustles daily with locals buying plants, produce, specialty goods or a gourmet meal.

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Cincinnati’s population, on the downslide since the 1960s, is now ticking upward, notes Chris Hais, a certified financial planner with Queen City Financial Advisors in the city. “You get the affordability, plus all the entertainment and health care benefits,” he says.

In Kansas City, more people are opting to age in their hometown, says Bret Guillaume, president of local financial advisory firm Mader Shannon. The city has invested heavily in rebuilding its downtown, adding streetcars, overseeing the conversion of old warehouses into loft living spaces and preparing to host several 2026 FIFA World Cup soccer matches.

“We’re seeing many more people move back, but we’re also not seeing people leaving to buy that condo in Florida — that’s not happening anymore,” Guillaume says. “We see people who have the ability to go elsewhere, but more and more, we’re seeing them stay.” The city has also become a draw for retirees from small towns in Kansas and Missouri, he adds.

Resurgent older cities outpaced retirement favorites Miami (No. 82) and Tucson (No. 103) in the U.S. News and World Report study, with high housing costs dragging down Miami’s ranking and low health care availability hurting Tucson’s. The AARP Livability Index, which measures the quality of amenities and services in communities across the country on a 100-point scale, scores Cincinnati (59), Buffalo (58) and Columbus (58) comparably to Miami (56), Fort Lauderdale (55) and Orlando (55).

Living in Buffalo does have its challenges, as residents learned anew in January 2024.

AP Photo/Carolyn Thompson

Sunshine, low taxes still big draws

Besides housing costs, the inflation surge of 2021–2022 may be playing a role in the shift toward areas that have something to offer retirees at a lower price.

“Higher inflation freaks people out,” says Jeremy Kisner, a partner in the Phoenix office of Corient, a wealth management firm. “People wonder about whether their money will last long enough.”

Much as that may play in revitalizing Rust Belt cities’ favor, the usual Sun Belt suspects remain the most popular places for people to put down fresh roots after punching out of the workaday world, studies show.

Florida is still the No. 1 destination state for retirees in Hire A Helper’s annual report, which uses U.S. Census Bureau survey data to track relocations. The Sunshine State drew 11 percent of retirees making interstate moves in 2023. Another warm weather state, South Carolina, came in second, with 10 percent. The four most popular metro areas were all in Florida and Texas.

To Kisner, those findings suggest that even the slight shift toward older and colder cities is an aberration, or a mini trend that isn’t unsustainable.

“The bigger story for me," he says, "is all the retirees moving out of high-tax areas and heading to lower-tax, lower-cost regions like Florida or Texas,” neither of which have a state income tax. California and New York, which have the highest and third-highest income tax rates in the country, are also the states that saw the most retirees migrate elsewhere, per the Hire A Helper study.

Another factor that might short-circuit a retiree exodus to the Rust Belt: weather. Several professionals who work with retirees in Buffalo say the blizzards are at least as much of a deterrent to moving there as high taxes.

“I’ve lived in Southern California, Las Vegas and Phoenix. I’ve never seen anyone move to colder weather,” Kisner says. “And if they did, it was only to be close to their kids and grandkids. Everyone moves here from New York or New Jersey — and not the other way around.”