6 ms·

He missed the big picture in my opinion: in these cities, everything is cheaper. You can get a new-ish, nice 3000sqft house for 200-300k in a good to excellent

by danjayh 12y ago

He missed the big picture in my opinion: in these cities, everything is cheaper. You can get a new-ish, nice 3000sqft house for 200-300k in a good to excellent school district in my area (Grand Rapids, MI) ... for those of you on the west coast, take a look at the houses on grar.com to get an idea of what housing money gets you in the midwest. Gas? $1.75/gal right now, way less than some of the larger cities, especially on the west coast (even when gas prices were high, they were less high here). Food, movies, broadway shows, symphony, land, taxes, all of life's expenses are less. I used to live in a trendy 1200sqft condo in the city center (it had all the perks - rooftop deck with pool and hot tub, indoor parking, community room with pool tables, walking distance to bars/restaurants, etc.) for $1200/month. Now I live an 18 minute drive from work (13 minutes from downtown) on 11 acres, and I paid < $200k for my place (although it's only 1500sqft). If you have to take a pay cut for a software job from $150k in Silicon Valley to 75-100k here, you still come out with a much higher standard of living and more left over to save for retirement. What baffles me is that more tech companies haven't set up shop in these areas. Around here we have Michigan State University, Grand Valley State University, Calvin College, U of M, and many other schools with solid engineering programs cranking out a steady supply of good to excellent engineers. I think that other rust belt cities have similarly good schools. Everything you need to live is on sale from the perspective of an individual, and talent is on sale from the perspective of an employer. In Detroit there is much engineering talent available due to the presence of the automotive industry, and once again, everything in certain areas on the east side of the state is incredibly cheap. I guess the real question is what has failed for these cities - has leadership failed to attract industry, has the community failed to advertise the wonderful things happening in them (Grand Rapids, at least, is a good place to live), or are people just unwilling to put up with the winters?

