Louisville is an OK larger sized lower Midwestern metro area. One will find the same concerns in a lot of older, established metro areas of 500K people or more. It seems that most established metro areas follow this blueprint: Downtown and specific neighborhoods have been revitalized in the last 10-20 years. A lot of younger folks have moved in to these areas. Lower income areas have thus spread out further from their old locations. A lot of older apartment complexes end up taking low income vouchers with some complexes getting into trouble for "slum lord" type management. Crime is highly associated with poverty, so crime rates in these areas usually see an uptick. Suburbs are still popular for public schools and standard retail, food, and entertainment amenities. The suburbs are usually broken up into a couple of wealthy enclaves, followed by some more upper income areas, and then some mix of upper and middle income areas. Some suburban areas may have some cheaper housing as well as some low income apartment complexes and thus see crime and poverty issues they never had to deal with until recently.
The region overall is nice. I like large river cities. Both Louisville and Cincinnati have done some great things with their river front areas. Louisville has a winter, but it is more moderate than the winter weather we get up here in the Indianapolis / Central Indiana area.
The only downside of Louisville might be that it is a smaller larger city. The metro area only has around 1.6M people. Cincinnati, Columbus, St. Louis, and Indianapolis all have over 2M. City size is now really affecting airport flight offerings, business decisions, specialized medical availability, etc..
