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Americans are rethinking where they want to live

• Tiktaalik 5y ago
  > First, people have been leaving large, dense, expensive urban cores for smaller, less-dense cities and suburbs. This trend is going to make reducing CO2 emissions even harder.
  • sanderjd 5y ago
    Maybe maybe not. A lot depends on what happens next. The assumption here is that people are moving out of urban areas and then not commuting back in. If that really is the case, unlike in the commuting form of suburbanization, then service businesses will follow those people, if they are allowed to. This would be a great outcome, but it depends on a lot of assumptions.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      > If that really is the case, unlike in the commuting form of suburbanization, then service businesses will follow those people, if they are allowed to. That would require these areas to be zoned for mixed business/residential, which very few suburbs are.
      • sanderjd 5y ago
        Yes, I didn't say explicitly, but this is what I meant by "depends on a lot of assumptions". It will require different regulatory thinking for this to work out positively.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • ravitation 5y ago
      While I agree we don't really know, I think it is quite likely to have a negative effect. Take, for example, these comments, which are full of people who have left NYC, a place where you can function entirely without a car, and moved to places like Texas and Florida, where you, for the most part, cannot. Sure they might not be commuting anymore (which was likely by public transit anyway), but they are now driving several times a day, likely relatively far distances, when they were not before.
      • sanderjd 5y ago
        This seems like a sample bias. Even if lots of people here who have moved used to commute by public transit, the reality is that most people commute by car. Reducing commuting is generally a very good thing.
        • ravitation 5y ago
          Eliminating the commute, when it is replaced by living in a suburb with essentially no access to services without driving (especially when there was access before), can still be a net negative... That's the point of the anecdote...
          • sanderjd 5y ago
            Yes I know. My point is that I think it's unlikely that anything comes out behind eliminating commutes. Even "essentially no access to services" is closer access to services than the common exurban commuting distance.
            • ravitation 5y ago
              I mean you responded as if you think I was using HN comments as a representative sample and not as an illustrative anecdote... > Even "essentially no access to services" is closer access to services than the common exurban commuting distance. Okay... But it's not a one-to-one replacement... A single two-way commute might be replaced by significant drives to the grocery store, restaurants, schools, after-school activities, etc... Honestly, despite all of this discussion, I think the idea that commutes will be broadly eliminated long-term is the bigger assumption than general suburban driving being a net positive compared to commuting or vice versa.
              • sanderjd 5y ago
                I think it's very likely that commuting to white collar jobs is in the process of undergoing a very significant and lasting change. The magnitude of it remains to be seen, but even significant changes on the margin can drive structural shifts.
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  People have always been on the move. The Dust Bowl led to the big recent migration to the west. Although the migration post covid from the Bay area is negligible in absolute terms compared to the total population versus the Twitter accounts of some famous tech and VC folk like Keith Rabois.
• haspoken 5y ago
  https://archive.md/2XIqn https://archive.md/2XIqn
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  COL/SOL in California is appalling. SOL continues to degrade here to the point where certain parts of Bay Are (Oakland, Hayward) look more like Syria than first world nation. Trash is everywhere, even in nicer neighborhoods. Not a single park here in East Bay without encountering a homeless person. And, then I meet people here that continue to defend 1) Food is amazing 2) SF sucks! Oakland is the best place ever 3) Well, we are kind here so we tolerate homelessness 4) All those NIMBYs, otherwise this place would be perfect 5) Our government cares about people more than infrastructure 6) We should tolerate crime because we are kind unlike other cities/states 7) California houses out of state homeless (this is false, despite of being repeated ad-nauseum on HN. Let me know and I’ll dig up sources). These reasons are not convincing anymore. It’s a self perpetuating degradation of living standards. I am currently looking for a job in Colorado, Texas, NC, etc.
  • lolpython 5y ago
    SOL = Standard of Living ? That is an uncommon acronym.
  • notyourwork 5y ago
    Lived in Mission Bay for 3 years after visiting the Bay Area double digit times over the years. It’s the type of place you love to hate and hate to love. I don’t regret leaving, moved to Washington but I do miss it and hate it for all the reasons you mentioned.
  • gknight 5y ago
    Could you dig up sources on that? Not challenging you, but as an Angeleno I've always believed this to be true myself. Curious what may actually be happening.
    • sokoloff 5y ago
      (As a resident of MA,) I'd also like to see the data. If I had a choice to be homeless here or homeless in the Bay Area, it's not even close. The weather here is terrifically worse than anywhere near the water in CA.
• ChrisBland 5y ago
  This makes sense; as generations come of age in this country there has always been a shift in where people live based on the advancements in technology. From the early days of trains allowing living outside city centers, to the invention of the automobile and subsequent suburban sprawl with the interstate system, it would follow that the internet and remote work would change how we live. As demographics change, so does the politics based on who stays and who goes in each city.
  • mymythisisthis 5y ago
    The automobile, refrigeration, radio, and the telephone all blossomed in the 1940s and early 50s. They were also factors in urban sprawl.
• larrymyers 5y ago
  My family and I decided to stay on the north side of Chicago, a very high cost of living location, despite no longer needing to head downtown every day for work. Why not move outside of Chicago where our cost living would be substantially lower? * We wanted to keep our kids in the same school, which is walking distance. * We like being walking distance to the grocery store, doctor's offices, etc. * Our kids can walk to their friends' houses. * Proximity to the lake is important to us. * We're close to family. Moving to the suburbs would find us losing much of that freedom that comes with living in a dense neighborhood. The size of a house and a yard is only one factor here for quality of life. I hope the trend that comes from remote work isn't just people optimizing for the size of a house and low cost of living, especially if it comes at the expense of being able to be in a community with other people around.
  • long_time_gone 5y ago
    Also in Chicago (northwest side). After our kids were born, we stayed for many of the same reasons. +1 on school within walking distance. Walking to-and-from each day with my son has been an amazing experience. A big surprise for us has been the sense of community within our neighborhood and school.
  • Retric 5y ago
    I think the important part is not where you decided to live, but the fact you had the freedom to seriously considering moving.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    I think people are social creatures and will always choose to have social interactions. The difference between high and low density living is whether you can choose the absence of these interactions, even temporarily. I live in a city and it suits me just fine overall, but I also need some of the "I don't want to deal with loads of people and their drama right now" time to remain sane.
