Why is the rural Midwest "easier" to live in than the rural/suburban South?

[memphis]

Problem is you don't know anything about the geography of Memphis. We have relatively few incorporated suburbs for a city our size, but the ones we have are (to varying degrees) mass affluent. This is particularly true for Germantown and Collierville, but Bartlett, Arlington, and Lakeland, for all their ticky tacky pointy house subdivisions, are still a helluva lot nicer than some desolate hellhole on the Plains. Your map in question only shows counties.Of the counties that border Shelby, only DeSoto, MS is predominantly suburban in population, and even there, it's still low density exurban and very new, with a strong underlying rural feel in much of the county. Fayette and Tipton, TN, Crittenden AR, and Marshall MS, remain authentically rural places, with the usual sorts of Dirty South rural problems.