Find a new city

This jumped out at me:<p>&gt; “I’m trans, so I need to live somewhere progressive so I feel safe day-to-day and don’t feel like I’m going to get beat up for using the wrong restroom.”<p>This is a pretty damn good reason to live somewhere like Seattle or Boston, and a pretty damn good reason not to live somewhere like (edit:) North Carolina or Tennessee or Georgia. The reality is that many of us are limited by not wanting to live in a city or state that basically wants us dead. The fact that tech companies tend to be clustered around progressive, blue areas is a major advantage.<p>It&#x27;s easy to say &quot;just move to the middle of nowhere!&quot; if you&#x27;re privileged enough to not worry about these things. But some of us kind of want to keep our asses safe and, honestly, alive.

Many New York artists talk about NYC as if it was cheap but it is simply not true. There is no other place in the US that concentrates so many different types of people. Patti Smith, David Byrne etc all benefitted from there being billionaires, millionaires, celebrities, thespians, high profile doctors, lawyers, and more than a century of civic dedication to arts and culture. There is a shared communal love and support for creative things in NY. Like all cities that grow, gentrification happens. But if you think the LES or east village was cheap in the 80s it&#x27;s because you were white and middle class. When this author speaks he&#x27;s talking to white middle class liberal arts types (like me!) and bemoaning the fact that getting direct access to world class culture isn&#x27;t &quot;cheap anymore&quot; when the reality is if you want that in NY now you move to crown heights. And there will be some myopic look back in 25 years saying the same shit about that place too.<p>Ask Patti Smith what happened to the Puerto Ricans who lived there before her. Was it too cheap for them?

I used to live in Nowhere, Florida, and would move back in a heartbeat, but from an employment standpoint it became too risky. Most places outside of The Usual Tech Hubs are one-horse towns when it comes to tech employment, major opportunity risk.<p>If you&#x27;re a software engineer and live in the Bay Area and suddenly lose your job, depending on the economy you&#x27;re probably in for a 1-6 month job search at local companies where you can show up for an interview at any moment&#x27;s notice. If you&#x27;re a software engineer and live in flyover country and suddenly lose your job, you better plan on moving somewhere else. Interviewing involves 2-5 hour plane trips all over the country, and then when you finally find something, you need to negotiate relocation costs or fork over $5-10K to move. The prospect of repeating that cycle is pretty unpleasant.<p>So we put up with 2 hour commutes, tiny homes, and sky-high cost of living, because that&#x27;s where the companies are.

For those looking for cheap cities to live, I&#x27;ve found Zillow&#x27;s data [1] on mortgage price to income ratio data [2] interesting.<p>Some choice datapoints:<p><pre><code> San Francisco, CA 9.1817795575535 Boston, MA 4.9264239374417 New York, NY 5.5458400782590 Detroit, MI 2.22905530728586 St. Louis, MO 2.4588523706753 </code></pre> I think the national average is around 3.1 and around 3.0 is considered &quot;healthy&quot; (your mortgage costs about 3x your yearly income).<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zillow.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zillow.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;data&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.zillowstatic.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;public&#x2F;Affordability_Wide_2016Q1_Public.csv" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.zillowstatic.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;public&#x2F;Affordability_...</a>

Tech is here because the money for tech is here. It started with the US Gov&#x27;t putting money into military bases and later Lockheed and other mil contractors. During and after WWII tax regulations changed in such a way that VC become more and more profitable, and the industry grew alongside the talent pool that was being drawn in.<p>This created a feedback loop of talent and money. But the money is the primary driver here.<p>It&#x27;s why if you&#x27;re an entertainer you go to LA (often after NYC), or go to NYC for finance.<p>Going somewhere cheap and being in a garage in a vacuum does nothing for you if the climate that allows something like the Homebrew Computer Club (or an underground music club, etc.) to exist isn&#x27;t there in place <i>already</i>. As much as it has done, the internet hasn&#x27;t wholly replaced that aspect of things yet.