organsnyder 12y ago
Fellow Grand Rapidian here. I think we've done quite well with self-promotion (as evidenced by the fact that we're on just about every "best place to live/work/retire/drink" list in the past five years). I paid just over $200k for 2500 sqft on 3/4 of an acre that's within easy walking distance of four transit lines. It was amusing to hear my friends home for the holidays talking about their $2k+ rents for tiny apartments in NYC and similar locales. Yes, they have access to far more entertainment options than I do, but I have yet to get anywhere close to utilizing all of the options we have here in GR, either. I also appreciate our easy access to water - I can remember once in my lifetime when we had any restrictions on water usage due to drought (lawn sprinkling was limited to alternating days, IIRC). Lake Michigan makes for a great reservoir. As one currently seeking a new job, I've also been disappointed with the number of truly top-notch tech employers in the area; there are a few, but less than we should have IMHO, given the potential client base in the area. Part of it is a function of the labor market, I'd guess—the talent pool here is not as large as it could be. I think that this will continue to improve as GR continues to cement its reputation as a "millenial-friendly" city and the healthcare sector continues to explode.
mahranch 12y ago
> or are people just unwilling to put up with the winters? This is slightly related; It may not be tomorrow, next week, or next decade, but eventually, there will come a time when climate change makes living in the west and/or southwest prohibitively (or increasingly) expensive. I'm not talking full abandonment often espoused by preppers, far from it. People will continue to live in the west, it's not going to disappear. However, it will become cheaper by orders of magnitude to live and do business elsewhere in the country. The biggest reason for this is that fresh water will be at a high premium. They're already experiencing drought issues in the west and southwest due to climate change, and I suspect places like Las Vegas will be the first to turn into a ghost town. Many people mistakenly believe that we can pump water around the country where its needed. While we have the technology, infrastructure and motivation to do it, we don't have the legal authority. You see, a few years ago, the Great Lake states and 2 Canadian Provinces signed the great lakes water compact. It's a (federally) legally binding contract which forbids exporting the water from the great lakes out of their respective states. In short, if you want cheap water, you're going to need to move back to the midwest/north east. I'm 1000% confident that the "rust belt" will rise again. It's only a matter of time.
- khuey 12y ago
  Desalination costs for human consumption in wealthy areas like coastal California are manageable. Especially since we're nowhere near the limits of residential conservation (single family homes will have to say goodbye to their green lawns). Climate change induced drought will increase costs of living in the coastal West, but it's not going to be orders of magnitude. Agriculture and inland cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix may very well be completely screwed though.
- dasil003 12y ago
  You might be right, but I wouldn't place any bets that the effects will be dramatic during my lifetime.
  - Pxtl 12y ago
    Maybe not working lifetimes, but I expect my grandkids to ask me some hard questions about what the hell we were doing if I live long enough to see a retirement home.
davidw 12y ago
Sounds like a great place for someone bootstrapping a business ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716248 ) I couldn't handle the lack of mountains or the winters, speaking just for myself. > What baffles me is that more tech companies haven't set up shop in these areas. Sounds like a good problem for an entrepreneur to come along and solve :-)
- walshemj 12y ago
  probably lack of access to capital and less liberal employment laws in particularly non competes
  - davidw 12y ago
    Access to capital would be a problem for people founding companies there, but it wouldn't be a problem for larger companies opening a branch.
    - walshemj 12y ago
      Well not every one wants to move to the middle of (no offence) nowhere - there are partners and kids to consider. Also a lot of US states have start up unfriendly labour laws.
      - davidw 12y ago
        > Well not every one wants to move to the middle of (no offence) nowhere - there are partners and kids to consider. Uhm, obviously, the people who want to can go to San Francisco. That they haven't all cleared out indicates that some people - quite a few of them, infact - don't want to live there, perhaps because of considerations such as partners and kids.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    While I oppose them, it's not clear how pronounced an effect non-compete laws have on companies locating/starting in a given state. Lots of states that are less restrictive than California on non-competes--such as Massachusetts which turned back another effort to restrict non-competes this year--still seem to do quite well.
jayess 12y ago
Fellow Grand Rapidian here as well and business attorney. We also have low taxes. Pass-through taxation for flow-through entities (partnerships, LLCs, S Corporations), a low income tax for C Corporations (1.8% if you have revenue below $20 million), low personal income tax (4.25%, non-graduated), low property taxes (for a homestead, generally about 1.5% of market value annually), and a reasonable sales tax (6% with no local sales taxes allowed). Also, it's easy as pie to form an LLC or corp -- it's a $50 fee and generally effective the same day you email the form and payment to the state. Annual renewal is $25.
- walshemj 12y ago
  Low property taxes :-) for the house I currently live in the UK that would be around $10k per annum its actualy about 1/10 of that.
maxsilver 12y ago
