You might consider Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC area. I'm in the Bay Area now, but I enjoyed living in "The Triangle" as they call it. Cost of living is gre

You might consider Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC area. I'm in the Bay Area now, but I enjoyed living in "The Triangle" as they call it. Cost of living is great. There are three large universities in the area: UNC, Duke, and NC State, meaning lots of youngish, educated people. There's a pretty good geek community. IBM, Cisco, Redhat, and SAS all have large presences in the area, and there is a startup scene (nothing like the Bay Area, but it exists). When I lived there, we had twice-monthly geek meetups and got great attendance - met some really interesting, fairly diverse, people. The large amount of northern ex-pats mixed with the southern culture made for a pretty cool, laid-back, friendly atmosphere. And there is biotech in the area as well. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triangle_%28North_Carolina%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triangle_%28North_Carolina%... for a start... Only downside is you'll definitely still need a car to get around. If you're smart and/or lucky you can probably minimize that a bit, though. The Chapel Hill/Carrboro area can be pretty walkable/bikeable.