Our guest will be Mickey Meece, a veteran editor and writer for The New York Times, who blogs on consumer issues at Forbes.com. Meece, who also teaches college journalists, will take your questions.

We’ll also talk with some people who’ve been featured in our stories, and members of the Changing Gears team will join us.

So, are you thinking about how to pay for college? The kind of job you’d like to get? Are you dealing with mortgage issues, or rethinking your retirement? Stop by at 3 pm ET/2 pm CT. Meg Cramer, our Public Insight Analyst, will be hosting the chat.

Home prices are still dropping in Chicago/photo by Frank Gruber

Chicago and Cleveland.

Zillow, a real estate forecaster, says it doesn’t expect home prices in either of those two places to bottom out in 2012. That’s even though home prices nationally rose 0.5 percent, according to the Zillow Home Value Index.

Nationally, Zillow says home prices remain 25 percent below their levels in 2007. It doesn’t  expect much of an increase in prices nationally this year. You can read a Bloomberg story about the Zillow forecast here. 

Chicago and Cleveland are among 11 cities that are still seeing home prices fall. Others are San Francisco, Charlotte, Seattle and Atlanta. Places where home prices are rising include Phoenix and Miami, according to Zillow.

Home values are one of the things that are prompting people to adjust their expectations about the future. Read our Changing Gears Tumblr on Changing Expectations.

Join us at 3 pm ET/2 pm CT for “Hidden Assets,” a call-in show airing on WBEZ Chicago, Michigan Radio and ideastream Cleveland. We’ll also be holding a live chat here at ChangingGears.info.

WBEZ’s Steve Edwards will host with a variety of scheduled guests, including Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, and Changing Gears reporter Niala Boodhoo. The Changing Gears team will chat with you here during the show.

Former Detroiter Alex Ozark on the Hyundai-Kia proving grounds in California / Credit: Charla Bear

Many of us have friends or family members that have moved away from the Midwest.

In the Changing Gears special “Where Did Everybody Go?” we’re talking with some of those people who have moved out of the region – asking them why they left, what they found, and if they’ll ever come back.

We also take a look at what their departure means for the region.

You can listen to some of those stories here.

Part I: What’s So Great About Austin? Plenty, According To Former Midwesterners

Part II: The Appeal Of Portland

Part III: Detroit Coney Dogs On The Sunset Strip

Part IV: A Generation Moves Off The Farm

You can listen to the hour long Changing Gears special “Where Did Everybody Go” Sunday, 9 pm ET, on Michigan Radio; Monday, 10 am CT, on WBEZ Chicago; or Tuesday, 8 pm, on ideastream Cleveland.

Alex Ozark on the Hyundai-Kia proving grounds / Credit: Charla Bear

No city has been more affected by Midwestern out-migration than Detroit.

Based on the latest census numbers, the city is losing about 2 people every hour.

Changing Gears has been talking with some of those people who are leaving our region.

Alex Ozark grew up in Detroit. He always wanted to work in the auto industry, but he’s not doing it with the Big Three. He’s doing it in California.

Charla Bear brings us this report:

Alex Ozark drives like a maniac in his company’s cars, treating a black SUV like a cross between a tank and a sports car.

“So we’ll do, we’ll do a hot lap.”

He deliberately hits potholes, runs over lane dividers, and takes corners really fast. So fast, I have a death grip on the grab handle.

I’ve heard bad stories about SUVs and rollover. “When the tires are squealing, everything’s ok,” says Ozark.

I sort of trust him. I mean, it is his job to know these things. He’s a durability engineer for Hyundai and Kia. That means he tests out vehicles at the company’s proving grounds, a set of tracks in the California desert designed to simulate different driving conditions. That is, if you stay on them.

“The plus is, when you go off, no big deal,” says Ozark.

In fact, he’s clearly thrilled by it. The 25-year-old says he’s wanted to push cars to the limit ever since he was a kid in Metro Detroit.

Growing up in the shadow of the Big Three US automakers, it’s probably tough not to fall in love with cars. Ozark gave his heart to one in particular at an early age.

“The Dodge Viper. Classic child’s love car, right?”

Not that he cares if you agree. To him, this car was the ultimate machine. It was even his reason for going to the University of Detroit-Mercy. He enrolled in the in the fall of 2004.

“At that time, it seemed like, oh man, this is going to be great. In 2008, there are going to be so many engineering possibilities and jobs available. This is like, the perfect job,” he says.

