Good cities where you can afford to live

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Glad to see my city on the list! Easily the top pick, though not the only one I voted for.

Also you don't want to live in Rochester, trust me. Unless you're highly skilled (and by that I mean have a medical license to work as a doctor or a boatload of specific IT certifications, not "have a college degree"), the only jobs you'll be able to get there is retail or restaurants. The economy of that place is unique in that it's incredibly skewed to certain highly skilled people, there's of course some jobs that have to exist everywhere that you can get there too, but also require specific qualifications (like accountants and teachers, etc.) If you're lucky you might be able to get something like a $15/hour simple data entry job for the Mayo Clinic or a law firm or something, but you can find those sort of jobs in any major city. No one ever moves there looking for a job, they only move there because they've already landed a job.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Also if you're going to include Ann Arbor, you might as well include Chicago too, since both are basically the same, expensive by the standards of the Midwest but NOTHING in comparison to the coastal cities people think of as expensive. Chicago is not in the same boat as NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, DC, Seattle, etc. Not by a long shot.

Charleston, SC on the other hand actually is pretty expensive and known as one of the most expensive cities in the south (along with Savannah, GA.)