Today, MSNBC.com had an article about downsizing your life from a major metro metropolitan city to a mid-size city for a better quality of life.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29723949/

They contain only 20 percent of the U.S. population, but midsize metropolitan areas can be an appealing alternative to life in the big city….The study compared the 124 midsize metros in 20 statistical categories, using the latest U.S. Census Bureau data. The highest scores went to well-rounded places with healthy economies, light traffic, moderate costs of living, impressive housing stocks and strong educational systems.

These are the top 10 midsize metros in terms of quality of life:

1. Provo, Utah
2. Boulder, Colo.
3. Madison, Wis.
4. Bridgeport-Stamford, Conn.
5. Ann Arbor, Mich.
6. Ogden, Utah
7. Fort Collins, Colo.
8. Boise, Idaho
9. Colorado Springs, Colo.
10. Des Moines, Iowa

….Des Moines is a joy for commuters fed up with the hassles of big-city traffic. The typical Des Moines adult takes 19.7 minutes to get from home to his or her workplace, compared to more than half an hour in major metros such as New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Continuing with our series, Des Moines Picture of the Week, this week’s picture comes from Flickr user pictureIOWA and is a view from inside the EMC Building.

“Between downtown Des Moines and Adel, I’ve been getting a lot of use out of my camera. They’re awesome places, full of life. As for why I take photographs of Des Moines; it’s a beautiful city! Every time I go downtown, I always notice
something new; something different. I think it’s important for anyone with a camera to help others notice the beauty
of the buildings/places/things they may walk by every day and never really notice.”

Check out previous pictures in of our series, Des Moines Picture of the Week.

Would you like to submit a post or article for publication here on Living Downtown Des Moines.com? If you have a passion for living in downtown Des Moines or just experiencing the many things to do when visiting downtown, we’d love to hear from you. Sharing your own experiences with others can be very rewarding. William Shakespeare said it best, “What is the city but the people.”

So, the rules to be a guest blogger are really simple, a few article guidelines are listed below as well as the five-step process to getting your post published.

Article Guidelines

• Your post may be anywhere between 150 and 1500 words in length.
• Author bio should be no more than 50 words or 250 characters in length.
• Affiliate links to your own blog are encouraged.

Submission Process

1. Register for an account, if you don’t already have one or log in.
2. Write your post, you can write it in multiple sessions, saved as a draft.
3. Edit your post to your liking.
4. Submit your post for review when ready.
5. Your post is queued for review and for publishing.

We look forward to hearing from you and to sharing your experiences about Downtown Des Moines with our readers.

A couple of weeks ago we did a post on Downtown Graffiti, and we talk about graffiti, people tend to only think of graffiti as being necessarily illegal. While that may be the case much of the time, not all graffiti or sometimes referred to as guerilla art breaks the law.

Many urban artists manage to be creatively but legally subversive. Here are some engaging types and works of visual art that may prompt some thought or controversy, all without getting the artist in trouble.

I personally, would love to see more of this type of art downtown. I think it adds to the beauty and interest of downtown.

Yesterday, while reading some new forum posts at AbsoluteDSM.com, I came across a post where someone had found a link to an old video about the study of social life in small urban spaces. This got me thinking about some of the re-design work that is currently in the planning stages for Nollen Plaza.

What you will see below is a 10-minute clip of an hour-long video called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. The clip shows an analysis of the plaza of the Seagram Building in New York City and what makes it so effective as a small urban space.

The video was adapted from a book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte.

On September 17, 1969, a world-wide hoax was born in Des Moines. That was the first date that the legend was first published on the pages of the Drake University Times-Delphic. It was a feature article by Tim Harper, a professional journalist and it was titled “Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?”. It’s probably one of the longest-running hoaxes involving a music group, and the hoax still has a life today.