  • ohples 5y ago
    Its too bad we can't build new places like this, and make this a more affordable option for people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
• dublinben 5y ago
  It bodes poorly for the environment if people are increasingly moving from denser cities to sprawling suburbs. This is in many ways a self-inflicted problem of high-cost cities, but it should be a national priority to reverse this trend.
  • kiba 5y ago
    It's probably economically unsustainable. Even governments have bottom line they must manage.
  • numbsafari 5y ago
    It depends on whether or not the move to a less dense area corresponds with increased travel and car use. My wife and I can go days without leaving our house. We have a single car. When we lived in a city, we went out multiple times per day, but it was almost exclusively on foot. We probably had the same number of car trips per week to visit friends, since most of them lived in the suburbs, plus wanting to get out into nature, which we value. When we lived in the suburbs, in an in-between space, we probably had the highest car use, and life required two vehicles. So, it's not either-or. There's a spectrum. You can't expect to maintain the same habits and lifestyle in a rural location as you do in a dense urban environment, etc. Expanding rural access to electric vehicle infrastructure, and re-investing in regional rail would be transformational for these communities, though.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Except that this is not what's happening according to the OP. It's mostly a move from the largest, most expensive cities and suburbs towards smaller, but still high-density cities. Which implies less urban sprawl in general.
  • ben-schaaf 5y ago
    It's always crazy to hear that suburbs are cheaper. Dense living inherently requires less infrastructure and less transportation, so it should be considerably cheaper. It's only through the subsidisation of suburbia and the low supply/high demand of high density urban areas that this is the case. Car centric suburbs aren't just terrible for the environment, terrible for safety and terrible for transportation; they're also incredibly costly.
• woollymallard 5y ago
  I have no concrete plans to move anywhere, but just knowing that I _could_ easily pick up and go anywhere I want without commute or general work location being a deciding factor has been so freeing.
• jstepka 5y ago
  Silicon Valley / SF have had a stranglehold on the digital economy for the last 20-30 years -- nearly anything that touches electrics or software had a "tax" where some portion of that innovation flowed back as cash. With covid / the great reset, I've seen so many leave the bay area now that they can work remote. It's occured to me that SV / SF will need to reinvent itself and be in a rough patch for a couple years. The benefit to the rest of the americans is that all those high paying jobs and new ways of doing business are being dispersed throughout the rest of the USA which is better for all of us in the end.
  • nickysielicki 5y ago
    There’s a fine line with this though — the advantage of hiring Americans in the Midwest versus hiring in Europe and Asia needs to be solidified somehow.
    • candiddevmike 5y ago
      Timezones and the whole mess of laws and regulations around paying international employees tend to keep American companies hiring primarily American workers.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      I think the Californians are going to be first on the chopping block. They're expensive and what can they do that a bunch of midwesterners can't? I think international teams are a given in both cases.
    • mfer 5y ago
      There are 2 advantages I see... 1. Many great workers either won't or don't want to live in SV. I've known a bunch of them, over the years. Moving more development to where these folks are brings them in to the fold. 2. The people in SV don't represent and aren't regularly interacting with most of America or the world. They are in a different bubble. The majority is part of the out group to them. Hiring people in distributed places means you hire people who are more likely to interact and relate to the majority. Relating to people that will use technology is useful when building solutions.
• Tiktaalik 5y ago
  > First, people have been leaving large, dense, expensive urban cores for smaller, less-dense cities and suburbs. Second, people and companies have been moving to warm, low-tax states in the South and Southwest. Seems like there could be a convergence of the demographic trend of millennial family formation with pandemic related increase in people's perception of the value of square footage that is pushing people toward that classic Single Family Home housing product. Problem being of course is that they're not distributed in the right places. Of course the era of normal people without incredible levels of wealth owning a detached home in cities like SF, Seattle, etc is long over. There will only ever be less and less SFHs as these cities urbanize further. The market urbanist solution to this issue has been to build more housing, and more apartments, townhomes and duplexes with larger footprints that are suitable for a family, so that one wouldn't need a detached home for a larger family to affordably live in one of these big cities. That we're seeing people abandon certain urban places may be a sign of the failure of those governments to actually get any of that product sufficiently built, but it also could be a sign that, despite similar square footage, people don't see townhouses/apt housing product as the same sort of value as a detached house, and they are willing to make remarkable life changes to own a fee simple house proper.
  • sanderjd 5y ago
    I think your last paragraph is interesting and the crux of the question. I think all else equal that people will prefer detached homes. But I also think that all else is not equal; there is a trade-off between that and access to amenities without driving. I think a smaller but still large set of people place high value on that. Large townhomes with nearby amenities (restaurants, libraries, coffee shops, work spaces, schools, parks, rec centers, etc.) could be a sweet spot for a large number of people.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    > also could be a sign that, despite similar square footage, people don't see townhouses/apt housing product as the same sort of value as a detached house, and they are willing to make remarkable life changes to own a fee simple house proper. That seems unlikely since townhouses and the like have been quite popular in places outside the U.S. where they're reasonably common. Detached single homes are incompatible with dense urban living, and this will always limit their popularity.
• thehappypm 5y ago
  I moved the the suburbs way earlier than I had planned due to the pandemic and my job being much more WFH. I love it. I’m still accessible the city (14-28 minutes by train depending on schedule), I have way more space, and I’m near some really wonderful nature areas. I love having a garage and a yard and a grill. Im still near restaurants and stuff, and I kinda outgrew the bar scene a few years ago — now I’m more likely to hit a brewery or 2, which are dense in the suburbs too.
  • kritiko 5y ago
    That sounds great, but I am very skeptical. 14 minutes by train - what's the actual door to door commute time? I'm not aware of any city in the US with commute times that short where the place you live wouldn't be more urban than suburban e.g. Hoboken/Harrison, NJ, Quincy, MA, etc...
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • thehappypm 5y ago
      The 14 minute train is from Route 128 in Westwood, MA to Back Bay, in Boston’s downtown. I give myself ~15 minutes (for traffic buffer) to drive and park, take the 14 minute train, then it’s a 5 minute walk to work. I’ve done it in 30 minutes seat to seat.
