12 ms·

Maybe on the west coast and western USA. But the suburban dream of middle class life at low prices is alive and well in the midwest, south, and much of the NE

by notadoc 10y ago

Maybe on the west coast and western USA. But the suburban dream of middle class life at low prices is alive and well in the midwest, south, and much of the NE too, where nice housing is still no more than 2x-3.5x median income levels.

notadoc 10y ago
A related thought... Startups and tech companies should pick a few midwestern or NE cities and open offices there. Imagine if Cleveland Ohio was a tech hub and "cool" by any vague stretch that a western city is, housing there is practically free by west coast standards. https://www.zillow.com/homes/cleveland-ohio_rb/ https://www.zillow.com/homes/cleveland-ohio_rb/ Even cities like Albany or Rochester NY are dirt cheap compared to any city in a western state. https://www.zillow.com/albany-ny/ https://www.zillow.com/albany-ny/ But instead everyone piles into San Francisco, bay area, Seattle, Portland, LA, and overpays by small fortunes.
- panzer_wyrm 10y ago
  Startups follow the VC money. VCs usually can afford SF.
- twiceaday 10y ago
  I left my home country to work in the bay area largely because I was going to a well established company in an area dense with other work. The chance of me moving to the middle of nowhere for a startup is exactly zero.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Yes, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. If there were plenty of good tech job opportunities in Nowheresville, USA, tech people would move there. If there were more tech people in Nowheresville, USA, companies would move there. Who has to act first to bootstrap the next tech hub?
    - thrden 10y ago
      Same one that bootstrapped Silicon Valley. The government.
      - mathperson 10y ago
        Indirectly!
    - sid-kap 10y ago
      Google, Facebook, and Amazon? Many of my friends believe that Google's new Austin office might lead to other tech companies to move here, but that's just speculation.
      - sremani 10y ago
        Yawn, It will be a cold day in hell, when Austin has more tech jobs than Dallas or Houston.
        RhodesianHunter 10y ago
        But then you have to live in Dallas or Houston.
        notadoc 10y ago
        Have you been to either? Texas is quite nice, and has great weather. Cost of living is a small fraction compared to the bay area or west coast cities too.
        RhodesianHunter 9y ago
        Yes, I live in Austin. It's quite nice comparatively. :)
        Arizhel 10y ago
        >Texas is quite nice, and has great weather. No, it doesn't. It's hot. And the people are conservative; nothing nice about that.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    The Cleveland metro area is ~2 million people. Granted it is going to have less tech jobs, but it isn't really the middle of nowhere.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      It IS the middle of nowhere when you're talking about tech jobs. How many people live in the city is irrelevant if they don't have jobs for you there.
      - sremani 10y ago
        I once made a comfortable living as a Software Engineer in Cleveland metro, they do have Progressive insurance, bunch of banks like National City, Key Bank (which may have now been acquired). The comments coming out people who very likely are Bay Area residents are the most ignorant as well as close-minded. Unless you are killing it in R&D departments of Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft etc. There is some one doing a similar job you are doing in 10 other metros in 'Murica.
        Arizhel 10y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. It depends on your specialty. I do embedded programming, and there's a bunch of metro areas where there just isn't much work for me; NYC is one of these. There's tons of software work there, but it's all finance or web, and very very little embedded. But there's other places, which are not traditional tech hubs, where there is some work for me where I'd rather not work, such as Detroit.
        unprepare 10y ago
        What specifically about Detroit makes you not want to live there? disclaimer: detroit resident
        Arizhel 10y ago
        Brutal winters and high crime rate, what else? Of course, there's lots of other problems like decrepit infrastructure (like the water pipes in Flint nearby), and I seriously doubt there's any kind of nice downtown area to walk around in like in nicer cities. I hear the suburbs are OK, but that doesn't exactly make me want to live someplace. Basically, AFAICT, Detroit sounds like someplace that would be OK if all you wanted was to live in the suburbs and never leave your house, and you have zero interest in outdoor activities, and don't care about going to nice restaurants downtown. The crime downtown is terrible, there's huge stretches of abandoned neighborhoods, the winters are horribly cold; I honestly don't know why anyone would want to live there. The location surely made sense a century ago back when shipping on the Great Lakes was a big thing and the location was sensible for manufacturing and shipping reasons, but those reasons are all gone now.