Of course, that’s not how it turned out.

In 2007, General Motors reported nearly $39 billion in losses. By the time Alex graduated from college, GM and Chrysler were headed toward bankruptcy.

“It was always just growing in the back of my head – you know what, customers don’t want this. There’s no innovation. There’s nothing new. This isn’t good. I don’t like you anymore,” he says.

With his sights no longer set on the Big Three, he says he really had no reason to stay in Michigan. Almost everyone he grew up with was gone. His mom and stepdad had moved to Virginia, his best friend was in San Diego. He started thinking about looking for a job in California.

“The sun is always out – it’s the Golden State. And I thought, there’s no better place to go work,” says Ozark. He figured with the state’s focus on high-tech and the environment, he was bound to find an innovative company. He saw an opening in the development group at Hyundai Kia and jumped on it.

“And, when I went there, what I saw were vehicles coming down the line that were now 40 miles per gallon vehicles, hybrids and electrics down the line. I can’t fathom doing anything else.”

So, you might think when GM came out with the Volt, one of the most fuel efficient cars on the road, it would change his opinion of The Big Three. Maybe rekindle a little of that passion he used to have. It didn’t. “I can’t extrapolate the Volt to the whole company,” says Ozark. “It’s just such a niche little product that they have that they aren’t even selling that much of.” Alex doesn’t buy that The Big Three have changed.

Chris Perry is vice president of marketing for GM’s Chevy line. The company brought him in a year and a half ago to help improve its image. He says his job would have been much harder before the automaker went belly up.

“If you look back on the history of our products, there were some pretty unspectacular products. That’s just the reality,” says Perry. He points to the Aveo and Cobalt, two compact cars the company no longer makes.

“We have to start with ‘What does the customer want out of this segment?’ and build a car that meets that [sic] criteria.”

GM’s market share is at a 90-year low, but it turned a record profit last year and it’s drawing budding engineers who are eager to help the company move in a new direction.

Scott Lenanna is a test engineer for abuse and safety testing of batteries at GM.

Lenanna has a lot in common with Ozark. He is 20-something, into cars, and he moved from home to find work. The only difference is that he is a California boy who came to Detroit.

“I’ll move to wherever the innovation and excitement is,” he says, but he never imagined that would be in Detroit, or at a US automaker. He always pictured himself at a Silicon Valley startup. But now that GM is into hybrid and electric cars, he sees things differently.

Scott Lananna / Credit: Charla Bear

“I don’t think batteries are perfect right now, but us putting the Volt out into the market is pushing battery companies to innovate. So, not only are we innovating, we’re pushing other people to innovate.”

He says Detroit could use more young engineers with their “heads in the clouds” to help car companies think in new ways.

So does any of this convince Alex Ozark? Would he consider moving back?

“No. This world is pretty vast. It doesn’t make sense to go back to where I started,” he says. Not even if the Big Three produced the most amazing, innovative cars out there. Not even if they paid him a fortune. He says California is too much fun. He gets to ride a motorcycle, snowboard on real mountains, and skateboard by the beach. Most of all, he says just being there makes him a happier person.

“It seems like the dreariness and grayness of the skies in Michigan, it always had me depressed. As soon as I came out here and it was sunny – instant change,” he says.

Yet, no matter how much he says he’s done with Detroit, there are some ties he can’t sever.

On the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, Ozark introduces me to one of his favorite places in all of L.A., Coney Dog, a Detroit-style hot dog joint. He lights up as we make our way to a booth, past black and white photos of the city, hockey figurines and a waitress whose shirt says Detroit Grrrrl.

“It’s instantly comforting. The whole atmosphere. The diner feel. The Coney Dog availability,” says Ozark.  And the Coney Dogs are the real deal, flown in from the Motor City and complete with Greek-style wet chili. The burgers are loose – no overly pressed patties here. Alex Ozark orders one of each.

Alex Ozark at Coney Dog LA / Credit: Charla Bear

“It tastes exactly like this place Comet Burger in Royal Oak. It’s perfect.”

So good, it’s worth the three-hour round trip – even if he’s by himself. But when he’s here, he’s never really alone. This place is a hub for displaced Michiganders, and he says they share a camaraderie that instantly makes him feel at home.

North Country Public Radio’s Brian Mann tracked the journey of one woman who moved from a tiny town to New York City. He brings us this report:

Mark Scarlett and his daughter, Becca Johnson, on their farm in Rossie, NY.