      • kritiko 5y ago
        Oh, that makes sense. I grew up around there, and I do think Boston is the best place in the Northeast megalopolis for access to nature stuff and relatively easy to get around... 128's kind of funny, though. Unless you live in one of a handful of nearby streets, you need a car to get there. And you're at the Boston line (the suburban, single family and industrial park part of Boston, but still.)
        • thehappypm 5y ago
• jermaustin1 5y ago
  I've heard this brought up as a kind of second round of white flight. The middle- and upper-class (primarily) white population is once again moving out of urban centers because telecommuting is something that these high-salary jobs afford them. I think it will rebound a bit (but not much), as moving from urban to suburban is a very difficult transition, but its even harder going the other way once you've adjusted. I miss living in NYC, but I'm actually looking to retire in the next few years, and pick up some remote land that I can settle with Starlink, and live off a VERY modest retirement (WELL under a million saved/invested) for the next 40 years. My retirement will look vastly different from my parents, as I will still work (building web apps, games, furniture, whatever tickles my fancy), just not for anyone but myself.
  • itsyaboi 5y ago
    I've entertained the same idea from time to time, but just don't see how it can work out financially. What is your contingency plan for medical expenses? Kids? Btw, big fan of your blog posts.
    • jermaustin1 5y ago
      So in rural America you definitely give up access to top-notch medical care, but I'm relatively healthy currently, and if we drop our household income, we start to qualify for subsidies. My wife only just started her career, 17 years into our relationship, so she's going to start ramping up income over the next few years, and that will hopefully cover any unforeseen issues. I actually tried retiring this year. I paid to go to university in the UK in a very cheap place to live, but we had a few people in our family pass, and we decided while everyone is aging, we should stick around. >big fan of your blog posts. That is so kind of you to say. I'm a big fan of writing them... once or twice a year when I finally remember a story worthy of writing.
      • throwaway6734 5y ago
        >if we drop our household income, we start to qualify for subsidies Yuck
• dmode 5y ago
  This article and similar ones have been written at least a 1000 times for the last decade with a clear political tinge. The poster child is always around how people want to move to Florida and Texas. But somehow it forgets to include Washington and Seattle which has probably seen the biggest tech migration and grown into the second biggest tech hub in the country, far greater than Austin or Miami (hyped up constantly). I guess it doesn’t fit with the narrative ? My working hypothesis is that people in general want to live in California like places, if they can afford it.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • ravitation 5y ago
    > My working hypothesis is that people in general want to live in California like places, if they can afford it. This is my general thinking as well, and it happens to fit with my current life experience. I'm unconvinced that there has been, generally speaking, a fundamental change in the preferred environment people wish to live in; instead it seems more likely that traditionally popular American urban areas are just too expensive and offer relatively little (compared to other parts of the world) in terms of services to justify living there... Even for those that might otherwise choose to.
    • dqpb 5y ago
      There is a litany of social and governmental problems plaguing California, but I always stayed because it's the climate that feels the most natural to me. What finally drove me out was the seasonal firestorms and rain of ashes.
      • lowbloodsugar 5y ago
        Indeed. Kids having "fire days" off school instead of "snow days"; the backyard looking like a blanket of snow, except it's gray.
  • jetsetgo 5y ago
• anthk 5y ago
  As an European, I love the American culture. But if you had the European standards on healthcare (The Spaniard one it's great), America would enter in a 2nd golden age.
  • dekhn 5y ago
    we do, it's called kaiser and it's amazing. it's unlikely they will replace the more rapacious alternatives, however.
    • sanderjd 5y ago
      The people I know with Kaiser hate it. YMMV I guess!
      • dekhn 5y ago
        Many people who have kaiser hate it but after I understood the what and why of Kaiser I concluded its model was far better than the alternatives.
        • sanderjd 5y ago
          And yet people hate it. I agree that it seems good in theory. In practice, it seems quite bad (because again, people hate it). This is one of the things that makes me less convinced about universal healthcare proposals than I innately would be. They also seem much better on paper, but if in practice people would hate it, then that would be a bad outcome.
          • saltcured 5y ago
            What I've seen from others and what I've read in attempted quantitative reviews is that Kaiser quality, perhaps not surprisingly, varies by region and facility. I don't know if anybody has invented a management strategy which can truly remove this variance. Qualitatively, as a patient, I'd say the biggest difference with Kaiser is that you engage something more like a government bureaucracy. You do not get complicated billing adventures when you go to your Kaiser clinics, hospitals, etc. But, you do get some long waits, occasional referral limbo, and sometimes indifferent treatment from overworked nurses or clerical staff. Of course, there are still individuals involved in each care event. I have seen two different family members have different levels of satisfaction and frustration from the same facilities, and my take is that the personalities of the patients had more to do with the different experiences than the facility or staff. I liken Kaiser to going to the DMV for treatment. This is most true as a young to middle-aged person, where your common care needs might be for unplanned, urgent care rather than periodic checkups or predictable chronic care. I know others who have used Kaiser in the same regions for more chronic and acute conditions including psychiatric, metabolic, and geriatric care. I have been reasonably impressed and would like to keep myself in the same system when I retire and grow old. I may be biased by having known the system since I was a child, but I prefer this to the non-HMO US experience I know mostly second hand. Instead of the DMV, I've had friends and relatives liken their healthcare to engaging a car dealership or some boutique investment firm, with every interaction transactionalized and tinged with financial worry.
• asimpletune 5y ago
  I'm also sure a small percentage of people from the USA may even rethink living there.
  • onychomys 5y ago
    My company has gone to work-from-anywhere-as-long-as-it's-in-the-USA, there's some sort of complicated tax thing that comes if you live in another country but work in the US, and they don't want to deal with that.
    • the-dude 5y ago
      There is a SaaS for that.
      • onychomys 5y ago
        lol, i'll be sure to bring that up with the C-suite next time they invite me to one of their meetings.
    • nradov 5y ago
      I expect we'll start to see more employees who work in the "USA" for employment tax purposes, but are physically in Thailand or somewhere connected via VPN. Short of a detailed audit it's difficult for authorities to tell where someone is actually living. (I'm not encouraging tax fraud, just stating that this is likely to happen.)
