I moved into a new downtown apartment in a major midwestern city back in April thinking this would be over by May. Now I'm stuck in a dystopian downtown. My lease is up in April though. I'm looking forward to putting everything in a POD and heading back to where I grew up in small town America. Hopefully it will help all cities go back to reasonable prices, for people who still want to live there.
I did the same! I likely could have extended my lease to monthly and negotiated an even better deal had I known how long this would last. I saw so many people in my building moving out, and a lot of the rooms in my floor are still empty 7-8 months later.
State St. (the only real 4 blocks of downtown Madison has) still has a ton of boards up from the BLM protests, and last I heard the count for closed stores this year was almost 40.
Ouch. If you can put up with the winters, Madison is quite a bit nicer than Chicago, even in it's current state. But, it's not really a city. Aside from 3 blocks around the capitol, there's basically no density and you're driving a minimum of 10 minutes to get to anything worthwhile.
I grew up here, but I personally hate winter and can't wait to get out of this entire region.
I've only been up that way to see The House on the Rock. I can't stand the winters though, or Mayor Lightfoot's disastrous policies. I'm definitely moving down south.