It’s hard to imagine just how small Becca Johnson’s hometown is. Her parents moved to Rossie, in upstate New York, in the 1970s, part of the farming and manufacturing belt that stretched from the Northeast to the Midwest.

Their family homesteaded in an old abandoned barn.

“No running water and no toilet, or anything like that,” says Johnson. She was practically a teenager before her family got indoor plumbing. “It had an interesting influence on my social life,” she says.

While most American kids were waking up to MTV, Becca’s family didn’t have a TV – or even a telephone.

Rossie is tucked away in a fold of rocky hills, surrounded by a chain of beautiful lakes. When her family settled there, the place was already fading. The mines were long gone, factories and farms and cheese plants were closing, and Rossie’s once bustling little downtown has mostly gone dark.

Mark Scarlett is Becca Johnson’s father. He’s in his sixties now and he loves Rossie. “The population of Rossie is about what it was in 1850 or 1860,” he says, laughing.

He talks about the land, the geology, and the local history in the way a city guy might talk about his favorite deli or his favorite baseball team.

Scarlett worked a number of different jobs to make a living, everything from construction to farming. He keeps a team of oxen that he uses for logging and for sugaring maple trees.

You might be thinking that Johnson and her parents are a quaint sort of Little House on the Prairie throwback, but here’s the interesting thing: When the Scarletts moved to Rossie in the 1970s – one third of Americans still lived in rural areas. These days, only one in five families lives in a rural community.

In states like Illinois, the change is even starker, with the urban population swelling to almost 90%. A big part of the reason is the rural to urban migration of young people like Johnson.

“I definitely wanted to go away,” she says. “I mean part of that was I just was like, there’s got to be other places in the world to see.”

Johnson is part of a historic migration, a century-long shift away from small towns. That shift is redefining the nation’s economy and culture.

This transformation is such a powerful part of the American experience that it’s actually inspired a sort of genre of music – pop songs and country and western ballads about leaving small towns and heading to the big city. This is the journey that has reshaped Becca Johnson’s life.

She now lives in the Hudson valley, north of New York City. She commutes o to work in Manhattan, trading her village of 800 people for a city of 9 million.

Johnson has made a great career for herself, working as a researcher and consultant for medical and insurance companies, but these days, people who study small towns are finding that a lot of young people are choosing an urban life not just because of better jobs and careers – but because this is the life experience they want: cosmopolitan, fast-paced.

I remember one of the first days on the job, you were just hearing different languages. Tons of languages going on in the office, which is cool – I love it,” Johnson says.

One big transition that Johnson and a lot of rural people navigate is the move from a mostly white community to an America that is far more multi-racial and multi-cultural. This is especially true in the Midwest and Northeast, where small towns have seen almost none of the racial diversity that is transforming the larger culture.

While at college, Johnson met and married a black man. Her husband, Mark Johnson, was leery at first about traveling north to Becca’s tiny town to meet her parents.

“He insisted that I tell my parents that he was black. And I was like this is going to be really awkward,” she says.

The two families met and meshed really well – though Becca says the lack of diversity in her home town is one of the reasons she thinks it would be hard to move back there with Mark and their two kids.

Mark and Becca Johnson

Becca Johnson is ambivalent about parts of her rural-urban journey. When we go for a walk with her kids, Ezzie and Maya, she admits that she feels that she’s betrayed something – or lost something – by choosing a more urban life. Some of the small-town values she grew up with have slipped away.

“I always think, we could have a garden, or I’d love to have a garden – instead I spend a whole lot of money shopping organically,” she says.

But Becca’s kids, Ezzie and Maya, don’t feel any of that regret. To them, even this bedroom town where they live feels isolated, and Rossie? They can’t even imagine that life.

People who study rural America say there are some hopeful signs for places like Rossie. The small farm movement is drawing some young people back. More rural workers are telecommuting and in some parts of the Midwest, Hispanic immigrants are reviving farms and businesses.

But the reinvention of America as a country where the culture and the economy are mostly rooted in cities – that’s probably irreversible.

These days, when Becca Johnson goes home to visit, she says she worries that important things are being lost as rural America fades – connectedness, self-reliance, a less frantic way of life.

Johnson’s mom, Louise says, “Unless they found some kind of really meaningful work here, I didn’t expect them to stay here.”

Both of her kids and all of their friends from school have moved away. She says she’s proud of them and their careers, but as her generation hits retirement age, she worries about Rossie and the community she and her husband tried to revitalize.