      • gamblor956 5y ago
        That would be tax fraud in two separate countries, and depending on local laws, a crime in the country the individual is working from. Connecting through a corporate VPN to the corporate network wouldn't shield your location, and I'm not aware of any company that lets employees connect using their own VPNs? With corporate VPN connections, it's usually pretty easy to trace back to the geographic area of the connecting IP, and IT generally keeps logs of these. While most companies are cool with short term remote work in other countries (especially for employees who do not work on revenue-generating products or services), undisclosed long term remote work is generally grounds for for-cause termination.
• nwmcsween 5y ago
  With a remote workforce what is stopping people to move to South America, etc? Cost of living is rising dramatically with YoY housing prices hitting 20-30% (even in middle of nowhere) it just doesn't make sense financially if you arent established to stay.
  • Omniusaspirer 5y ago
    Cultural differences, distance from family, language barriers, laws against foreign land/home ownership, crime, corrupt governments, etc. I'm all for traveling and experiencing different cultures but there's a lot more than money that comes into play when you're considering a move to a developing country.
  • reidjs 5y ago
    1. They don’t speak Spanish 2. They don’t know anyone there 3. Their company doesn’t allow it
  • ericmay 5y ago
    Not much and I think we'll see more of this for the reasons you mention. You can just "rent" a place somewhere or buy a trailer and claim that as your official home and then just live in another country. Latin America is ideal for this for Americans because of the timezones as well. Though of course it depends on the country, your goals and ideas, etc.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• throw_away_45 5y ago
  My family moved out of NYC during the pandemic. We have a young kid and a dog - so finding a spot which had more space was imperative (given that both our gigs were remote). The few factors for us : * Is the neighborhood family / kid-friendly ? * Is it comfortable ? * Does it have space ? * Does it have some of the conveniences of a city (not a cut-off remote suburb) We moved to TX to be closer to family and it checked all of these boxes. That being said, I don't think we have it in us to do another relocation unless forced. It was painful to execute and I can only imagine it gets harder when you have deeper ties in the neighborhood/city with kids/family
  • InitialLastName 5y ago
    Does "kid friendly" for you include a means for your child to operate independently of you in the time between "go play outside" age and driving age? I ask because I grew up in a suburb where I had the equivalent of a small urban park's playground in my back yard, but the time between that playground being useful and when I could drive were terrible for me and for my parents (who had to drive me to almost anything I wanted to do) and would have been worse if I weren't able and interested in walking/biking 3 miles to the library or train station. I was so very jealous of my friends who lived in more urban areas who could walk home from school and do things independently of their parents at 12 rather than 16+.
    • throw_away_45 5y ago
      For us it meant having enough established services such as good schooling, daycare, recreational activities within a reasonable distance. One of the big stressors in hyper-growth cities has been that the infrastructure doesn't scale quickly enough and the waitlists for somethings can run months, if not years E.g. daycare signups in parts of Austin
    • jedberg 5y ago
      This is something a lot of parents don't think of! As I keep my eye out for new houses, one thing I noticed is that no one emphasizes walkability in the suburbs anymore. It exists if you know where to look. Where I live now we can walk to some stuff. When my kids are older they will be able to walk or bike to the park, to school, to the shopping center to hang out, and I want to make sure it stays that way. I certainly don't want to be on the hook to drive them everywhere like my parents were!
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I'd go South if the politics start to blue-up. I figure if this trend holds as the article says, by the time I'm ready to retire there will have been two censuses. I care about social justice, local produce, and warm weather. The south has 2 out of 3.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • 8ytecoder 5y ago
    If everything goes as planned with global warming, we may have 3/3 here in the north as well (at least some of us). Where I live it’s noticeably warmer, winters milder and summers longer just in the ten years I’ve been here.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • silisili 5y ago
    Southern CA has all of that, why not just move there?
  • jwolfe 5y ago
    Do you care about being around social justice or bringing about social justice? If the former, sure, move to a blue area. If the latter, wouldn't moving to a purple area be more impactful?
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      I ask myself that every day. Should I be the change? Or should I wait for someone else to do it? I don't have the guts to jump headfirst into a deep red area: I already get harassed for driving a truck with an obama sticker when i go off-roading in the red counties 5 hours from where i live. But I am interested in moving to one of the isolated purpler cities in the south. I'm hoping there's a "diffusion area" where it is safe to be liberal, but still having a net effect of changing a demographic.
  • 5y ago
• donatj 5y ago
  I live just west of Minneapolis with my wife in a house that's been in my family for generations. I don't want to leave but the continuous stream of car jackings, home invasions, petty theft and seemingly random acts of violence have me rethinking this. Calls to defund the police sound pretty tone deaf when your elderly neighbor is assaulted in their own home and robbed.
  • kahmeal 5y ago
    Seem being the key word. The messaging is poor, the idea has quite a bit of merit.
  • liveoneggs 5y ago
    Pay them more to keep failing to provide protection? The cops extort you (the tax payer) by playing with your safety for the sake of inflating the budget.
    • alistairSH 5y ago
      Police in the US are under no obligation to protect the citizenry. SCOTUS has reaffirmed that over and over again.
      • glial 5y ago
        For anyone interested, there's a great Radiolab episode about this: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/no-special-duty https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/no-sp...
  • bovermyer 5y ago
    Counterpoint: we live in Edina, a nicer suburb just south of Minneapolis proper. No real crime except for a single hit-and-run by an out-of-towner in the last two years. Walking distance to two grocery stores, several restaurants, and two malls. Affordable utilities and rent.
    • 5y ago
• 55555 5y ago
  I’m looking to buy an investment property in the US. Any ideas on how to pick an up-and-coming location where people are going to want to move to?