  - dba7dba 10y ago
    True. But for some American born engineer who has family outside of SF/NY/LA, being able to work remote while staying near family/hometown would be awesome for himself, the hometown and ultimately residents of those mega cities too as they would see some relief in ever increasing cost of living. Google/Facebook/etc have to pay a lot higher salary to keep talented engineers in/near SF because of much higher cost of living. Those employers probably COULD save $ if they paid lower salary and allowed full remote working. Even if they flew in the engineers on chartered jet every other week and housed them in hotel for regular face-2-face time in HQ, they still probably would end up saving $ in the end. Like instead of paying salary of half a million a year, they could pay $300,000 and use the $200,000 for chartered jets and housing when they are visiting SF.
    - tsunamifury 10y ago
      The vast majority of people in SV don't make 500k. 200-300 puts you in the upper middle even in tech.
- forgotmysn 10y ago
  tech companies open up offices in cities to hire existing talent in those communities. they don't open up offices to take talent away from their existing offices, at great expense to the company with no measurable upside.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Perhaps not surprisingly the two things a region can do to boost its economic vitality is to put in an airport and Internet infrastructure. I'm still waiting on the citylab report comparing similar economic zones with Google Fiber and those without. The Internet so that you can work remotely, and a easy to use airport when you can't work remotely.
- lotsofpulp 10y ago
  Part of being cool is also the cachet of living somewhere "exclusive". If a place is considered cool, then the demand to live there should increase by definition, and therefore prices will rise. Also, the weather is noticeably nicer, plus you're in a city with an international airport hub.
  - imjustsaying 10y ago
    "plus you're in a city with an international airport hub." >pays an extra $30,000 a year to live near SFO >saves $50 on a flight to Asia once a year rationale checks out
    - haihaibye 10y ago
      It works for the CEOs who make the decision.
      - astrange 10y ago
        Living near a major airport gives them a lower chance of seat upgrades, though. Nobody in ATL ever gets Delta 360.
    - macNchz 10y ago
      If you like to travel and fly a few times a year, being near a major airport may not be justifiable financially but removes so many pain points from the process. I definitely travel more than I would if it was more difficult. I grew up in a small town far from any airport and traveled internationally regularly. We either drove 50 miles to a small regional airport, which meant we'd have layovers and connections flying almost anywhere (more chances for lost luggage!), or we drove three+ hours to a big airport with expensive parking. Landing after a long international flight and having to get in the car and drive for three hours is a terrible way to end a trip. These days I live within a 30 minute cab ride of LGA or JFK. The availability of flights and the ease of getting to and from the airport makes a huge difference in how annoying it is to fly. Cheap early morning flights don't require pulling an all nighter, there are direct flights to so many cities, and the wheels-down-to-hot-shower-and-beer-at-home time is so short.
- Nition 10y ago
  I think Microsoft did this with Redmond?
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    It's not very far from Seattle (which had aerospace and such when Microsoft was starting).
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  A two-bedroom condo for less than $100k, period? You can pay off the mortgage with a couple years of income, free and clear? Now I see why my parents like living in Albany!
- foobiekr 10y ago
  the basic problem, once you put aside mythology and the realities of VCs tending to fund local companies, as summarized by a friend who picked up and did a funded startup in Austin: 1. top tech talent in austin is rare and they know they are rare 2. because of (1) they can always work remotely for big valley companies (e.g., the top ten by average eng salary) 3. so if they are working locally, you are mostly going to give the top guys valley-like comp 4. the rest of the talent is cheaper ... which doesn't sound too bad, as far as it goes. But then you run into an issue. There's going to be some specific skill that you need and you simply are not going to be able to hire it locally. So now you're in the position of hiring a remote worker or trying to get someone to move. Depending on your team, your product, team communications skills, how important in-person vs. remote is, etc. to the company, real or imagined, this can basically screw things up.
