Midland/Odessa already has 300,000 people in the city limits of both cities, so if you want to know why you shouldn't move to Midland/Odessa, here they are.

Kevin Chase
Kevin Chase
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1. Rent is way too high. - Rent costs for a one-bedroom are averaging over $500/mo in most apartments and mostly around $1000/mo since most of the apartments have been built in the past 10 years. This is good because before the boom 10 years ago, the newest apartment complex was built in 1984.

Getty Images/ThinkStock
Getty Images/ThinkStock
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2. Gas prices are the highest in the state. - Even though we are the place that produces an enormous amount of oil for the nation, we are the ones paying the highest prices for it (not counting California of course). Right now the average price for gas is hovering a little over $3.00 a gallon.

Photo by Dillon Kydd on Unsplash
Photo by Dillon Kydd on Unsplash
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3. Prices of houses in the area. - The average price of a house in Midland/Odessa is running right around $265,000 which is higher than the state average of $240,000 but not as bad as the national average of $287,000.

NewsWest 9
NewsWest 9
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4. Traffic in a place that has never seen traffic before. - Traffic is a big deal here in Midland/Odessa since it has just shown up over the past 10 years. Before that, there was not enough traffic to even call it traffic which led to the state not preparing for a rush of traffic coming to the area and not preparing the highways like they needed to be. Now they are trying to play catch up as lines of cars flow over into the main lanes of traffic on I-20 and cause a hazard. So now on top of traffic we were not built for, we have construction to accommodate the influx of traffic we now have.

 

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LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

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