Our team has been selling Real Estate in Grand Rapids and the West Michigan area for over 20 years and needless to say, we love living in Grand Rapids! As we work to kick off our new series all about Living in Grand Rapids, we had to start by sharing some of the reasons we love this city!  

Six Reasons To Love Grand Rapids

Grand Rapids has Four Distinct Seasons

The summers in West Michigan are absolutely perfect. You have incredible temperatures, beautiful scenery, and a ton of water, and it’s just a great place to be in the summer. You have incredible fall seasons with that crisp fall air that I absolutely love, so many options for apple orchards, and some great hiking. Then you have the winter months for those that love the great outdoors for skiing, hiking, snowmobiling, you name it. And of course, we have spring. Everybody is happy here in West Michigan when the spring hits. The sun comes out and we know that summer is just around the corner. 

The Grand Rapids Art Scene

This community is highlighted by some incredible museums spread out through the downtown area. We have the Grand Rapids Art Museum, the Grand Rapids Public Museum, the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum, and Frederick Meijer Gardens up on the Northeast side. We’re going to take a deeper dive into all of these museums at a later date, but the Grand Rapids art scene is amazing and the highlight for many years has been Art Prize. Art Prize is an event that has been happening (mostly) annually. This two-week event brings thousands and thousands of artists from around the world into Grand Rapids to showcase their art and compete. This event brings hundreds of thousands of people to downtown Grand Rapids to support local businesses and the economy. 

The Restaurant and Brewery Scene 

Grand Rapids is known as Beer City, USA. Every single year, we compete to be known as the beer city. And it’s a fantastic thing because we’ve got tons and tons of breweries in the area, which of course we’ll be highlighting later. But some of the big ones are Founders, New Holland Brewery, and Brewery Vivant. Needless to say, the brewery and distillery scene in Grand Rapids is absolutely amazing. 

This city has made a huge push at some amazing authentic food over the years. I can think about all the great places as far as the Wealthy Street corridor, some amazing places downtown, and Bridge Street on the northwest side, which again, we’ll talk about later is making a huge push on the restaurant scene. And over the years, we’ve had some amazing farm-to-table experiences pop up for everybody to enjoy that comes to this city. We have some incredible restaurants that are utilizing local farmers and bringing you the freshest food in the city.

Grand Rapids is One of America’s Greenest Cities

This city has made extensive pushes over the years at reducing its carbon footprint and you can see that all over the city. For example, our bus system uses hybrid buses and we were the first city in America to have our buses with green roofs on top.

Another cool thing about Grand Rapids is that we have more LEED-certified buildings and so many firsts in the world with some of the museums and businesses that have become LEED certified. 

Low Cost of Living & Affordable Housing

Grand Rapids as a whole rank below the national average in things like housing, healthcare, and miscellaneous things like shopping, dining, groceries, and others. You get all of the great benefits of living in a city but without all of the added costs so of course, another reason why we love Grand Rapids is the low cost of living here.

A Great Place to Start a Career

This city has some very longstanding employers, which include Spectrum Health, Meijer, Steelcase, Amway, and so many other opportunities for people to get involved in a career in this community. With all of the college students in the area and the low cost of living, this makes Grand Rapids a great place for them to stay after college and build their careers.

What reasons do you love Grand Rapids? Definitely leave a comment below!