  • after_care 5y ago
    Future expectations are largely considered in current prices. Some of this will depend on your time horizon. Let’s consider 5+ decades. 1. Look for areas that have a long history of growth. You don’t want to invest in a fad. 2. Look for areas that aren’t too rural. Many of the most rural areas are actually losing population as people leave services like grocery stories and doctors leave and thus drive out more people. Look at rural Kansas as an example of this, places 100 miles away from a city had a population peak with the baby boomers. 3. Look for a diverse local economy. Oil/Factory/Company towns exist and they tend to disappear when fortunes change for the host. You need more than remote workers to run a local economy. 4. Consider climate change. Almost everywhere in the US will be effected for the worst, but Miami is probably more risky than Nashville. 5. Do your homework and invest in what you know. I’ve picked the locations of my property very carefully. I usually can find deals when the market undervalues one particular property short term for various things reasons. Maybe I’m the first solid offer to a motivated seller (this may become more common again soon). Maybe it’s a home that needs some renovations. Maybe it’s in a neighborhood whose gentrification isn’t widely recognized yet. My niche is residential realestate in a single mid-sized metropolitan area. About 50% of my investment portfolio is real estate. I actively manage these properties, while working full time as an engineer.
    • 55555 5y ago
      Thanks, you’re the man!
  • rubylark 5y ago
    A lot of US cities publish their urban development plans. Pick a state and look up their major cities' 2040 plans and see if they are planning extensive developments in the area your interested in buying. Sometimes the plans are overoptimistic or pessimistic but usually they generally give you an idea if the city itself thinks it will grow quickly or slowly.
• Tycho 5y ago
  I've been thinking about what gives big cities their edge. Why some even become global hubs for particular industries. Two reasons are clearer to me now than they were in the past: - Lifestyle advantages of living amongst specialists: people can outsource various chores/tasks/jobs/errands to local specialists who can complete them much more efficiently. For instance imagine if your village doesn't have a plumber and you have to spend much of your own time fixing pipes, rather than focussing on activities where you have comparative advantage. - Poaching. Modern companies struggle to maintain a competitive advantage since their employees can leave and join their competitors. But key employees will usually have roots in a particular place, so competitors can only hope to lure them away if they co-locate their offices in the same city. So almost all of them do. That said, the internet has introduced some counter-effects, for instance externalizing specialist knowledge on public websites, and enabling remote working.
  • nradov 5y ago
    Depending on specialists for everything is fragile. What happens when there are no plumbers available at any price? I see it as just sad and pathetic when city dwellers can't even do basic home maintenance like replacing a faucet cartridge or toilet seal.
    • ARandumGuy 5y ago
      > I see it as just sad and pathetic when city dwellers can't even do basic home maintenance like replacing a faucet cartridge or toilet seal. That seems rather harsh. A big reason why "city dwellers" can't do home maintenance is because cities have more renters then owners. When you rent a property, you're strongly encouraged to offload all home maintenance onto your landlord. Not only is the landlord obligated to cover maintenance costs, but they can withhold a deposit (or even outright fine) for any damages done if maintenance is done incorrectly.
    • jedberg 5y ago
      How far down the rabbit hole are you willing to go? Will you teach yourself how to butcher your own meat so you don't have to rely on a butcher? Teach yourself surgery so you don't have to go to a doctor? Our society thrives because of specialization. It's what allows a person to focus on what they're best at to have the greatest chance at innovation.
• foofoo4u 5y ago
  I sure am. I live in San Jose (which resides in the Bay Area). Here’s why I am leaving. - $2,700 per month for a 500 sq/ft apartment. - Homeless people everywhere the moment I step foot out of my apartment. - Smells like urine on many sidewalks. - Literally half of the buildings are vacant or abandoned (in downtown). - Human feces on sidewalks and entrance to buildings. - Political and ideological homogeny. Keep your head low if you aren’t progressive. - We’ve reached $4.99 per gallon for gasoline. - I’ve experienced two car break-ins. - Trash everywhere. - High taxes. - Crummy roads. I’m paying a lot of money to live here, but for what? My standard of living is low. I’m leaving for Texas or Florida. Hopefully either of these two states provide me something better.
  • bugzz 5y ago
    you don't have to move that far to escape all that. Plenty of areas an hour away from San Jose that are nice and a lot cheaper (still more expensive than Texas or Florida, sure).
    • hunterb123 5y ago
      Depending on if you need to change jobs and the family situation sometimes it's just as much effort to move states than move a few hours away. If you have the opportunity it's good to look at the entire country, sometimes even the world (though for tech the US is by far the best option) for the best value.
    • twblalock 5y ago
      Even moving 2 miles away will result in better quality of life. Downtown San Jose has the some of the highest crime rates and largest homeless encampments in the city, and the rent in other parts of the city is not a lot higher.
    • 0xffff2 5y ago
      But if I'm moving an hour away, why not move farther? I was born, raised and have lived 31 out of 34 years in California and I just can't fathom why anyone would choose to live here anymore. I bought a house in Southern Oregon 4 years ago and moved up here full time a year ago thanks to the pandemic. I really hope I never have to move back.
• scottmcleod 5y ago
  The answer is Miami
  • imbnwa 5y ago
    What's the climate change outlook in 20 years though?
    • vb6sp6 5y ago
      bleak
• jcadam 5y ago
  Moved out of the city (Tampa) to rural Alaska. Currently working remotely with the help of a local ISP that does wireless internet (on the waiting list for Starlink).
• davewritescode 5y ago
  I think a lot of people are seeing what they want to see in this. Once a company figures out how to leverage a developer in the Midwest as effectively as one in the Bay Area what stops them from hiring in the Dominican, or Mexico or South America? I've worked with fantastic developers from those areas who can effectively work on the same timezones, communicate well and write high quality code. I know personally, I've seen a lot of hiring shifting to Latin America in the last 2 years. I don't think this is going to be the midwestern/southern renascence that people think it's going to be.
  • csomar 5y ago
    "They" could always make it harder to transfer money from inside the US system to the "outside" world. This is what an exit-tax is, basically making it harder for established people to move away from the system. Or AML for international wires. Or Minimum Corporate Tax. Unluckily for First-World countries, the politicians seems to be focused on the symptoms rather than the disease itself. This will not change course of what will happen, of course.
    • mrkentutbabi 5y ago
      Crypto seems to introduce another headache to this.
  • finiteseries 5y ago
    This isn’t an article about developers, tech, or remote work. It’s about a general trend of existing US residents across many industries relocating to the affordable, low tax, business friendly suburbs of cities where people do things besides converting funding into JSON.