  - RhodesianHunter 10y ago
    "There's going to be some specific skill that you need and you simply are not going to be able to hire it locally." Such as?
- Johnny555 10y ago
  Having grown up near Cleveland, I'll take the weather of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, LA over that of Cleveland. The weather is what keeps me in the SF Bay Area despite the traffic congestion and high cost of living. Being able to bike to work nearly every day of the year goes a long way toward making up for heavy traffic.
  - notadoc 10y ago
    Weather in SF and LA is likable, but Seattle and Portland are dreadfully rain soaked and socked in clouds for 9 months of the year. You don't move to the latter two locations for the weather, you move there because they are considered trendy and "cool" in modern culture and you're a trend seeker. The same "cool" designation could be slapped onto Cleveland or Milwaukie or Ann Arbor and you'd have the same trend seekers piling into there too.
    - unprepare 10y ago
      rain is a lot easier to deal with than snow and ice on the roads. i'd take 9 months of cloudy skies over 4 months of invisible black ice patches, multi car pileups, blizzards, polar vortexes, scraping ice off my car every morning, shovelling my driveway, extreme heating costs, etc. While the PNW isnt ideal compared to drought ridden california, its vastly nicer weather than what millions of americans put up with every year.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      Biking in drizzle isn't hard or all that dangerous, and if it's not drizzling too much is pretty fun (it keeps you cool). Biking in sub-freezing weather and snow is entirely different. Does Cleveland even have any bike lanes? Interesting how you call people who seek practical, comfortable weather "trend seekers", and you seem to think that enduring brutal winters is normal.
- JDiculous 10y ago
  Network effects -> high cost of living. I've never been to Cleveland, Ohio, but most of these flyer states in America where housing is cheap are boring. Add to that the chicken-and-egg problem, you're going to have a tough time convincing young single people to move there. Only practical solution to avoid high cost of living is to embrace remote work and give employees the freedom to work from wherever they want.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jmulvi 10y ago
I think the issue is proximity to a world class city. The economic growth that we see in bigger cities leads to lots of opportunities for advancement. These are the places smart young people move to after they graduate university, the places where many of the top universities are based, they are also expensive due to this success. The suburbs are finding it harder to attract educated 20 somethings because of a lack of professional opportunities as well as changing lifestyle trends. I think there will be a graying-out of the suburbs as they get older until property prices become affordable to young professionals and the work/commute times become more bearable. I have no idea why working remotely is not more common in 2017 but that would be a massive improvement over the ridiculous commutes so many people have to suffer through.
- nostromo 10y ago
  This narrative might feel true, but isn't supported by actual data. https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/think-millennials-prefer-the-city-think-again/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/think-millennials-prefer...
  - Swizec 10y ago
    My theory as an outside observer has always been that [white] Americans are like salmon. They are born in the suburbs, they move to the city to find mates and build careers, then they move to the suburbs to have children. As an American-in-training I too would be terrified of having a kid in a place like San Francisco. Ain't nobody got money for that. That said, when I did live in the suburbs for a while, I found it to be depressing and miserable. But I grew up in a small city, 10min walk from as downtown as it gets, so I'm biased.
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      It's not just Americans. The dream of having a place in the country that is your own personal property is about as close to a cross-cultural norm as you can find. English country houses, Roman villas, French royal hunting lodges... even the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union had their dachas. Americans were just the first culture to make it practical for large numbers of people to actually do it.
kasey_junk 10y ago
Only a small fraction of the article was about housing prices in the suburbs. The vast majority of it was an exploration of the idea that many of the drivers to people moving to the suburbs are going away (better infrastructure, lower crime, more prosperity). Further the articles main point may be that mitigating those problems in the suburbs may be harder than the all ready tricky task of mitigating them in denser urban areas due to higher infrastructure costs, increased transportation costs and more limited areas for new development.