As another fellow Grand Rapids citizen, the above post is somewhat accurate, but ignores an awful lot of the problems that towns like ours have. (And that might not be obvious to folks on Hacker News) Everything is not cheaper. Depending on what your comparing to, roughly 30-40% of things are cheaper. But 30-60% of your wages get lost at local employers. Depending on how you spend your money, you can easily come out ahead. But there's also a good chunk of people who won't. Housing is cheaper. Land is cheaper. Parking is cheaper. Higher-end food / restaurants / entertainment is cheaper. This is all very true. However, Gas is not significantly cheaper. Home / Medical insurance is not significantly cheaper. Food / groceries is not cheaper. Medical bills are not cheaper. Consumer products, electronics, automobiles are not any cheaper. Utilities are higher. Maintenance costs on houses and automobiles are much much higher. Your student loans actually jump (as a percentage of your monthly costs) out here. Taxes might be higher in GR too, depending on where you come from. (I think it's higher than Seattle, for instance, which has no income tax, but higher sales tax than GR does) Plus, the bad winters (which I don't mind, but I understand many people will). You also loose nearly a lot of the benefits of real cities. For instance, Grand Rapids has no real public transit of any kind (we have a single commuter bus, that only goes from downtown to a run down part of town). To compare, GR has 25% of the population of Minneapolis, but less than 10% of the public transit that Minneapolis offers. You have to own at least one car in Grand Rapids. The job market for technology is competitive, but not nearly as competitive as it is in real cities. So wages are lower than normal. More important than that, there's also there's very little room for improvement. If your happy just programming for twenty years straight -- GR is great. But if you'd like to get more autonomy, or lead projects, or similar, the opportunities for that here are very very small. Do you want to someday start your own business? Watch out -- non-competes from your previous employer are still heavily enforced in Michigan, and unlike California, there's no state-level protection for you against this. Do you have a spouse that works? Because while technology is hiring in Grand Rapids, most of the other industries are still significantly depressed. You'll see articles about how there's job growth in Grand Rapids, but if you read the fine print, you'll notice they're actually press releases from Manpower -- they're mostly just minimum-ish-wage temp jobs. GR is still heavily religious and heavily conservative. For some people, this can be very off-putting. For instance, legalized discrimination almost became law last month - http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/05/1349672/-Michigan-House-passes-anti-LGBT-right-to-discriminate-law http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/05/1349672/-Michigan-H... . And I have literally been pressed about my religious affiliation in an interview for a programming position in Grand Rapids. There's enough open-minded companies that this won't be a complete roadblock in technology, but it cuts down on the available employers in a market that's already very small. > has leadership failed to attract industry, has the community failed to advertise the wonderful things happening in them (Grand Rapids, at least, is a good place to live), or are people just unwilling to put up with the winters? It's not that the community isn't pushing the wonderful things happening -- I think they are. Things like our extensive amount of meetup groups, or the work of GR Makers are wonderful additions to the community. Most folks here just like to ignore all the things that still aren't happening. Even if we're doing the best we can in GR (and I believe we are -- I've seen lots of people doing amazing things) we're still one or two decades behind real cities. People who aren't from here, are less skewed in their perception of where GR is at. They see things a lot more clearly than folks who are in Michigan. You'll notice, in the article, they still work in DC. They're getting the best benefits of both worlds in their situation (cheaper living in Baltimore, good careers in DC). You usually can't do that in Grand Rapids. You get most of the "small town" benefits, but you have to loose nearly all the "big city" benefits. (Unless you have remote work, but then you could choose from literally any small town to live in) - - - I'm not trying to trash GR. There's a lot of benefits to it. But there's a lot of drawbacks too -- it's not an obvious winning decision. You have to weigh whether the drawbacks are worth the cost savings. And for a large number of people/companies, I suspect they aren't.
shanusmagnus 12y ago
Dunno how tongue-in-cheek you're being, but as a Minnesotan my perspective is that people in warmer parts of the country truly cannot fathom enduring our winters. Which is a point of view that many of us here actively encourage, but even so, its deterrence value is puzzling considering the other quality-of-life arguments.
geogra4 12y ago
I'm living in Detroit (or the Detroit area, I guess, not Detroit proper). The issues with working in software out here in the (so called) hinterlands is few-fold. 1. You can work for companies in the traditional rust belt industrial base, but companies like the Big3, Delphi, etc (I'm sure whirlpool and Amway are like this out in western Mich). seem to be just as happy outsourcing IT to the lowest bidder. And why wouldn't they? It's not their core business. GM is trying to change that but their job descriptions still mostly read like the kind that ask for 8+ years in a specific esoteric technology so they can claim they can't find anyone and will just go with an H1-B. 2. You can work for companies that aren't in any way related to the big names. Smaller software companies in the 50-500 employee range exist around the area. The thing is it can be kind of lonely working at one of these places because there's not a huge industry of producing software to sell out here. There aren't a whole lot of them. And the benefits are certainly not Silicon Valley, though the pay adjusted for the cost of living is still pretty good. This is the kind of place that I work in. 3. You can work for a company based elsewhere with a branch that's local. These kinds of jobs can be hard to find since companies don't usually advertise their secondary and tertiary locations. Plus working in the small branch of BIGCO(TM) may mean that you will have the choice of having to either find a new job or move when they close that branch down. There's also the issue that you may not be able to really grow professionally at a small branch office. 4. You can work remote. I am starting to perhaps explore this option.I think there's lots of promise here. But it's still hard to search and find remote jobs. And I'm not sure that remote employees are treated equal to in office ones in a lot of employers when it comes to career progression. 5. There is a local startup scene here. Both in Ann Arbor and Detroit with their own incubators, and I'm sure there are ones strewn about the rest of the rust belt. I think this also holds a lot of promise. But I'm not sure we're there just yet. I don't know if there's been any truly huge exits for startups native to the rust belt.
alistairSH 12y ago
"...are people just unwilling to put up with the winters?" For me, it's not the winter, but the darkness. Those short winter days are a real drag. Even here in DC, the shorter days are depressing. I don't think I could deal with days that are shorter (even with upside of the longer days that come in summer).