• coryrc 5y ago
  In my city (Seattle), you never know if a mob is going to set up a month-long occupation outside your building, whether unregistered sex offenders have set up camp in your doorway (can't roust them), every road puts cars first, and the school is removing gifted programs for being racist. I'd love to live in a safe, well-managed, urban city. I don't believe any exist in North America.
  • malermeister 5y ago
    Montreal!
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      coryrc should have stipulated one more condition - the weather is temperate enough to survive living outside.
      • malermeister 5y ago
        There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.
        • lotsofpulp 5y ago
          That is a fun saying, but I have been to Montreal in February and I would give myself much better odds of surviving outdoors in Seattle than Montreal.
          • malermeister 5y ago
            I come from a place that gets colder than Montreal, but I see your point. Temperature is very subjective and Montreal might be very harsh to someone that grew up some place warmer.
            • lotsofpulp 5y ago
              It is not that subjective. It is simply more probable to survive as a homeless person (not a person prepared to camp, a person without means to properly clothe themselves or a drug addict or otherwise mentally unwell) outside in Seattle than Montreal. It barely ever snows in Seattle, the temperatures do not go below freezing, and there is low humidity so there is less heat loss hence it feels much warmer than the same temperature in Montreal.
• TurkishPoptart 5y ago
  And part of it is what public schools are doing to our kids. My 6 year old is required to sit outdoors to eat her lunch in 40ish degree (F) weather, and is not allowed to socialized. My 5 year old has to wear a mask 7 hours a day against an illness that doesn't kill kids. I'm at my wit's end with these school administrators. Hoping to be in Wyoming in 6 months' time.
  • anarchy8 5y ago
    > My 5 year old has to wear a mask 7 hours a day against an illness that doesn't kill kids This is misinformation: https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/ https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...
    • CountDrewku 5y ago
      Maybe you ought to pay more attention to what it actually says instead of getting upset at what is obviously a generalization about the overreaction to COVID when it comes to young children- >A smaller subset of states reported on hospitalizations and mortality by age; the available data indicate that COVID-19-associated hospitalization and death is uncommon in children. Here's a more accurate representation - https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b-4pzv https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b... Now, go look up how many of those kids were already immuno-compromised. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937e4.htm?s_cid=mm6937e4_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937e4.htm?s_cid=mm... That's just one report that mentions 75% with an underlying medical condition. When people say it doesn't kill kids they're generalizing, flagging it as misinformation is completely silly. By percentages and how we react to every other virus this is NOT something we should be scared of when it comes to children. We certainly shouldn't be subjecting children to measures that may cause psychological and developmental harm for something that's VERY unlikely to be a threat to them.
      • TurkishPoptart 5y ago
        Thanks for bringing in that hard data. I don't understand why the news media keeps saying "thank goodness kids can get vaccinated now!". Why are they trying to normalize annual or 2x a year shots for these kids, who are more likely to suffer from myocarditis as a result than to actually contract or get ill from this virus? Nobody freaking knows.
• willis936 5y ago
  Visit Texas or Florida first. I've lived in Texas and visited Florida many times. I've also visited San Jose. TX and FL are hell compared to CA. I don't care for CA either, but that's because of cultural (coastal) differences. The NorthEast is heaven on Earth.
  • dang 5y ago
    Please don't take HN threads into regional flamewar. You can make your substantive points without name-calling and swipes. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29541695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29541695.
  • gautamcgoel 5y ago
    Can you elaborate why you like the Northeast? I'm thinking of spending a few years in Boston.
    • 0_____0 5y ago
      Where are you moving from? I just moved to greater boston and I love it. Where I live has just the right level of density -- you see people around at all times of day, but it's still peaceful at night. And almost everything I do is walkable.
  • 0_____0 5y ago
    As a recent transplant from SF Bay to Greater Boston... I'm inclined to agree. It's actually cheaper in my neighborhood than it was in East Oakland, and I can walk to almost anything I care about, incl. work, friends, pub, gym, grocery. Massive quality-of-life upgrade, assuming you're OK with freezing temps in the winter, and humidity and bugs in the summer.
    • yurishimo 5y ago
      There are humidity and bugs in Texas and Florida too, and even more so! If you're lucky, Texas will get another snow-pocalypse too if that tickles your fancy.
• gnicholas 5y ago
  For me, schools are a huge part of this. Zoom schooling has demonstrated how little learning actually happens during a day. Simultaneously, online alternatives have popped up/become popularized, and people are realizing how much more a student can learn through good/personalized remote learning. Parents who pay tens of thousands of dollars in property tax — largely for access to 'great schools' — are now able to move anywhere they want and access online options that are in many ways better than their tony suburban schools. Many of these parents are allowed to WFH now, which makes moving to rural areas possible, for the first time ever. I imagine there will be some people who move away, realize the grass isn't always greener, and then move back. But overall I think WFH and remote schooling will unlock regions to a huge pool of families who never previously thought of living away from urban/suburban centers.
  • carom 5y ago
    What are some of the online alternatives?
    • gnicholas 5y ago
      The people I know who have pulled their kids from public schools are either homeschooling or enrolling in online charter schools. This allows for a great degree of autonomy, and basically lets kids learn via whatever platform works for them. I've heard about people using informal platforms like Outschool and more formalized courses from Beast Academy or Potter.
      • brewdad 5y ago
        Online school can be a boon for the right type of student, especially if they have strong parental support. It can also be the end of the line for students who don't have that. My district has historically used the "online academy" as the dumping ground for kids they need to keep on the enrollment roster but that they don't want on campus or know won't bother showing. I don't know how things have changed since they quintupled enrollment this year with students wishing to avoid the mask mandates and other on-campus distractions. Hopefully it will become a positive element in our district rather than the last-chance lounge.
• 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
  If people on HN really want the urban life style to make any sense in America they need to start tackling the mental health / homeless problem. They talk about "the environment" but no one wants to talk about how my wife has to dodge human feces getting on and off public transportation. "It's just part of living in a vibrant city".... Give me a break.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Balero 5y ago
    It's part of living in a broken city. Your city (and country) does not need to have a massive homeless problem. This is something the city and state government can fix. Housing, mental health support, drug treatment support and better community policing are all possible, and proven to work. How to get the city and state (and national) governments to fix this problem is another issue.