“I don’t know who the younger people who will carry it on. So yeah, it’s definitely not a good thing for the community,” she says.

This story was informed by the Public Insight Network. If you want to learn how to be a part of our network, click here.

The Brookings Institution reports that 20-somethings fled Detroit and Chicago at the end of the last decade for places like Seattle and Portland. Cities they thought were cool. “Cool” has become a selling point for young professionals. And perhaps no city has it figured out better than Austin, Texas. Over the next few days Changing Gears will profile people who have left the Midwest, and that’s where we go next – to the home of music festivals known around the world.

John Livingston at the Pour House in Austin, Texas / Credit: Peter O'Dowd

John Livingston and his friends say Austin has a soul, and on a gorgeous Friday night in March you can see why.

Livingston is a lot like any other 24-year old. He and his friends still like to party, and on this night, they’re doing it on the north side of town.

Not long ago, Livingston and four others moved to Austin from Bloomington, Indiana.

It was January 2010. College was coming to an end. The friends were drinking at their favorite hang-out, and wondering what to do next in life. It was pretty clear that Bloomington – a city of 80,000 and home to Indiana University – didn’t have what they wanted.

“We just started thinking of places to go – something different, something new. By the end of the night we were all just chanting Austin. We wanted to go to Austin. We were all about Austin,” says Livingston.

A lot of people these days are all about Austin and its reputation for constant cultural festivity. The city is home to Austin City Limits and South By Southwest. If you’re even remotely into music, you already knew that. So Livingston and his buddies stumbled home that night with visions of central Texas in mind.

“The next morning we woke up and really started thinking about it and the logistics and it was a good idea. It still is a good idea,” says Livingston.

They had no jobs lined up and the economy was still lousy, but they found the cost of living in Austin was comparable to Bloomington. And it didn’t actually take very long for Livingston to find a job in tech support for a video game company called Blizzard Entertainment. His buddy, Travis Carrico, got the same gig.

“Those types of jobs don’t exist in Indiana,” says Carrico. But they do here, and that’s just the type of work Carrico wanted.

It’s a pretty classic story: A few ambitious kids move to Austin and love it. So what’s the deal with this city?

Ryan Robinson is the city of Austin’s demographer. “How can you engineers and manufacture that?” he asks. “At the heart of our success is the fact we attract more highly skilled college educated individuals than any other city in the country. It’s our golden goose.”

Golden is a good word for it. The last Census showed half a million people moved here in the past decade. That growth spawned jobs in retail, healthcare, real estate and technology. Austin’s job growth over the past year ranked third in the country. The city’s unemployment rate is about 6 percent. Robinson says 60 percent of its population growth came from Latinos, another 25 percent from Asians.

“Cities that are not diversifying are not growing, but it goes way beyond that,” Robinson says. “Socio-economic diversification, cultural diversification, lifestyle diversification. Simply put, we are a far less homogenous place today than we were 30-40 years ago.”

Robinson says Austin’s diversity and vibrancy emerged over time. The University of Texas is here, and had a lot to do with the burgeoning culture. But Robinson says Austin’s boom has led to a worrisome socio-economic divide – an underclass of under-educated, minority workers. He says it threatens to stall the city’s rise if not tended to.

What can you possibly say to a city that’s losing its educated, young creative class about what you’ve been able to do here? Robinson’s not sure what to tell them.

“It’s all organic,” he says. “It’s the gifts that history gives you. There’s only so much you can do to make that magic happen.”

Sometimes it can feel like everyone loves Austin’s magic. After spending some time here, it gets kind of weird when the only complaint most people have is about the terrible, terrible, terrible traffic. In some ways, it’s the most tangible sign that Austin hasn’t been able to keep up with its growth.

Matt Sadler is a comedian who grew up in a military family. He has lived everywhere, but settled in Austin and loves it. He’s proud of the city, but he can throw a stone or two. “Driving in Austin, Texas, is an effing nightmare,” Sadler says. “Would I give another city advice about how to be more like Austin? I’m not sure I would. Austin doesn’t necessarily have it figured out.”

As with most things, what’s charming and quirky can quickly become tiresome. Before I came to Austin I cast a poll on Facebook to see what my network of 20- and 30- somethings knew about the city. People had mostly good things to say, but I did find one person who complained that Austin is obsessed with being cool.

The city is full of hipsters drinking old-school beers and liberals protesting every injustice. Criticizing Austin’s vibe is definitely not cool. I asked Matt Sadler about this.