I love the sentiment. Silicon Valley and NYC became what they are because of people hacking on things in garages &#x2F; shitty apartments. Now those shitty apartments cost $2,000&#x2F;month. The equivalent of those places, where things like Apple started, isn&#x27;t Silicon Valley and NYC. It&#x27;s places like Detroit. Or wherever people doing cool things decide to move and congregate.<p>Then again, it is still possible to live cheaply in NYC. My friend lives in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn for $450&#x2F;month. And there&#x27;s value in living in or near where the community is already strong. You just have to move out a bit further and live a bit grungier.

This idea that cities reach a point of maximum growth, become unaffordable, and should be abandoned by potential newcomers: this is currently true, but it&#x27;s a broken system, and it&#x27;s time we look at ways we can improve it.<p>When a city becomes unaffordable, when rents skyrocket-- those expenses are someone else&#x27;s windfalls. When people expect the value of real estate to rise and rise indefinitely-- those windfalls are someone else&#x27;s expenses.<p>I&#x27;ve come to believe that so much of these structural problems are essentially reducible to issues of land-use (property&#x2F;land taxes), but there is so little focus at present on reforming this.

This view ignores the benefits of the large cities.<p>The rents are high for a reason. You want to go there. And not just for the cultural opportunities. Most people want good jobs.<p>You can&#x27;t have everyone starting startups, or working remotely.<p>To put it another way, almost everything important and interesting you do will require other people.

For people looking for that 70s NYC like experience, with proximity to NYC, I HIGHLY suggest checking out the Albany &#x2F; Troy area.<p>Both are gritty little cities with a bunch of interesting people living there doing interesting shit, all for next to nothing. You can rent a townhouse for under a thousand &#x2F; month. Shit, you can BUY a gorgeous 19th century townhouse for under a 100k - the same thing that would be 3 million in the Brooklyn where Patti Smith and Robert Maplethorpe lived.<p>I&#x27;m not going to go on about how much there is to offer there, because I could do that for paragraphs. You should just go check it out for yourself.

I really enjoyed this article. I think that if there&#x27;s one thing that&#x27;s going to gut the creativity and character of our cities it&#x27;s going to be hugely increasing rents and housing prices that we&#x27;re seeing in almost all major urban centers.<p>&gt; Young folks: Forget New York City. Forget San Francisco. Forget Austin, Texas. Stay out of debt, live somewhere cheap, make something happen<p>&gt; This is pretty much what I was trying to say a few days ago, when I posted a series of Tweets that I thought were fairly uncontroversial, not to mention unoriginal:<p>A little off topic, but it&#x27;s sort of a sign of the state of Twitter today that an unoffensive, positive, and fairly thoughtful tweet like this one is enough to set off the Twitter hate machine (I think that&#x27;s what he&#x27;s implying happened here). Many users seem to be put in a concerted effort to read other people&#x27;s comments as uncharitably as they possibly can.

Everywhere is just a buncha kids trying to make it, until they do, then others want in, so they get there, copy everything, until they crowd others out, repeat the process.<p>Find a new game server.

While cost of rent is lower in nowheresville, the network effects are much, much lower too. There is definitely a benefit to living somewhere that has a thriving community around whatever it is you&#x27;re doing (software, tech, art, etc). Having only a small community runs the risk of stagnation.

This is a good article, in particular the first point that the &quot;super star&quot; cities were affordable places to live from the late 60s through the early 90s if you didn&#x27;t mind a pretty gritty situation. However, I don&#x27;t think you can recreate that situation easily in an affordable rust belt city.<p>The reason those cities were affordable at that time was white flight. The wealthy and middle class white population was moving to the suburbs, causing demand for housing to fall dramatically reducing costs (as well as the tax base, causing decay, increasing white flight). However the businesses that drove those cities did not leave. San Francisco was still a financial hub on the west cost. New York was still the center of finance and business for the entire country. So you had a place were creative people could gather and live affordably as well as an economy that produced enough excess to support the artists and musicians. (a struggling rust belt city doesn&#x27;t have that many coffee shops and no local money to buy art and pay cover charges and clubs)<p>I guess what I&#x27;m saying is that those times are gone. There are cities where artists artists &quot;are creating their own scene&quot;. New Orleans springs to mind, but those cities are getting expensive fast because there just isn&#x27;t the huge excess of housing there was during white flight.