by danjayh 12y ago

organsnyder 12y ago

Fellow Grand Rapidian here. I think we've done quite well with self-promotion (as evidenced by the fact that we're on just about every "best place to live/work/retire/drink" list in the past five years). I paid just over $200k for 2500 sqft on 3/4 of an acre that's within easy walking distance of four transit lines. It was amusing to hear my friends home for the holidays talking about their $2k+ rents for tiny apartments in NYC and similar locales. Yes, they have access to far more entertainment options than I do, but I have yet to get anywhere close to utilizing all of the options we have here in GR, either. I also appreciate our easy access to water - I can remember once in my lifetime when we had any restrictions on water usage due to drought (lawn sprinkling was limited to alternating days, IIRC). Lake Michigan makes for a great reservoir. As one currently seeking a new job, I've also been disappointed with the number of truly top-notch tech employers in the area; there are a few, but less than we should have IMHO, given the potential client base in the area. Part of it is a function of the labor market, I'd guess—the talent pool here is not as large as it could be. I think that this will continue to improve as GR continues to cement its reputation as a "millenial-friendly" city and the healthcare sector continues to explode.

mahranch 12y ago

> or are people just unwilling to put up with the winters? This is slightly related; It may not be tomorrow, next week, or next decade, but eventually, there will come a time when climate change makes living in the west and/or southwest prohibitively (or increasingly) expensive. I'm not talking full abandonment often espoused by preppers, far from it. People will continue to live in the west, it's not going to disappear. However, it will become cheaper by orders of magnitude to live and do business elsewhere in the country. The biggest reason for this is that fresh water will be at a high premium. They're already experiencing drought issues in the west and southwest due to climate change, and I suspect places like Las Vegas will be the first to turn into a ghost town. Many people mistakenly believe that we can pump water around the country where its needed. While we have the technology, infrastructure and motivation to do it, we don't have the legal authority. You see, a few years ago, the Great Lake states and 2 Canadian Provinces signed the great lakes water compact. It's a (federally) legally binding contract which forbids exporting the water from the great lakes out of their respective states. In short, if you want cheap water, you're going to need to move back to the midwest/north east. I'm 1000% confident that the "rust belt" will rise again. It's only a matter of time.

khuey 12y ago
Desalination costs for human consumption in wealthy areas like coastal California are manageable. Especially since we're nowhere near the limits of residential conservation (single family homes will have to say goodbye to their green lawns). Climate change induced drought will increase costs of living in the coastal West, but it's not going to be orders of magnitude. Agriculture and inland cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix may very well be completely screwed though.
dasil003 12y ago
You might be right, but I wouldn't place any bets that the effects will be dramatic during my lifetime.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  Maybe not working lifetimes, but I expect my grandkids to ask me some hard questions about what the hell we were doing if I live long enough to see a retirement home.

