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    If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie
    If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie
    If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie
    Audiobook7 hours

    If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie

    Written by Christopher Ingraham

    Narrated by Josh Bloomberg

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The hilarious, charming, and candid story of writer Christopher Ingraham’s decision to uproot his life and move his family to Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, population 1,400—the community he made famous as “the worst place to live in America” in a story he wrote for the Washington Post.

    Like so many young American couples, Chris Ingraham and his wife Briana were having a difficult time making ends meet as they tried to raise their twin boys in the East Coast suburbs. One day, Chris—in his role as a “data guy” reporter at the Washington Post—stumbled on a study that would change his life. It was a ranking of America’s 3,000+ counties from ugliest to most scenic. He quickly scrolled to the bottom of the list and gleefully wrote the words “The absolute worst place to live in America is (drumroll please) … Red Lake County, Minn.” The story went viral, to put it mildly. 

    Among the reactions were many from residents of Red Lake County. While they were unflappably polite—it’s not called “Minnesota Nice” for nothing—they challenged him to look beyond the spreadsheet and actually visit their community. Ingraham, with slight trepidation, accepted.   Impressed by the locals’ warmth, humor and hospitality —and ever more aware of his financial situation and torturous commute—Chris and Briana eventually decided to relocate to the town he’d just dragged through the dirt on the Internet.

    If You Lived Here You’d Be Home by Now is the story of making a decision that turns all your preconceptions—good and bad—on their heads. In Red Lake County, Ingraham experiences the intensity and power of small-town gossip, struggles to find a decent cup of coffee, suffers through winters with temperatures dropping to forty below zero, and unearths some truths about small-town life that the coastal media usually miss. It’s a wry and charming tale—with data!—of what happened to one family brave enough to move waaaay beyond its comfort zone.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateSep 10, 2019
    ISBN9780062958884
    Author

    Christopher Ingraham

    Christopher Ingraham writes about all things data, with a particular interest in wealth, happiness, and inequality. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.

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    Reviews for If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now

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    • 5/5
      Such a great look at life and what's really important.
    • 3/5
      For me, just an ok read, a 3 star at most. A short memoir by Ingraham, data writer for the Washington Post. After visiting and then writing a short piece on Red Lake County, Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, the ugliest county in America, he decides that despite it has no lake, nor hills, nor falls, it may not be a bad place to relocate his family. Afterall, the people were so friendly and welcoming and the 9-5 grind and 2 hour commute in DC were getting to be rather tiresome and he and his wife were spending very little time with their two young boys. So off they went. Charles was able to submit his work to the Post online, his wife Briana quit her highly successful job to be a stay at home mom. The lower cost of living in Red Lake proved to be the catalyst for making the change. The memoir continues with tales of life in rural America where the temps get below -40f, pizza and chinese food are replaced by lutefisk and tater tot hot dish. A nice visit to Red Lake Falls but just a visit is just fine by me.
    • 4/5
      Ingraham manages to write "how we traded the DC suburbs for a remote county in Minnesota" without a) making me hate him or any member of his family, b) talking down to, or dismissively around, any Minnesotan, or c) treating it all like some kind of miracle. That's an achievement!I'll recap the plot here, because it is such a great story: Ingraham crunches data and writes gee-whiz pieces for WaPo. He finds some data about the most pleasant counties to live in across the US, in terms of geographic features, weather, and things like that. Since every county in the country is ranked, not only are some places best, but some are inevitably the "worst" places to live - where were those places? Well, bottom of the list turned out to be Red Lake County, Minnesota. After Ingraham points this out in his article, he gets some hate mail - Minnesota style, which means understated and not very vitriolic - and invitations to come out and see their "ugly" county for himself. Which he does. And he likes it.And he moves there!Very interesting to me on a personal level is that Ingraham contrasts Red Lake County not just with the Baltimore/DC area, but with other places he and his wife have lived as well - including my county in Vermont. And Vermont doesn't come off very well. Vermonters aren't as welcoming as the Minnesotans; the Ingrahams made some friends, but never felt part of a community like they do in Red Lake County. I believe it. We're pretty standoffish round these parts."If there is one thing - one sole, solitary piece of information - that I can convey to you about rural America it's this: rural America is not a nation apart. The people here are just as complex and fallible as people anywhere else. They consume the same media, cheer for the same sports teams, fight over the same political issues, and have the same dreams for their kids." I like that.
    • 4/5
      I have mixed feelings about this book. I loved the chapter on politics, where Ingraham takes to task reporters from the coasts mythologized the older, white, rural man who supported Trump as some kind of oracle, and kind of argue that the secret of life is to be found in small towns...and yet much of the book, Ingraham does just that. HIS life seems to have improved greatly by moving to rural Minnesota, but it's not going to happen for everyone. He doesn't find a small town in rural Minnesota stultifying, but doesn't seem to acknowledge that some people would. (This is even odder because he spends a lot of time criticizing the small towns in upstate NY of his and his wife's youths. I did really like his descriptions of winter in the very north of the lower 48.
    • 5/5
      This is just a delightful as well as rather eye opening book. It really should be read by every politician out there as a very honest picture of what it is like to actually LIVE in a rural area of this country and Ingraham was the perfect person to do the describing!! He is humorous overall in a vast number of subjects he covers as well as a little horrifying, in particular, with his descriptions of some animal events that have occurred. Three years seems to be a significant amount of time to have an accurate description, from an enormous array of incidents, including hunting, medical events, and of course toddler twin boys through all of it. It definitely took two people for this adventure---Ingraham's wife sounds...amazing!!