It's not like that everywhere. Yeah if your city is imploding, you're going to struggle to find any job, which is of course one reason why the city is declining and wages are stagnating. But $50k in Boulder isn't $50k in Flint or Gary, so comparing salaries like that is kind of ridiculous.

More than half a decade ago I was hired out of an internship at a fairly average company doing fairly average work in a mid-sized Midwestern city making $51k/yr. I was 23 and the internship was the only IT experience I had.

So take an anecdote as an anecdote... it's not always true across the board.

I understand the sentiment you're going for, but Gary has a commuter train that goes to downtown Chicago in less than an hour. With free (working) wifi. I've known some guys that have worked in high paying IT jobs in Chicago while renting a house on the beach in the part of Gary that is surrounded by National Park Service land (Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore). Rent and a monthly train pass was around $500 per person. They rarely locked their doors and one of the guys got his car broken into once in the 3 years they did it, which would probably be considered decent in SF. Their typical weekend involved dragging a cooler full of beer and a volleyball net onto the sand.

You can still get a good software engineer salary in the midwest. In Indy we have at least 4-5 places that will pay you 140k+, the place I'm at will pay 180k for someone that has proven their worth. That is a lot of money in Indiana.