- shostack 10y ago
  The prosperity bit is key. Prosperity being jobs in this case. When the risk of unemployment or underemployment is higher, why live somewhere that limits your opportunities? An expensive house or a cheap house is irrelevant if you are unemployed for a significant stretch of time and can't afford a mortgage period. When I moved to the Bay Area, I justified the increased cost of living as the sunshine tax as well as the cost of reducing the risk of unemployment in a down economy. Even in the event of another crash specific to the tech industry, I guarantee I'd have an easier time getting another job out here compared to flyover country.
  - pnathan 10y ago
    > When I moved to the Bay Area, I justified the increased cost of living as the sunshine tax as well as the cost of reducing the risk of unemployment in a down economy. Even in the event of another crash specific to the tech industry, I guarantee I'd have an easier time getting another job out here compared to flyover country. This is the specific reason why I have self-limited my living situation to one of the major tech centers in the US. The downside is nearly unlimited if you're in a rural area: particularly if you have a house. You must be able to get a job if your company collapses, and most companies get shirty about remote work for people they don't know. So you're stuck trying to move in a hurry, to a place where you have no network. Hopefully it's not a down economy and lots of people are looking... then things are even dicier. Move to the city, young man (or woman). There be jobs there.
    - 10y ago
pnathan 10y ago
The South keeps coming off as racist/homophobic these days, constantly. So does a fair bit of the Midwest. I have this weird allergy to that.
- my_first_acct 10y ago
  Can't speak for the rest of the South, but Houston (which you might or might not count as a Southern city) elected an openly gay woman as mayor in 2009 [1]. The current mayor is African-American [2]. Obviously, looking at mayoral demographics is a pretty crude way of judging a city's tolerance, but it is better than extrapolating from news reports, which can hardly give a detailed picture of a region that encompasses a dozen or so states. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annise_Parker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annise_Parker [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Turner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Turner
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    To be fair, Texas isn't really part of the "Deep South", and isn't really known to be as backwards and racist as places like MS, AL, etc.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > Texas isn't really part of the "Deep South" I dunno, it seceded to protect slavery from twice as many countries as any other state in the South; that's got to count for something.
      - Arizhel 10y ago
        Tennessee seceded in the Civil War too but it's not part of the Deep South either. I think Arkansas did too, and that's definitely not part of the "South" at all. Same goes for Missouri.
- dakrootie 10y ago
  So I see you've learned everything you know about the South from TV/movies. When you get a chance, visit (in person) Jacksonville, Savannah, Asheville, Charleston, Austin, Birmingham, Atlanta...and on and on. It's amazing how they're just like the other non-hateful cities from time to time.
bsder 10y ago
> But the suburban dream of middle class life at low prices is alive and well in the midwest, south, and much of the NE too, where nice housing is still no more than 2x-3.5x median income levels. So explain to me how well things are going in Columbus, OH, Johnstown, PA, or Rochester, NY? And I don't see people clamoring to move to Tennessee, Alabama or Mississippi.
- notadoc 10y ago
  If those locations were deemed "cool" by the trendy and trend seeking zeitgeist they would suddenly be doing well. It's often perception and cultural attention that drives interest in an area, you can see many examples of this in the western states.
LogicX 10y ago
Cheers! Moved from Boston to Myrtle Beach, SC 5 years ago, so we could afford a home. (weather and gigabit fiber to the home don't hurt either). Still plenty of land to develop here. Get a new 2000sq ft 4 bedroom home for $150k-$200k within 15min drive of the beach. Only challenge here is tech jobs: remote or bust. I've been doing remote until I started my own company.
- notadoc 10y ago
  > Get a new 2000sq ft 4 bedroom home for $150k-$200k within 15min drive of the beach. Wow, and that is exactly my point. For what is barely a down payment out west you could theoretically just buy a home outright. Imagine the equivalent in the bay area or LA, it'd be $3 million+. Even in Seattle or Portland it'd be $700k-800k+ or likely higher given their trendy status.

