Michael Scott

The show sent Michael to Colorado, because that is where Holly’s parents were and Holly’s parents needed her. This is the version where they retired to Georgia instead. It is also the only guide on this site where the man does not get the address he asked for and ends up better off for it.

Michael wants a high rise, a pool, a doorman who knows his name, and a young trendy neighborhood full of people who think he’s cool. Michael and Holly have $300,000 to $400,000 between them. This is going to be a journey for all of us.

Every other person on this site, you figure out what they want and match it to a place. Michael Scott is different, because what Michael says he wants and what Michael actually needs are two completely different guides, and the fun is that he has no idea. He’ll tell you he wants status, a luxury condo, a rooftop pool, the flashiest zip code he can drop into conversation. That’s the fantasy. What Michael actually needs, the thing under all of it, is to be adopted. To walk into a place and have people be happy he’s there. Get that wrong and no square footage on earth will make him happy.

Left to himself he buys the fantasy, and I’ll make that case properly below. He is not left to himself. He married the one person who ever saw the entire ridiculous package and wanted it, and she is the reason this guide ends somewhere he would never have driven to alone.

Who we’re working with

Let’s be clear eyed about the money, because the money is the whole comedy. Michael is a regional manager who is spectacularly bad with it. This is a man who got so deep in debt he took a second job as a telemarketer, then tried to solve it by standing up in the office and yelling “I declare bankruptcy.” He once bought a condo he couldn’t really afford, from a Realtor he then started dating, which may be the single most Michael sequence of events ever recorded. Put him in front of a mortgage and a sales agent who compliments his blazer and he will buy something he cannot pay for. Guaranteed.

So the $300,000 to $400,000 is real, it is the household number rather than his alone, and it is going to run face first into his taste, which is expensive and loud. He wants a high rise. He wants a pool and a gym. He wants young and trendy and walkable, comedy clubs and restaurants he can hold court in, and he has explicitly ruled out anything that smells like a boring suburb.

But hold onto the other thing, because it’s what actually matters. Michael’s deepest, most consistent want across the entire series was belonging, not status. He wanted a family so badly it ached, he treated coworkers who tolerated him like a family he chose, and his actual happy ending was Holly, the one person who loved his entire ridiculous self without asking him to tone it down. Whatever we pick for him has to be a place that will have him.

It has to have her parents too, because they are why the Scotts are in Georgia at all. Holly rearranges her life around the people she loves and doesn’t treat it as a sacrifice, so this move carries a requirement most of this site never has to think about: hospitals close by, transit her parents can actually use, and enough money left at the end of the month to absorb a bad year.

The match: Clarkston

Michael and Holly land in Clarkston, which is the widest gap on this entire site between what somebody asked for and what somebody got.

Start with the money, because for once it settles the argument instead of complicating it. Clarkston’s median runs around $309,000, inside their range rather than at the edge of it, and it buys a house instead of the smallest unit in a building with a good name. Every address either of them wanted sits above the number: Midtown condos around $450,000, Decatur around $705,000, Virginia-Highland starting around $500,000. Clarkston is the only one where the Scotts are buyers rather than applicants.

Now the part that makes it more than a budget answer. Clarkston is the most welcoming square mile in the state, a small city that spent thirty years taking in people from everywhere and built a town out of it. Walk a few blocks and you pass groceries and restaurants from six countries. Nothing corporate has ever happened here, and the vibes are the opposite of negative, which between them are Holly’s only two stated deal breakers, cleared in one stroke by the town’s whole reason for existing.

Then Michael, and this is the point. His guide says he needs density and calls density his love language, and both are true, but density was the symptom rather than the diagnosis. What Michael needs is a place small enough that a loud, needy, fundamentally kind man becomes a known quantity fast. Midtown would take years, because Midtown has a hundred thousand people and no obligation to notice him. Clarkston takes about a month. He will be at the same counter every morning. He will learn nine names badly and mispronounce all of them with enormous confidence. He will be invited to things. This is a town that adopts people for a living, and Michael Scott spent nine seasons auditioning for exactly that, so we are going to stop making him audition.

The practical layer holds too. Emory Decatur Hospital is a few miles west with Emory’s main campus just past it, which stops being an abstraction the first time somebody needs it at two in the morning. MARTA’s Indian Creek station sits at the edge of town, so nobody’s independence depends on being able to drive. And Decatur, the town Holly actually wanted, is a short drive west, which means she gets the square and the festivals and the farmers market on a Saturday without buying a $705,000 house to attend them.

Michael will tell people he lives just outside Decatur. Let him have it.

The ones that almost worked

Midtown. This is the Michael who never met Holly, and for that guy it’s a genuinely good answer. High rise towers along Peachtree, the best walkability in the metro, three MARTA stations, Piedmont Park, and the dense young energy that makes a mid forties man feel like he finally arrived. Every box on the fantasy checklist gets ticked. On his own he buys the smallest, oldest unit on a low floor, describes the shared amenity deck as “my pool,” and over several years wins over a corner bar one regular at a time. It works. It’s the slow expensive route to the thing Clarkston hands him in a month, and it costs $450,000 to take.

Buckhead. The status trap, and Michael would absolutely fall for it. Flashy brands, upscale everything, valet culture, the shiniest version of “I made it.” At the low end, around Lenox, he could squeeze a condo into the budget. The problem is the fit rather than the price. Buckhead is where Michael goes to impress people who are never going to adopt him. He’d spend a fortune he doesn’t have keeping up and stay lonely doing it. This is the wrong dream wearing the right dream’s clothes.

Stone Mountain. The budget runner up at around $284,000, diverse and unpretentious and cheaper still, and a perfectly good life. It loses on the one thing Michael cannot do without, which is walkable density. Spread him out and he withers. The extra $25,000 buys a town he can walk around in, and for this particular man that is the entire purchase.

The verdict

Michael lands in Clarkston, in a house he can actually afford, in the one town in metro Atlanta whose defining civic act is welcoming strangers, married to the woman who is the reason he stopped needing a tower to feel like somebody.

The truest thing about Michael Scott is this. He’ll tell you his guide was about the high rise and the address and the status, and back in season four he’d have meant it. Really it was always about a guy who wanted to belong somewhere. He moved across the country for Holly’s family without being asked twice, which is somehow the least Michael and the most Michael thing he ever did at the same time. Give him a small dense town that will have him, a walk to a counter where they know his order, and a Holly who thinks the whole act is wonderful, and Michael Scott is finally, genuinely home. He’ll get over the pool.

Next up is Dwight Schrute, who does not want a condo. Dwight wants land, and possibly a militia.