    • 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
      Ah yes blame the "city" and not the various municipalities sending their homeless to said city. Most of the homeless are not from the cities they are in. They just end up there and then the city has to pay for it for some reason.
      • nostromo 5y ago
        We’ve created the lawless environment that attracted them to our cities. They weren’t coerced to come here, we enticed them to come here.
        • 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
          I've lived in a major us east coast city up until the pandemic. My tax dollars kept going down the drain dealing with homeless who by in large were not originally city residents. Your opinion that these people were enticed to the city is wholly unfounded and totally made up. Just another reason I've mentally checked out of the debate. Y'all have fun with that. I'll live in the burbs.
• AlbertCory 5y ago
  The Economist used to be somewhat boring, but at least it had honest reporting about parts of the world you don't read much about. Good for you, in other words. In the new world of the web, they seem to be trying too hard to amplify conventional opinions. Chasing clicks, in other words. Long after a trend has started up and enough people have heard of it (moving out of expensive areas, in this case), they jump on it.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > In the new world of the web, they seem to be trying too hard to amplify conventional opinions. They've always been, fairly overtly, about amplifying a narrow range or neoliberal viewpoints. At the height of the UK/US neoliberal consensus of the late 1980s and 1990s, that may have been less obvious since that narrow range basically spanned the entire Overton Window.
• vehemenz 5y ago
  My Big Ten university town is offering cash incentives for workers to relocate there. It makes sense. These towns have benefits of a small town—low COL, access to nature, minimal commute—with big city amenities—transport, walkability, entertainment.
• honkycat 5y ago
  I grew up in a rural town around 4 hours from St. Lois. I was MISERABLE. I HATED IT AS A KID! A short list of things I disliked: - Completely car dependent as a kid. If my parents didn't give me a ride I wasn't doing anything. Bicycling is not an option because people drive like maniacs and are not expecting bikes, so it is extremely dangerous. People love to haul ass on country roads. - Conservative values. My parents are solidly blue voters, but growing up in that environment surrounded by racism, you learn a lot of bad stuff that you have to unlearn, or else sink deeper and deeper into the bad stuff. - Our house became worthless. The community is dying, and the house my family owned is reasonable and has been sitting in the market for years. Nobody wants to move or live there. - Lack of culture. My parents, up until this year, had never eaten Indian food, real ramen, or a huge number of other commonplace things you get in a city. There weren't any "garage bands" or other artists or coders to collaborate with as a kid. They are getting older now and they are realizing how empty and boring the place they have chosen to live is. My dad is getting really into video poker. There is NOTHING ELSE FOR THEM THERE. - Bad schools. I had the same teachers as my parents, who graduated 20 years before I did. We had HUGE behavioral problems. Students who fell behind were sent to another school 45 minutes away... until that school filled up and could no longer take the overflow. It was constant triage and if you were a little clever you were BORED. A lot of students their senior year just sat in study hall for 6 hours a day because they didn't have the rooms and the teachers to teach higher level classes. I didn't even know what AP classes were until I got to college. - Bad hospitals. We had to close ours down because we couldn't play doctors enough to move to our town. - Total lack of community. You think "less people == people are closer". No. There is nowhere to gather, the only land you can use is the land you own. There are not enough people to support hobbies or meetups. Most of the people get a degree or a trade job and get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.
  • strict9 5y ago
    Every time I see an article about an exodus to rural America I am reminded of the rural America I grew up in, and frankly it's terrible compared to living in or near a city. For all the reasons you cite and so many more. Of course cost of living is cheap in rural America, demand is low and supply is high for land far from modern conveniences.
  • 5y ago
• say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
  "A countervailing political force is that some of the people who are moving into Texan, Floridian and Arizonan suburbs from California and the Northeast consider themselves political refugees, fleeing badly-run state and local governments. They may cast votes against Democratic candidates in an attempt to ensure their new locations will not resemble the places they left." I can't help but wonder whether the people with the means to flee California were partially responsible for its poor state of political affairs, consistently voting for more progressive candidates and policies. They left a mess of their own creation. Just as Mike Tyson famously said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
• mrkentutbabi 5y ago
  I’ve been rethinking this as well. I think I came to conclusions that too much diversity isn’t a good thing. I myself isn’t American and rethinking hard if I should obtain my American citizenship (currently PR) I want to move back to Asia where there are less diversity and society is less complex. I value harmony more than diversity.
• mderazon 5y ago
  I moved to somewhat of an expat bubble in rural Portugal, lots of advantages, the few disadvantages for me though are having to drive everywhere and lack of options for schools. Granted these are not specific to Portugal, but more for the "moving to rural / suburbs areas". Some people don't mind the driving, but for me, realizing I will be a taxi driver until kids get a driving license is a little depressing. Especially the driving to school part... However, the advantages still offset the disadvantages for me.
• pessimizer 5y ago
  There's a bit of racial cheating going on here by assuming the reasons that black/hispanic people are leaving cities are identical to the reasons wealthy whites are leaving cities, and that the trend started at the same time, follows the same lines, or ends up in the same suburbs. It's all glossed over by calling suburbs diverse by citing demographic percentages of all people who live in any suburb. Black/Hispanic people have generally been priced out of cities by gentrification, and have been forced to move to places that are even farther from jobs and services than the previously neglected urban areas that they came from, and this started when millennials moved into the cities from the suburbs. Black people in particular have had a Southern migration because Northern black people are often only two or three generations from the South anyway, so they have family who can help with shared housing, childcare, and leads on employment. This could be easily shown by showing rates of outmigration by group over time. Chicago's black population was dropping while its white population was rising. It would also be shown by individual attention to the suburbs that are being moved to, not only would you find that they were very segregated, but you might notice that plenty of them are hellish and poverty-ridden compared to the cities that people moved from. I might as well quote the entire discussion of ethnicity, which occupied the body of a paragraph with nearly unrelated first, second, and final sentences. Maybe the word "urbanizing suburbs" in the context of an increase in amenities worked as a subconscious trigger to discuss black people moving to suburbs. "The allure of suburbs has been a trend more than a half-century in the making, but covid-19 offered an additional boost. “Urbanising suburbs”, as Mr Clark them, are gaining amenities but keeping their characteristic sprawl. Contrary to the stereotype of identical white homes with white occupants, today’s suburbs are ethnically diverse. Wendell Cox of Demographia, a consultancy, estimates that 86% of the population of major metro areas live in the suburbs or exurbs. That includes 90% of whites, 83% of Latinos, 81% of Asians and 76% of African-Americans. Latinos, in particular, have been relocating to suburbs at greater rates in the past two decades: since 2000 their number has risen more than 50%, compared with a 20% rise for African-Americans and Asians and just 1.3% for whites. Ross Perot, Jr., a real-estate developer, says he’s “never seen as many people moving into Dallas. It’s shocking.” But far more people are going to the suburbs surrounding the city." Note: a 20 year trend for non-whites, and a statistically insignificant blip for whites. Yet the article paints everyone as young upper middle class urban professionals trying to dodge taxes and city government.