by notadoc 10y ago

notadoc 10y ago

A related thought... Startups and tech companies should pick a few midwestern or NE cities and open offices there. Imagine if Cleveland Ohio was a tech hub and "cool" by any vague stretch that a western city is, housing there is practically free by west coast standards. https://www.zillow.com/homes/cleveland-ohio_rb/ https://www.zillow.com/homes/cleveland-ohio_rb/ Even cities like Albany or Rochester NY are dirt cheap compared to any city in a western state. https://www.zillow.com/albany-ny/ https://www.zillow.com/albany-ny/ But instead everyone piles into San Francisco, bay area, Seattle, Portland, LA, and overpays by small fortunes.

panzer_wyrm 10y ago
Startups follow the VC money. VCs usually can afford SF.
twiceaday 10y ago
I left my home country to work in the bay area largely because I was going to a well established company in an area dense with other work. The chance of me moving to the middle of nowhere for a startup is exactly zero.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Yes, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. If there were plenty of good tech job opportunities in Nowheresville, USA, tech people would move there. If there were more tech people in Nowheresville, USA, companies would move there. Who has to act first to bootstrap the next tech hub?
  - thrden 10y ago
    Same one that bootstrapped Silicon Valley. The government.
    - mathperson 10y ago
      Indirectly!
  - sid-kap 10y ago
    Google, Facebook, and Amazon? Many of my friends believe that Google's new Austin office might lead to other tech companies to move here, but that's just speculation.
    - sremani 10y ago
      Yawn, It will be a cold day in hell, when Austin has more tech jobs than Dallas or Houston.
      - RhodesianHunter 10y ago
        But then you have to live in Dallas or Houston.
        notadoc 10y ago
        Have you been to either? Texas is quite nice, and has great weather. Cost of living is a small fraction compared to the bay area or west coast cities too.
        RhodesianHunter 9y ago
        Yes, I live in Austin. It's quite nice comparatively. :)
        Arizhel 10y ago
        >Texas is quite nice, and has great weather. No, it doesn't. It's hot. And the people are conservative; nothing nice about that.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The Cleveland metro area is ~2 million people. Granted it is going to have less tech jobs, but it isn't really the middle of nowhere.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    It IS the middle of nowhere when you're talking about tech jobs. How many people live in the city is irrelevant if they don't have jobs for you there.
    - sremani 10y ago
      I once made a comfortable living as a Software Engineer in Cleveland metro, they do have Progressive insurance, bunch of banks like National City, Key Bank (which may have now been acquired). The comments coming out people who very likely are Bay Area residents are the most ignorant as well as close-minded. Unless you are killing it in R&D departments of Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft etc. There is some one doing a similar job you are doing in 10 other metros in 'Murica.
      - Arizhel 10y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. It depends on your specialty. I do embedded programming, and there's a bunch of metro areas where there just isn't much work for me; NYC is one of these. There's tons of software work there, but it's all finance or web, and very very little embedded. But there's other places, which are not traditional tech hubs, where there is some work for me where I'd rather not work, such as Detroit.
        unprepare 10y ago
        What specifically about Detroit makes you not want to live there? disclaimer: detroit resident
        Arizhel 10y ago
        Brutal winters and high crime rate, what else? Of course, there's lots of other problems like decrepit infrastructure (like the water pipes in Flint nearby), and I seriously doubt there's any kind of nice downtown area to walk around in like in nicer cities. I hear the suburbs are OK, but that doesn't exactly make me want to live someplace. Basically, AFAICT, Detroit sounds like someplace that would be OK if all you wanted was to live in the suburbs and never leave your house, and you have zero interest in outdoor activities, and don't care about going to nice restaurants downtown. The crime downtown is terrible, there's huge stretches of abandoned neighborhoods, the winters are horribly cold; I honestly don't know why anyone would want to live there. The location surely made sense a century ago back when shipping on the Great Lakes was a big thing and the location was sensible for manufacturing and shipping reasons, but those reasons are all gone now.
- dba7dba 10y ago
  True. But for some American born engineer who has family outside of SF/NY/LA, being able to work remote while staying near family/hometown would be awesome for himself, the hometown and ultimately residents of those mega cities too as they would see some relief in ever increasing cost of living. Google/Facebook/etc have to pay a lot higher salary to keep talented engineers in/near SF because of much higher cost of living. Those employers probably COULD save $ if they paid lower salary and allowed full remote working. Even if they flew in the engineers on chartered jet every other week and housed them in hotel for regular face-2-face time in HQ, they still probably would end up saving $ in the end. Like instead of paying salary of half a million a year, they could pay $300,000 and use the $200,000 for chartered jets and housing when they are visiting SF.
  - tsunamifury 10y ago
    The vast majority of people in SV don't make 500k. 200-300 puts you in the upper middle even in tech.
forgotmysn 10y ago