“Ask anyone who has been here 10 years, and they’ll tell you how cool it was 10 years ago, ask someone who lived here 20 years and they’ll tell you how much cooler it was 20 years ago. With the population boom we’ve got a lot of douchebags. We’re douchebag heavy right now,” he says.

Long-time residents of any growing city tend to be skeptical of newcomers. The gang from Bloomington appreciates the energy of this place. John Livingston says Austin is just more interesting than Indiana.

“This is the place where the fun is. This is where things are changing. This is where people are coming up with new ideas and growing those and everything,” he says.

When you’re young, change is what you want. Forward momentum and good music. At Travis Carrico’s apartment we listened to an Australian band called Tame Impala. Carrirco saw them live when they came to Austin.

“That’s what I expected when we moved down here – to see a show that probably wouldn’t be playing back home. I was really impressed with them,” Carrico says.

It hasn’t been all good. Carrico recently lost his job at Blizzard Entertainment, proof that Austin isn’t totally immune to recession. But he has no plans to come home to look for work.

Carrico didn’t finish college, but he is confident that he is better off looking for work in Austin than Indiana.

“I’ve never wanted to work a factory job…I don’t know if I was afraid of that, or if i wanted to distance myself from it, because that’s all I knew of manufacturing industry – the image today of the Rust Belt, these empty factories turning to rust, just rusting away,” he says.

Instead he’ll stake his future to this quirky, rhythmic city a thousand miles from home.

This story was informed by the Public Insight Network. If you want to learn how to be a part of our network, click here.

Beginning this weekend, tune in for Changing Gears’ hour-long documentary, “Where Did Everybody Go?”

Hosted by Richard Steele of WBEZ Chicago, “Where Did Everybody Go” tells the stories of people who left the Midwest, and some who came home.

We’ll visit Portland, Austin, New York City, upstate New York and Los Angeles. We’ll talk with Jim Russell, a geographer who writes the Burgh Diaspora blog, and Dan Moilanen, a Flint, Mich., native who went to Austin to work for Apple, and came back to help his hometown.

Changing Gears senior editor Micki Maynard will also be part of the special, which was produced by award-winning journalist Kate Concannon. The special is informed by the Public Insight Network.

“Where Did Everybody Go” airs at these dates and times:

• Sunday, 9 pm ET, on Michigan Radio
• Monday, 10 am CT, on WBEZ Chicago
• Tuesday, 8 pm, ideastream Cleveland

Or you can come back here to listen to the show. Be sure to join us, for “Where Did Everybody Go?”

Carla Danley / Credit: Chris Lehman

If you wanted to start life over in a new place, would you choose somewhere with a chronically high unemployment rate and struggling schools, or one that’s known as a haven for slackers? The latter is one way to describe Portland, Oregon.

It seems like everyone is talking about Portland these days. Part of that has to do with the success of Portlandia, a sketch comedy show that pokes fun at Portland’s young hipster crowd. As one character explains, “Portland is a city where young people go to retire.”

But not everyone who moves to Portland is a twenty-something slacker. The city still draws out-of-state transplants, including highly educated professionals.

More than half of all Oregon residents were born somewhere else. As part of our Changing Gears project, reporter Chris Lehman introduces us to two families who moved to Portland from the Midwest.

Lehman met up with Marie Montalbano and Ted Layman. Layman is a social worker and Montalbano teaches special education students in the Portland Public School district.

Before they were married, Layman was living in small town Athens, Ohio. Montalbano was living in Chicago. Montalbano thought Athens was too small. For Layman, Chicago was, “A great place to visit and enjoy, but the noise, the congestion of people,” was too overwhelming.

“So we knew we would have to find a place that was a good compromise and a good fit,” says Montalbano.

That place was Portland, with big city amenities and a small-town vibe. The emphasis on local food, the mild winters, and the proximity to mountains and the ocean appealed to them.

Layman says they didn’t necessarily see all that when they first visited Portland, but, “We did see a woman with her turtle on a leash walking it across the street. And that definitely had this like, oh my god, this is so Portland.”

But unconventional pet care wasn’t the deciding factor. For that, we turn to Forest. He’s Layman’s 15-year-old son and in the end, it was Forest who played a key role in getting the family to move to Portland.

Forest Spiritdancer, Ted Layman, and Marie Montalbano / Credit: Chris Lehman

Forest takes his education seriously.

