There's loads of cool stuff in New Hampshire and the environs. If Peekskill is in serious contention, then there is good reason to check out New Hampshire, which is significantly better along most axes. I'd recommend that you physically send people to look around for a couple of weeks.
I will second the claim that being more than an hour from a city means most people will not casually go there.
I'd love to make a strong pitch for New Hampshire. There are a ton of people who are ideologically aligned with MIRI in the state. Taxes are low — there's no income tax or sales tax, and the state is actually lowering what business taxes exist. Cost of living is very modest. Boston is a relatively doable drive, providing access to a major international airport and a number of well known universities, and Dartmouth is in state. The state has a low intervention, libertarianish political ethos, and people are quite tolerant. The populace is also reasonably we...
I've taken the Edwards class; I can testify that the results were more or less as dramatic as what you see above. (One reason I took the class was that I thought that I was somehow mentally deficient in that I couldn't draw at all. Once I took the class and realized it was mostly about a very specific learnable skill that I had lacked, my desire to learn how to draw faded. BTW, similar skills are taught in Kimon Nicolaides' "The Natural Way to Draw".)
I think you will find that most of the more livable places to live in the United States require a car. The places that truly do not require a car are quite expensive to live in comfortably and often have other drawbacks as well.