tech companies open up offices in cities to hire existing talent in those communities. they don't open up offices to take talent away from their existing offices, at great expense to the company with no measurable upside.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Perhaps not surprisingly the two things a region can do to boost its economic vitality is to put in an airport and Internet infrastructure. I'm still waiting on the citylab report comparing similar economic zones with Google Fiber and those without. The Internet so that you can work remotely, and a easy to use airport when you can't work remotely.
lotsofpulp 10y ago
Part of being cool is also the cachet of living somewhere "exclusive". If a place is considered cool, then the demand to live there should increase by definition, and therefore prices will rise. Also, the weather is noticeably nicer, plus you're in a city with an international airport hub.
- imjustsaying 10y ago
  "plus you're in a city with an international airport hub." >pays an extra $30,000 a year to live near SFO >saves $50 on a flight to Asia once a year rationale checks out
  - haihaibye 10y ago
    It works for the CEOs who make the decision.
    - astrange 10y ago
      Living near a major airport gives them a lower chance of seat upgrades, though. Nobody in ATL ever gets Delta 360.
  - macNchz 10y ago
    If you like to travel and fly a few times a year, being near a major airport may not be justifiable financially but removes so many pain points from the process. I definitely travel more than I would if it was more difficult. I grew up in a small town far from any airport and traveled internationally regularly. We either drove 50 miles to a small regional airport, which meant we'd have layovers and connections flying almost anywhere (more chances for lost luggage!), or we drove three+ hours to a big airport with expensive parking. Landing after a long international flight and having to get in the car and drive for three hours is a terrible way to end a trip. These days I live within a 30 minute cab ride of LGA or JFK. The availability of flights and the ease of getting to and from the airport makes a huge difference in how annoying it is to fly. Cheap early morning flights don't require pulling an all nighter, there are direct flights to so many cities, and the wheels-down-to-hot-shower-and-beer-at-home time is so short.
Nition 10y ago
I think Microsoft did this with Redmond?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It's not very far from Seattle (which had aerospace and such when Microsoft was starting).
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
A two-bedroom condo for less than $100k, period? You can pay off the mortgage with a couple years of income, free and clear? Now I see why my parents like living in Albany!
foobiekr 10y ago
the basic problem, once you put aside mythology and the realities of VCs tending to fund local companies, as summarized by a friend who picked up and did a funded startup in Austin: 1. top tech talent in austin is rare and they know they are rare 2. because of (1) they can always work remotely for big valley companies (e.g., the top ten by average eng salary) 3. so if they are working locally, you are mostly going to give the top guys valley-like comp 4. the rest of the talent is cheaper ... which doesn't sound too bad, as far as it goes. But then you run into an issue. There's going to be some specific skill that you need and you simply are not going to be able to hire it locally. So now you're in the position of hiring a remote worker or trying to get someone to move. Depending on your team, your product, team communications skills, how important in-person vs. remote is, etc. to the company, real or imagined, this can basically screw things up.
- RhodesianHunter 10y ago
  "There's going to be some specific skill that you need and you simply are not going to be able to hire it locally." Such as?
Johnny555 10y ago
Having grown up near Cleveland, I'll take the weather of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, LA over that of Cleveland. The weather is what keeps me in the SF Bay Area despite the traffic congestion and high cost of living. Being able to bike to work nearly every day of the year goes a long way toward making up for heavy traffic.
- notadoc 10y ago
  Weather in SF and LA is likable, but Seattle and Portland are dreadfully rain soaked and socked in clouds for 9 months of the year. You don't move to the latter two locations for the weather, you move there because they are considered trendy and "cool" in modern culture and you're a trend seeker. The same "cool" designation could be slapped onto Cleveland or Milwaukie or Ann Arbor and you'd have the same trend seekers piling into there too.
  - unprepare 10y ago
    rain is a lot easier to deal with than snow and ice on the roads. i'd take 9 months of cloudy skies over 4 months of invisible black ice patches, multi car pileups, blizzards, polar vortexes, scraping ice off my car every morning, shovelling my driveway, extreme heating costs, etc. While the PNW isnt ideal compared to drought ridden california, its vastly nicer weather than what millions of americans put up with every year.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    Biking in drizzle isn't hard or all that dangerous, and if it's not drizzling too much is pretty fun (it keeps you cool). Biking in sub-freezing weather and snow is entirely different. Does Cleveland even have any bike lanes? Interesting how you call people who seek practical, comfortable weather "trend seekers", and you seem to think that enduring brutal winters is normal.
JDiculous 10y ago
Network effects -> high cost of living. I've never been to Cleveland, Ohio, but most of these flyer states in America where housing is cheap are boring. Add to that the chicken-and-egg problem, you're going to have a tough time convincing young single people to move there. Only practical solution to avoid high cost of living is to embrace remote work and give employees the freedom to work from wherever they want.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jmulvi 10y ago