davidw 12y ago

Sounds like a great place for someone bootstrapping a business ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716248 ) I couldn't handle the lack of mountains or the winters, speaking just for myself. > What baffles me is that more tech companies haven't set up shop in these areas. Sounds like a good problem for an entrepreneur to come along and solve :-)

walshemj 12y ago
probably lack of access to capital and less liberal employment laws in particularly non competes
- davidw 12y ago
  Access to capital would be a problem for people founding companies there, but it wouldn't be a problem for larger companies opening a branch.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Well not every one wants to move to the middle of (no offence) nowhere - there are partners and kids to consider. Also a lot of US states have start up unfriendly labour laws.
    - davidw 12y ago
      > Well not every one wants to move to the middle of (no offence) nowhere - there are partners and kids to consider. Uhm, obviously, the people who want to can go to San Francisco. That they haven't all cleared out indicates that some people - quite a few of them, infact - don't want to live there, perhaps because of considerations such as partners and kids.
- ghaff 12y ago
  While I oppose them, it's not clear how pronounced an effect non-compete laws have on companies locating/starting in a given state. Lots of states that are less restrictive than California on non-competes--such as Massachusetts which turned back another effort to restrict non-competes this year--still seem to do quite well.

jayess 12y ago

Fellow Grand Rapidian here as well and business attorney. We also have low taxes. Pass-through taxation for flow-through entities (partnerships, LLCs, S Corporations), a low income tax for C Corporations (1.8% if you have revenue below $20 million), low personal income tax (4.25%, non-graduated), low property taxes (for a homestead, generally about 1.5% of market value annually), and a reasonable sales tax (6% with no local sales taxes allowed). Also, it's easy as pie to form an LLC or corp -- it's a $50 fee and generally effective the same day you email the form and payment to the state. Annual renewal is $25.

walshemj 12y ago
Low property taxes :-) for the house I currently live in the UK that would be around $10k per annum its actualy about 1/10 of that.

maxsilver 12y ago

As another fellow Grand Rapids citizen, the above post is somewhat accurate, but ignores an awful lot of the problems that towns like ours have. (And that might not be obvious to folks on Hacker News) Everything is not cheaper. Depending on what your comparing to, roughly 30-40% of things are cheaper. But 30-60% of your wages get lost at local employers. Depending on how you spend your money, you can easily come out ahead. But there's also a good chunk of people who won't. Housing is cheaper. Land is cheaper. Parking is cheaper. Higher-end food / restaurants / entertainment is cheaper. This is all very true. However, Gas is not significantly cheaper. Home / Medical insurance is not significantly cheaper. Food / groceries is not cheaper. Medical bills are not cheaper. Consumer products, electronics, automobiles are not any cheaper. Utilities are higher. Maintenance costs on houses and automobiles are much much higher. Your student loans actually jump (as a percentage of your monthly costs) out here. Taxes might be higher in GR too, depending on where you come from. (I think it's higher than Seattle, for instance, which has no income tax, but higher sales tax than GR does) Plus, the bad winters (which I don't mind, but I understand many people will). You also loose nearly a lot of the benefits of real cities. For instance, Grand Rapids has no real public transit of any kind (we have a single commuter bus, that only goes from downtown to a run down part of town). To compare, GR has 25% of the population of Minneapolis, but less than 10% of the public transit that Minneapolis offers. You have to own at least one car in Grand Rapids. The job market for technology is competitive, but not nearly as competitive as it is in real cities. So wages are lower than normal. More important than that, there's also there's very little room for improvement. If your happy just programming for twenty years straight -- GR is great. But if you'd like to get more autonomy, or lead projects, or similar, the opportunities for that here are very very small. Do you want to someday start your own business? Watch out -- non-competes from your previous employer are still heavily enforced in Michigan, and unlike California, there's no state-level protection for you against this. Do you have a spouse that works? Because while technology is hiring in Grand Rapids, most of the other industries are still significantly depressed. You'll see articles about how there's job growth in Grand Rapids, but if you read the fine print, you'll notice they're actually press releases from Manpower -- they're mostly just minimum-ish-wage temp jobs. GR is still heavily religious and heavily conservative. For some people, this can be very off-putting. For instance, legalized discrimination almost became law last month - http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/05/1349672/-Michigan-House-passes-anti-LGBT-right-to-discriminate-law http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/05/1349672/-Michigan-H... . And I have literally been pressed about my religious affiliation in an interview for a programming position in Grand Rapids. There's enough open-minded companies that this won't be a complete roadblock in technology, but it cuts down on the available employers in a market that's already very small. > has leadership failed to attract industry, has the community failed to advertise the wonderful things happening in them (Grand Rapids, at least, is a good place to live), or are people just unwilling to put up with the winters? It's not that the community isn't pushing the wonderful things happening -- I think they are. Things like our extensive amount of meetup groups, or the work of GR Makers are wonderful additions to the community. Most folks here just like to ignore all the things that still aren't happening. Even if we're doing the best we can in GR (and I believe we are -- I've seen lots of people doing amazing things) we're still one or two decades behind real cities. People who aren't from here, are less skewed in their perception of where GR is at. They see things a lot more clearly than folks who are in Michigan. You'll notice, in the article, they still work in DC. They're getting the best benefits of both worlds in their situation (cheaper living in Baltimore, good careers in DC). You usually can't do that in Grand Rapids. You get most of the "small town" benefits, but you have to loose nearly all the "big city" benefits. (Unless you have remote work, but then you could choose from literally any small town to live in) - - - I'm not trying to trash GR. There's a lot of benefits to it. But there's a lot of drawbacks too -- it's not an obvious winning decision. You have to weigh whether the drawbacks are worth the cost savings. And for a large number of people/companies, I suspect they aren't.