In 1969, Tim Harper was friends with his sports editor, Dart Brown. Dart was a music student at Drake University. Dart lived off-campus in a house that was inhabited by mostly music students. Sometimes rock musicians who might be passing through Des Moines would stay at the house. One night some rockers from the west coast boasted that they knew how to read the cover of “Sgt. Pepper” to prove that Paul was dead. Dart Brown told the details to Harper, who then prepared the article for the Times-Delphic. This was the first known publication of the clues that have since become famous.

Within weeks, other student newspapers jumped on board and published their own version of the clues. One of these articles was very similar to Tim Harper’s clues. It made its way into the studio at Detroit FM radio station WKNR, where a DJ found it. The DJ thought the article was crazy and read it on the air less than a month after Harper’s article was published. A student at University of Michigan as well as a writer for the Michigan Daily was listening to WKNR-FM that night. He thought it would be fun to submit a newspaper article based on the hoax he’d just heard. The student by the name of Fred Labour had his article published on October 14, 1969. It was exaggerated to say the least. He invented clues of his own and also invented a conspiracy involving a look-alike called William Campbell who replaced the dead Paul McCartney after McCartney’s death in 1966. The article added fuel to the flames of the hoax. Then the mainstream press came on board with articles in the New York Times and L.A. Times.

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Continuing with our series, Des Moines Picture of the Week, this week’s picture comes from Flickr user Peter Anderson and is of the the sign for American Plumbing Supply downtown. American Plumbing Supply is a family owned business in downtown Des Moines, Iowa that has supplied local homeowners with plumbing fixtures since the Depression era.

Peter says: “Having just made my first visit to Des Moines from Seattle, I have been impressed by the opportunities I have had to capture some of the unique, interesting, and beautiful components of this city and its surroundings.
Exploring Des Moines, and indeed Iowa in general, has been a pleasure. I look forward to returning for the State Fair
in August to see more of what Des Moines, IA has to offer.”

Check out previous pictures in of our series, Des Moines Picture of the Week.

With the economy in the shape that it is, more and more people are choosing renting over purchasing. In fact several condo projects proposed for downtown, turned into to rental projects this past year. So when I came across this site, I thought it would be good to take a closer look at it as a tool to help renters finding housing downtown.

MyApartmentMap is a national apartment search website with over 250,000 active apartment listings. The site has just released a new rental search tool that lets user calculate the exact rents for any location in the US, so I thought I would see what it looks like for Downtown Des Moines.

Studio	1 Bedroom
2 Bedroom	3 Bedroom

So how do they get this data? MyApartmentMap crawls most of the online classified sites to generate up to the minute real time data. It then uses Google Maps to display the rental costs of any location. The rental research tool makes finding affordable housing easier than ever. By plotting apartments on Google Maps and color coding by price, users can instantly see exactly where they can afford to rent.

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With the first ever tweet up held in a private residence, the #dmtweetup that was hosted by Tina Johnson (@geturban411) and Bob Berry (@metroflooring) at 418 Liberty Condos was a huge success. Lot’s of people, lot’s of fun, a little karaoke and lots of great pizza courtesy of Fong’s Pizza. Big thanks goes out to Rich at www.tweetupbadgets.com for the Tweet Up badges he supplied for those in attendance.

Also a big thanks to the other sponsors of the event, Brian Hoake at AT&T Jordan Creek, Splash Seafood, Jethro’s BBQ, Fleur Cinema, the Village Bean, Downtown Des Moines Neighborhood Association, 418 Liberty Condos, Nelson Construction, West End Salvage, Brenton Skating Plaza, RE/MAX Real Estate Concepts Skywalk Office and Living Downtown Des Moines blog.

I know there’s been some press and discussion last year about pedestrians being run over in the crosswalks, so it got me thinking. Our crosswalks do nothing to draw your attention to them. While the purpose of these crosswalks is to assist people wishing to cross a street, their utilitarianism hasn’t not stopped people in other cities from creative experimentation in the form of quite literal pedestrian street art. Something like this could definitely jazz up downtown after our long cold winter.

Here’s some ideas I found that other cities have implemented. Hey!, City of Des Moines, will you think about something like this, even if it’s only temporary during the Arts Festival?

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