I think the issue is proximity to a world class city. The economic growth that we see in bigger cities leads to lots of opportunities for advancement. These are the places smart young people move to after they graduate university, the places where many of the top universities are based, they are also expensive due to this success. The suburbs are finding it harder to attract educated 20 somethings because of a lack of professional opportunities as well as changing lifestyle trends. I think there will be a graying-out of the suburbs as they get older until property prices become affordable to young professionals and the work/commute times become more bearable. I have no idea why working remotely is not more common in 2017 but that would be a massive improvement over the ridiculous commutes so many people have to suffer through.

nostromo 10y ago
This narrative might feel true, but isn't supported by actual data. https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/think-millennials-prefer-the-city-think-again/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/think-millennials-prefer...
- Swizec 10y ago
  My theory as an outside observer has always been that [white] Americans are like salmon. They are born in the suburbs, they move to the city to find mates and build careers, then they move to the suburbs to have children. As an American-in-training I too would be terrified of having a kid in a place like San Francisco. Ain't nobody got money for that. That said, when I did live in the suburbs for a while, I found it to be depressing and miserable. But I grew up in a small city, 10min walk from as downtown as it gets, so I'm biased.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    It's not just Americans. The dream of having a place in the country that is your own personal property is about as close to a cross-cultural norm as you can find. English country houses, Roman villas, French royal hunting lodges... even the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union had their dachas. Americans were just the first culture to make it practical for large numbers of people to actually do it.

kasey_junk 10y ago

Only a small fraction of the article was about housing prices in the suburbs. The vast majority of it was an exploration of the idea that many of the drivers to people moving to the suburbs are going away (better infrastructure, lower crime, more prosperity). Further the articles main point may be that mitigating those problems in the suburbs may be harder than the all ready tricky task of mitigating them in denser urban areas due to higher infrastructure costs, increased transportation costs and more limited areas for new development.

