Ann Arbor, Michigan is a small college town with a huge football stadium and a fame of cultural capital of the Midwest.
Real estate: Depressed as of 2007 because of Pfizer closing its Ann Arbor office and compensating up to $100k house sale losses for relocating employees. Houses for rent are listed in the Ann Arbor News, which has its classifieds on the web. The prices go up at the end of summer and are lower in the winter. The rent depends on the local elementary school. Three-bedroom house rent is $1250--$1800. Apartments are not much cheaper and there are almost no apartment buildings and no apartment communities in the good school areas. The heating adds another $100-150 a month in the winter; some houses have air conditioners, but you don't need it.
Public schools: elementary schools Burns Park, Angels, Thurston, King, Northside and Eberwhite are considered good. Mitchell, Bryant, Pattengil, Carpenter are not.
Life with children: the preschools are about $450 a month for a full day (as of 2005). Most child-care centers have part-day and part-week plans. Rec&Ed program offers affordable art, dance and sport classes. There are many good playgrounds. Ann Arbor Mom's Club is a large and active organization.
Food: The best place to eat in Ann Arbor and within a hundred miles around is Zingerman's Delicatessen, with Zingerman's Roadhouse next. The closest competition is in Chicago. Bread from Zingerman's bakery is sold elsewhere in town. It's easily the best bread to buy East of Mississippi.
Grocery stores: Whole Foods Market, Arbor Market, Hiller's, Trader Joe's. Kroger's and Meijer's are huge cheap chains. Busch's is as expensive as Whole Foods and as bad as Kroger's, with the only redeeming quality of being open 24 hours.
Culture: Good source on the local culture is monthly Ann Arbor Observer, delivered for free to every postal address. The main event is 3-day Ann Arbor Art Fair. It happens every year mid-July. Besides, there are several overlapping summer festivals with movies and music in the park.
Nature: It takes 1 1/2 hour to get to the Port Huron lakeshore, about 5 hours to the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, 4 hours to the Traverse City, 5 hours to the bridge to Upper Peninsula. U.P. is a vast place itself, so at least another 2 hour to get anywhere there. Ann Arbor itself has several small parks and a long wooded strip along the Huron river: City Park, Riverside/Island Park, Fuller Recreation Area, Nickol's Arboretum, Gallup Park. They all form almost a continuous strip if you access them from the water. You can rent a canoe or a kayak at several liveries along the river. There is a shuttle between Argo and Gallup park liveries that will bring you back to your car. Arboretum is one of the few places with relief in Ann Arbor. There is not much botany there, but hills, pine trees and maples, great open fields for frisbee, and the new granite stairway to the rapid and shallow Huron. Campus is bike-friendly, but the town in general is not: there are few bike lanes on the streets and village roads around, and drivers are not polite to bikers.
It takes 4 hours drive from Ann Arbor to Chicago, 10 hours to New York, 14 to Boston, 3 days to San Francisco. I tried all that.
See also: travel with kids, Ann Arbor travel, Walnut Creek California, Lafayette California.