shanusmagnus 12y ago

Dunno how tongue-in-cheek you're being, but as a Minnesotan my perspective is that people in warmer parts of the country truly cannot fathom enduring our winters. Which is a point of view that many of us here actively encourage, but even so, its deterrence value is puzzling considering the other quality-of-life arguments.

geogra4 12y ago

I'm living in Detroit (or the Detroit area, I guess, not Detroit proper). The issues with working in software out here in the (so called) hinterlands is few-fold. 1. You can work for companies in the traditional rust belt industrial base, but companies like the Big3, Delphi, etc (I'm sure whirlpool and Amway are like this out in western Mich). seem to be just as happy outsourcing IT to the lowest bidder. And why wouldn't they? It's not their core business. GM is trying to change that but their job descriptions still mostly read like the kind that ask for 8+ years in a specific esoteric technology so they can claim they can't find anyone and will just go with an H1-B. 2. You can work for companies that aren't in any way related to the big names. Smaller software companies in the 50-500 employee range exist around the area. The thing is it can be kind of lonely working at one of these places because there's not a huge industry of producing software to sell out here. There aren't a whole lot of them. And the benefits are certainly not Silicon Valley, though the pay adjusted for the cost of living is still pretty good. This is the kind of place that I work in. 3. You can work for a company based elsewhere with a branch that's local. These kinds of jobs can be hard to find since companies don't usually advertise their secondary and tertiary locations. Plus working in the small branch of BIGCO(TM) may mean that you will have the choice of having to either find a new job or move when they close that branch down. There's also the issue that you may not be able to really grow professionally at a small branch office. 4. You can work remote. I am starting to perhaps explore this option.I think there's lots of promise here. But it's still hard to search and find remote jobs. And I'm not sure that remote employees are treated equal to in office ones in a lot of employers when it comes to career progression. 5. There is a local startup scene here. Both in Ann Arbor and Detroit with their own incubators, and I'm sure there are ones strewn about the rest of the rust belt. I think this also holds a lot of promise. But I'm not sure we're there just yet. I don't know if there's been any truly huge exits for startups native to the rust belt.

alistairSH 12y ago

"...are people just unwilling to put up with the winters?" For me, it's not the winter, but the darkness. Those short winter days are a real drag. Even here in DC, the shorter days are depressing. I don't think I could deal with days that are shorter (even with upside of the longer days that come in summer).