shostack 10y ago
The prosperity bit is key. Prosperity being jobs in this case. When the risk of unemployment or underemployment is higher, why live somewhere that limits your opportunities? An expensive house or a cheap house is irrelevant if you are unemployed for a significant stretch of time and can't afford a mortgage period. When I moved to the Bay Area, I justified the increased cost of living as the sunshine tax as well as the cost of reducing the risk of unemployment in a down economy. Even in the event of another crash specific to the tech industry, I guarantee I'd have an easier time getting another job out here compared to flyover country.
- pnathan 10y ago
  > When I moved to the Bay Area, I justified the increased cost of living as the sunshine tax as well as the cost of reducing the risk of unemployment in a down economy. Even in the event of another crash specific to the tech industry, I guarantee I'd have an easier time getting another job out here compared to flyover country. This is the specific reason why I have self-limited my living situation to one of the major tech centers in the US. The downside is nearly unlimited if you're in a rural area: particularly if you have a house. You must be able to get a job if your company collapses, and most companies get shirty about remote work for people they don't know. So you're stuck trying to move in a hurry, to a place where you have no network. Hopefully it's not a down economy and lots of people are looking... then things are even dicier. Move to the city, young man (or woman). There be jobs there.
  - 10y ago

pnathan 10y ago

The South keeps coming off as racist/homophobic these days, constantly. So does a fair bit of the Midwest. I have this weird allergy to that.

my_first_acct 10y ago
Can't speak for the rest of the South, but Houston (which you might or might not count as a Southern city) elected an openly gay woman as mayor in 2009 [1]. The current mayor is African-American [2]. Obviously, looking at mayoral demographics is a pretty crude way of judging a city's tolerance, but it is better than extrapolating from news reports, which can hardly give a detailed picture of a region that encompasses a dozen or so states. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annise_Parker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annise_Parker [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Turner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Turner
- Arizhel 10y ago
  To be fair, Texas isn't really part of the "Deep South", and isn't really known to be as backwards and racist as places like MS, AL, etc.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Texas isn't really part of the "Deep South" I dunno, it seceded to protect slavery from twice as many countries as any other state in the South; that's got to count for something.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      Tennessee seceded in the Civil War too but it's not part of the Deep South either. I think Arkansas did too, and that's definitely not part of the "South" at all. Same goes for Missouri.
dakrootie 10y ago
So I see you've learned everything you know about the South from TV/movies. When you get a chance, visit (in person) Jacksonville, Savannah, Asheville, Charleston, Austin, Birmingham, Atlanta...and on and on. It's amazing how they're just like the other non-hateful cities from time to time.

bsder 10y ago

> But the suburban dream of middle class life at low prices is alive and well in the midwest, south, and much of the NE too, where nice housing is still no more than 2x-3.5x median income levels. So explain to me how well things are going in Columbus, OH, Johnstown, PA, or Rochester, NY? And I don't see people clamoring to move to Tennessee, Alabama or Mississippi.

notadoc 10y ago
If those locations were deemed "cool" by the trendy and trend seeking zeitgeist they would suddenly be doing well. It's often perception and cultural attention that drives interest in an area, you can see many examples of this in the western states.

LogicX 10y ago

Cheers! Moved from Boston to Myrtle Beach, SC 5 years ago, so we could afford a home. (weather and gigabit fiber to the home don't hurt either). Still plenty of land to develop here. Get a new 2000sq ft 4 bedroom home for $150k-$200k within 15min drive of the beach. Only challenge here is tech jobs: remote or bust. I've been doing remote until I started my own company.

notadoc 10y ago
> Get a new 2000sq ft 4 bedroom home for $150k-$200k within 15min drive of the beach. Wow, and that is exactly my point. For what is barely a down payment out west you could theoretically just buy a home outright. Imagine the equivalent in the bay area or LA, it'd be $3 million+. Even in Seattle or Portland it'd be $700k-800k+ or likely higher given their trendy status.