• superfamicom 5y ago
  I have a home in Nashville, Tennessee but chose to move to Seattle, Washington for work (software engineering), but stay here for the access to everyday life improvements- restaurant variety, activities, etc. Nashville has grown a lot, but you are still car dependent and the Conservative values run deep there, though those folks are being displaced as the housing market continues to boom which makes them more hostile to outsiders than they already were.
  • ozzythecat 5y ago
    Huh, interesting. I’m visiting Nashville from Seattle. There’s definitely not as much Asian/Fusion food or Indian food in Nashville, but overall there are tons more restaurants - just not Pho or chicken tikka masala everywhere. I’ve spent some time in Nashville and visited Brentwood, Franklin, Nolensville, and further east towards Murfreesboro and Smyrna. In a week, I felt like there’s a restaurant metric you’d measure in some metric like restaurants per square mile. There’s just food everywhere, and even on a Monday night, restaurants are packed. No disagreement at all obviously on the politics. IMO, Seattle is too liberal for me (you committed a crime? It’s okay. You’re actually the victim) while in TN they’re maybe an extreme on the other end. I will say though that politics aside, people in and around the Nashville are are waaayyyy more friendly. It’s not even a comparison. I do see tons and tons of new construction in Nashville and surrounding areas. On the other hand, the liberal, equal rights and affordable housing/healthcare/childcare crowd is drowning in NIMBYism.
    • darknavi 5y ago
      What about teriyaki? Can't move somewhere without it!
    • selimthegrim 5y ago
      Maneet Chauhan has a well known restaurant there, and there are some South Indian places south of the city too
• yalogin 5y ago
  I was giving it some due until I saw this -- > It’s the fact that they can live their daily life and send kids to school with minimal restrictions. I completely disagree with this. This is the number one reason why I will not move away from a science believing/respecting area. I don't want the headache of people with lack of basic common sense on top of everything life throws at you. If the pandemic has taught us anything trusting science is amazing and that many people are willing to blatantly abuse it.
  • RobertRoberts 5y ago
    This seems to work well for both sides then. I wonder if there is a downside to people self-segregating based on belief systems so vehemently because of intolerance?
    • rpmisms 5y ago
      I'm perfectly happy living next to people who disagree with me viciously. Problem is, they always try to force it on me.
  • ryan93 5y ago
    The science shows driving your kids to upper class resume boosting events is more dangerous to kids than covid
    • yalogin 5y ago
      Can you elaborate or provide examples?
      • ryan93 5y ago
        Just saying the risk of covid for kids is so low it’s comparable to lots of other activities parents have no problem with
        • yalogin 5y ago
• willob33 5y ago
  This is manufacturing consent right here. It’s easily Googled; ~30 million people move each year. The CEO of Upwork is engaging in SEO. An academic in Canada is calling normal behavior a “great unmooring.” Then bail on any other discussion they had with said academic. Suburban developers with data from Mar 2020-2021 ignoring easily Googled fall 2021 data showing a reverse in the urban exodus. This article is SEO spam, ostensibly about a big deal, but their data is normal movement of the population, and outdated sampling, wrapped in grand language.
• porknubbins 5y ago
  I lived in a walkable city for 7 years and since moving to a 1950s style neighborhood do not really miss it. You can only have so many trips to the bakery, the coffee shop or the local bookstore until eventually its just your normal life and no more exciting than driving 5 min to the same thing. Plus a lot of the local places closed because of high rents and only chains or overpriced places tend to stick around.
• Kon-Peki 5y ago
  Hello all, it appears that a large portion of this article is based on this study: https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publications/cfed-district-data-briefs/cfddb-20210205-did-the-covid-19-pandemic-cause-an-urban-exodus.aspx https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publication... There is a lot of data and a lot of charts. This study has a data table that just makes me confused about the Economist article: > V. Change in Gross and Net Flows for Metro Areas with Populations Greater Than 500,000
• yboris 5y ago
  This year I moved from New Jersey to Michigan (since my job is now 100% remote). Homes in NJ are around $400k. In Michigan I bought a duplex for $160k. I could rent out the other side of the house, but instead we had our friends move in. We are 4 blocks from main street in a tiny town and enjoy the peace and quiet without obscene NJ traffic. This is an easier decision since I have a life partner and am not trying to meet new people or see new things. It's especially easier since we do not intend to have kids. I am baffled that some of my friends choose to live in Seattle where, if they buy a house, they would spend most of their working lives paying it off. While they would miss out on some big-city amenities if they moved out, they instead could have the ability to retire a few decades early.
• dhosek 5y ago
  I used to occasionally daydream about moving someplace rural or semi-rural where land and housing are cheap. When I got my first vaccine dose, it was difficult to impossible to get an appointment in the Chicago area. I managed to find one in Urbana. I drove down on a Sunday to get my shot. Along the way, I stopped at a McDonald's to use the bathroom. Coming out, I had someone berate me for wearing a mask and declare mask wearing to be selfishness (I would later discover from reading a blog post that he was mirroring language he'd heard on Fox News). I do not wish to live somewhere that my neighbors would be brainwashed by Fox News and engage in behaviors/have attitudes that would kill me. It may cost more to live in an urban liberal environment, but it's worth every penny.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  Spending from two to four hours each day in the car comuting means a few years from your life you will lose. I'd rather live in an apartment building and do more meaningful things in my life than having a big yard and drive a few hours every day.