Come to Omaha! Lots of talk about how you can&#x27;t find jobs or culture in small places, and talk of how the big cities are expensive for a reason. That may be true if you&#x27;re trying to be an actor, but Omaha has a thriving tech scene, extremely low unemployment, and one of the lowest costs of living of any major metro area. It&#x27;s safe, LGBT friendly, family friendly, great schools, and the people are nice and laid back.<p>There is a sweet spot between too big and expensive and too small and isolated. I have lived in NYC and there is nothing I&#x27;m missing in Omaha. Although the scale is obviously much different everything I want is within reach, and usually takes a lot less time to get to. Public transportation sucks, but it really is a great city otherwise and has some things NYC doesn&#x27;t (better beers, and steaks that are better and actually affordable).<p>There are others within this sweet spot. Minneapolis, the less expensive bits of Denver, Kansas City, and others I am less familiar with. Omaha is pretty much the cheapest of the cities I consider acceptable, but I encourage all of you to find your sweet spot city if you want to live well or cheap.

This really resonates with my choice to live in Albuquerque, NM.<p>Maybe San Francisco, New York, Austin, etc, are better, but (almost) everything those cities have we have too, just in fewer quantities, or more grounded, or both.<p>I would argue we have a certain cultural richness not found in cities dominated by exposed brick and a 1920s rough aesthetic complemented by modern accessories.<p>For starters, the state is home to 20+ separate nations that predate the United States.

He has a decent point. He is, perhaps, not saying it very well. It generally doesn&#x27;t work to use imperatives, like &quot;Find a new city.&quot; His point might go over better if it were framed more like &#x27;Artistic youth need a new option.&quot;<p>I totally get where he is coming from when he says you just need to move to someplace cheap. I am a big fan of doing what is within my means, regardless of whatever is going on in the world. But you have to be careful with how you frame such thoughts. Framing in a way that can be read as &quot;It is your fault your life sucks&quot; instead of &quot;It sucks that places like New York and San Francisco aren&#x27;t what they were a few decades ago. But maybe the piece within your hands is picking a new place to live that meets your needs better.&quot;

I agree with the sentiment of that tweet mentioned in the article, except that Austin isn&#x27;t really comparable to NYC or SF in terms of living expenses. Perhaps more expensive than the average American city these days, but definitely not in the stratosphere like those other two.

There&#x27;s a difference between attracting artists, and attracting engineers. Both thrive in communities surrounded by like minded people. The difference is entry level artists can&#x27;t live in high priced cities, so they <i>must</i> find new habitats. Otherwise art goes back to a hobby for the idle rich. Engineers can get by (if not save a ton) on entry level jobs in places like Silicon Valley or SF. It just takes a willingness to have roommates.<p>I left Manhattan because you had to be in a hedge fund to have a good life. For all the talk of Silicon Valley being expensive, you don&#x27;t need to add private school costs to a $6K rent.

I definitely understand the need for a progressive city -- I grew up in the midwest in a place that was decidedly not.<p>But Paul Graham gave a talk about how Pittsburgh could be the next startup city [1]. And price factors in for both artists and entrepreneurs.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;pgh.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;pgh.html</a>

Depends on the field and type of work.<p>If you work from home then sure, the location doesn&#x27;t matter much. But for more traditional occupations (pretty much anything other than creative work or location-independent business), big cities are better because they offer more opportunities and often higher paying jobs.

I used to live in Fargo, North Dakota, and might suggest that as an affordable town that embraces weirdos.

Cleveland is a great city