“I have very strong ideals about how children and kids and students should be equally respected and given more broad aspects in like learning and being able to pursue their own interests,” he says.

He figured the local public school system back in Athens, Ohio wasn’t going to cut the mustard. So he launched a nationwide search for the perfect high school. Two of his top choices were in Portland.

He carefully crafted an application essay. It was good enough to land a spot in the exclusive Metropolitan Learning Center. It’s a public school, but Forest says in a lot of ways it doesn’t feel like one.

“It’s totally different from my old middle school,” he says.

For example, he’s on a first-name basis with his teachers. He says classes rarely follow a textbook, leaving plenty of breathing room for student creativity. Forest likes to get to school early to hang out with friends and catch up on schoolwork before classes begin. He says the Metropolitan Learning Center is turning out to be just the kind of student-oriented education he was looking for.

Detroit native Carla Danley was also looking for something new. “I think a lot of times when you think about people leaving the Midwest to go to other parts, it might be a story about job opportunities or an improved economy elsewhere,” she says. But Danley was looking for a nicer place to live.

She wouldn’t have found economic opportunity in Portland anyway. Repeated statewide budget cuts have shuttered schools. The unemployment rate has been above the national average since the mid-90′s.

But Danley already knew how bad Oregon’s economy was. She figured – correctly – that her skills as a nurse would land her a job anyway.

“I really embrace the beauty of the wilderness of Oregon. And I think that’s very different from places I’ve lived in the Midwest,” says Danley.

Danley also likes to get around without a car and she figured Portland’s bicycle-friendly reputation would suit her just fine. It did. Carla’s not here alone. She met her husband back east, and for a while they lived together in Detroit, where she grew up.

“Then I said to my husband, thank you so much for coming to Michigan and not divorcing me, because Michigan is sort of an acquired taste,” she says. “You love it if you’re from there, and not so much if you’re not.”

Her husband uses a wheelchair, and it was important for both of them to have easy access to public transportation. Their new neighborhood has light rail and frequent bus service.

But Danley says despite the good public transit, natural beauty, and abundant cultural offerings, there is something the city lacks.

“As a black person, life is a little tougher in Portland than it is east of the Mississippi. There isn’t really a sort of rich, diverse black community in a way that I’m accustomed to,” says Danley.

Just 6 percent of Portland residents are African-American, compared to 83 percent in Detroit. And Danley is not the only one to notice the homogenous nature of her adopted city.

Jack Ohman is a nationally syndicated political cartoonist with the Oregonian newspaper in Portland. He’s also a Midwest native. “Portland is still not a diverse town, unless you count different shapes of beards as diversity,” he says.

Ohman agrees with Carla Danley on this: What the city lacks in diversity it makes up for in natural beauty. Ohman remembers when he flew out to Oregon for his job interview.

“I had never seen the Pacific Ocean. And it was the most beautiful day in the history of the Pacific Northwest. And once you see that, you’re not going back. You’re not gonna go back to Detroit. You’re not gonna go back to Columbus. You’re not going back to Minneapolis,” he says.

But the mid-90′s is when something else started to happen, especially in Portland.

Ohman explains that, “all of sudden it was just this renaissance, where it was just the coolest place in the world to live. And I had not really experienced that before. Living in the Midwest, it was never the coolest place in the world to live.”

Ohman says it’s around that time that Portland started to feel like Portlandia.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the political culture here has established this kind of ‘Amsterdam without drugs’ vibe to Portland,” he says.

Ohman says that Portlanders bear little resemblance to the characters in the television series. You know…the ones who ask to see the pedigree of the chicken they’re ordering for dinner.

But most Portlanders have embraced their city’s namesake television series. It’s one of the many things that helps set their city apart. And after decades of embracing quirkiness and livability, Portland continues to be a magnet for people looking to make a change.

This story was informed by the Public Insight Network. If you want to learn how to be a part of our network, click here.

You can read more stories about the Midwest Migration at http://midwestmigration.tumblr.com

Credit: Flikr user 401k

Over the next two weeks, Changing Gears will be sharing stories about how people are planning ahead in a tough economy, and how their expectations have changed in light of the recession.

You can read some of the stories about changing expectations on our tumblr page: http://chgears.tumblr.com.

You can also tell us about your own experiences. How are you planning for what comes next? Are you coming up on a milestone like retirement, marriage, or a new career? How have your plans changed since the start of the recession? Follow this link to share your story.