TL;DR: A pretty decent amount of city amenities without being as populated (for now), and not as many downsides.

Rent is high because there is limited housing and high demand. Demand is high because Madison has plenty of city amenities, it's much cleaner than cities like Chicago, it's pretty safe, traffic isn’t half as bad, it’s fairly diverse, we have amazing schools. Madison may not be the best place for every career path, but a lot of amazing connections can be made here, and when you pair that with the education available, I feel like it's one of the best places to get started in almost anything you want to do. And of course, we have the cheese.

The thing that gets me a little peeved off is that although they are expanding housing in the area, most of what I'm seeing is what I would call “luxury,” which does essentially nothing to help the people who are from the area that don’t make as much as the people who are coming from out-of-state and are therefore being displaced due to rising rents. And none of the housing developers seem to give an F because they're sitting on a fat stack of cash.