I moved my family from Dallas to a small city in Missouri. I miss the diversity of food in Texas, but the cost of living is much cheaper here.

• Josh Hartman and his family moved from Texas to Missouri in 2021 when he started a new job.
• He said he missed the easy access to amenities that Dallas offered.
• But Hartman and his wife are happier with their kids’ education in Missouri.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Josh Hartman, a 42-year-old operations manager who moved with his family from Dallas to Sikeston, Missouri, in 2022.

I moved around a lot as a kid, but I spent four years in Missouri and graduated from high school there, so I consider myself to be from the Midwest.

My wife is from Kansas. We’ve been married almost 20 years. We have three kids ages 14, 12, and 10.

We spent about 10 years in Minnesota after we graduated. We weren’t big fans of Minnesota.

A career change brought us to Texas in 2015

We lived in a suburb of a suburb of Dallas, on the very outskirts of the DFW area. We were there for about eight years.

We owned a home in a bedroom community. It was one of the fastest-growing areas in the state.

We liked Texas. It had a southern feel to it. There were lots of good people in that area. We appreciated that.

Dallas gives you access to everything. It’s huge. From every kind of sports team to every fair, Dallas has everything you could ever need. There was an Amazon facility at our nearest exit, so if we ordered something at 7 a.m., sometimes it would be to us within five hours.

There were lots of benefits to living there.

But Dallas is so congested. So many people are moving in, and it’s just neighborhoods on top of each other. We moved there, too, so we were part of the problem.

These communities are quadrupling in size, but their services aren’t growing at the same rate. A lot of the roads would be just two lanes and it’d be backed up six miles.

I don’t know that I would want my kids driving there for their first four or five years while learning how to drive.

Our kids went to schools in modular units out back of the building. The area couldn’t build schools fast enough with how many people were moving, so they used modular units for some classes.

Drop-off and pick-up were like a death match for moms. There were times you were over a mile away from school because there was only one road. It would be an hour later, and you still wouldn’t have your kids.

The cost of living also skyrocketed while we were living there. I think it did across a lot of the country, but especially in Dallas.

We had talked about maybe staying in Texas but moving to somewhere a bit more rural.

But I got a job offer, and that was really the primary motivation for our move to Missouri. My wife has family in Missouri, so that helped.

We moved to Sikeston, Missouri, in 2022

We moved primarily for work, but the location played a big part, too. It was a good job opportunity for me, but I wouldn’t have done it if it was in a different location.

We all reacted to the move a little differently. I was good. I could move every two years and probably be OK. That’s just my personality. I’ll make new friends wherever.

Our biggest concern was around our kids. Even though we felt that the move would potentially provide a better schooling experience for them, we were worried. They were in third, fifth, and seventh grade when we moved. Those are rough ages to move kids with friends.

When we came and visited before we made the decision, we met with some people in the city, and they were beyond thrilled to get a new manufacturer. It made us excited.

Sikeston is in the bootheel of Missouri, down in the corner. It’s all farmed through real rich agriculture. We’re surrounded by cotton fields and corn fields.

It’s a city of 16,000 something, so it’s not huge. But there are a lot of smaller communities around. We’re kind of the big town around here.

We lived in Minnesota, where it was winter nine months out of the year. Then we moved to Texas, and it was summer nine months out of the year. We moved here, and we finally got four seasons. We love that.

The pace of life here is a lot slower

Housing costs and the cost of living in general are substantially lower here. We were able to upsize our home when we moved to Missouri. We got a pool.

It’s freed up enough expendable income that we’ve been able to take more family trips. Nashville is a little over three hours from us. Louisville, Kentucky, is four. St. Louis, Memphis, Springfield, Missouri. We’ve done a lot of day trip visits to different cities. We’ve taken some bigger vacations too.

We’re definitely happier with the schooling here. We like our kids’ class sizes and that they aren’t in modular units. We like the teachers and administrators. They’re in an environment that helps them thrive.

I’d estimate that 95% of the people I come in contact with were born and raised here. Everyone’s known each other their whole life, and they don’t know you. Overall, they’re really welcoming, but it can still be a bit of a challenge.

But my kids have made good connections here through sports. We found a good church. My wife has made a lot of friends there.

I miss the diversity of food in Texas. I like Thai food. And I miss the access that Dallas has. A good car wash seems like a small amenity, but all of them here are either the kind where you have to get out and spray it yourself or where you park, and someone comes and washes it. Those sorts of things.

We don’t have any plans to move in the near future. We wouldn’t want to move again until the kids are out of school.

But who knows, we may end up living here for the rest of our lives.