I prefer small town life. The hustle bustle of large cities just has little appeal to me. As far as housing, I doubt anywhere is much cheaper than in a small town. As an example, we bought a 3 br 2 bath 12 year old house for under $70k. Gasoline is usually amoung the cheapest in the country. Traffic is never bad, 10 minutes to anywhere in town (50,000 people).
We have an airport with limited daily flights to Dallas and St. Louis.
If a person likes hunting, fishing and shooting sports, this is a pretty good place to live.
I don't know how much snow we average, but it is very minimal. I don't think we had more than 1" this winter. It's not perfect here, but it looks pretty damn good when seeing what other places deal with.