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As a native Oregonian remembering all times driving through Albany ,rolling up the car windows and plugging my nose, I cannot imagine anyone wanting to live there!
It is home to one of the stinkiest paper mills on the planet!
Maybe that is why buying a nice old house there is easy .

Centrailia is one of the rainiest ,wettest ,muddiest places .
Pretty because of all the rain ,but it rains like a muther there!

Wow. Never thought I'd see my hometown mentioned on Apartment Therapy. Centralia is a beautiful little place, with loads of turn of the century homes. A great spot to have spent my formative years. Thanks for blogging it, Leslie.

And for the record: Centralia isn't any rainier than other places in Western Washington; it's simply located on a flood plain (for the most part).

I want to visit! :)

I'd question the suggestions on this list if I were you. I grew up in Reading, PA and it's nothing like their description. True, there is a beautiful historic district where you can cheaply buy a house, but "home to top-notch schools, four universities"? Not exactly. My high school had a gang problem (my locker was owned by the Latin Street Kings) and is probably going to be taken over by the state, and there's not a university to be found...unless you count the satellite campus of Penn State on the outskirts of town. Also, it's more like an hour and a half from Philadelphia, not the advertised 30 minutes. I do have pride in my hometown, but it's not the nice-to-live-in place that the website claims it to be.

millersburg, OR is the stinky place--adjacent albany is fine.

as former albany resident, the smell is mostly by the freeway, the historic district, by the river west of the stink.

I know that the homes are a little newer, but highland park IL is a suburb north of Chicago, and has a LOT of unremodeled architecturally significant Mid-Century Modern Homes. Mostly ranch style, but some other variations including split levels, the homes around there are really great.

A bedroom community to Dubuque?

And a historic split level ranch? This I gotta see...

Hit submit rather than preview.

One big problem with their list is that most of these places are cheap because their local economy sucks. A suburb of Detroit? Great for a cheap old house, bad for a job with a real wage. Flatbush is indeed a treasure trove of old houses, but it's not cheap (only by NYC standards).

Centralia has a really excellent old bowling alley that hadn't been remodeled in a lonnnnngg time. It's a real gem.