I’ve lived in a few different places on the East Coast, but have been in NorCal for quite some time now, and I can’t imagine living elsewhere. We have, [almost] literally, everything within driving distance. We have an economy that bounces back stronger every time we have a recession. Air pollution was kind of shitty when i moved here in the late 70s, but its much better now, even with more people. And… the weather is almost always near-perfect. And… none of my family lives anywhere near here.
And, although I live in what might be one of the most heavily densely populated areas of the country, there is open wilderness not even a mile from my house unlike you would find almost anywhere on the East Coast except maybe Maine.
A similar situation applies for LGBT people, who are often willing to spend more, and live in worse conditions, to live in a community where the political and social situation is friendly rather than hostile.
((Just popping in to note that this sort of response points more to interviewer’s lack of restaurant experience than actual available options. We used to drive to Johnson city back when we lived in SW Virginia (about an hour one way), just to go to Carrabba’s and shop around a bit. It’s got a very decent restaurant selection for the area.))
I’m with you on that, John. I’ve spent some time in California (mostly northern Cal) and always felt regret at having to leave. In terms of climate and culture, everything else being equal I’d pick it as the #1 place to live in the world.
Mind you, I wouldn’t pick San Francisco itself. It’s a wonderful place to visit, but I’d want to settle further inland, in some place like Palo Alto (which is no cheaper, as I understand). I feel the same way about New York – I’ve had some great times there, but I couldn’t see myself living there, even though I know folks who love living in Manhattan and wouldn’t leave it for the world. If I had some high-paid job in Manhattan I’d do the Letterman thing and go live in Connecticut.
She’s a reference librarian for a Defense Department component. It’s subject matter that’s hard to find elsewhere. There are just a lot of those opportunities in DC, at agencies, news organizations, some NGOs, all the law firms, plus of course the Library of Congress. Also, librarian is one of the fields where the feds pay more than the typical private sector job, presumably because they are generally looking for a specialty.
To be fair, that’s a really nice apartment in a reasonably awesome South of Market part of town–walking distance to some high-end restaurants and theaters.
San Francisco is heading in a really awkward direction because all the landlords figured out a while back that if they charged more, people would pay it. All the upper-management types who couldn’t afford houses in Orinda any more got apartments in San Francisco, and over the course of the last 30-40 years, many of the working-class people have had to move out to the East Bay. They’re moving farther and farther out and eventually they’ll be getting jobs in Walnut Creek or Pleasanton because it’s so much closer to home that the lower pay of a not-in-SF-job makes it worth while, and at that point, all those business in SF are going to be stuck trying to pay somebody minimum wage to wash dishes and it’s going to be a big mess.
I understand this, but it seems like there are LGBT communities in most sizable cities. Is a particular city’s LGBT culture different enough to (as my original question) place one’s self in financial hardship? I looked up the LGBT information for Dallas, and found that an area called Oak Lawn is a fairly large gay community, and was (apparently) selected the best gay neighborhood in the US by a magazine called “Out Traveler”. According to Google, this community is 20 minutes drive from the random rental house I selected in my question. FWIW: I don’t live in Lancaster but I chose it for my example because it was close to a large trucking terminal, and I thought driving a rig was a fairly low-barrier-to-entry job that still provides benefits. It turns out it’s fairly close to Dallas’ large LGBT area too (a lucky accident on my part).
I with you on this one. Some around here may remember posts about spending a small fortune getting my eldest into the airline biz. After buying him a small plane, and funding all the fuel and classes, he got hired as a regional pilot 4 years ago, and upgraded to Captain last year. In the meantime I’ve been racing my own industry to remain employable in the programming world, and find myself in a most confusing delimma. I’m programming flight control software for unmanned and completely autonomous air vehicles. This is an advanced research project, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m developing the very thing that will put my own kid out of work (and wasting all my effort and $$ to get him there).
It does look nice, as well as spacious, with an upscale kitchen. But the fact that this exorbitantly priced apparently spacious and trendy place is a one-bedroom one-bath apartment tells us a lot about the nature of the demographic that is currently overwhelming San Francisco (see my comment about the San Francisco 2.0 documentary) – namely what used to be called yuppies. This is not an apartment that is going to be rented by a middle-class family with two school-age children who are going to join the PTA and be concerned about the quality of the public school system or the quality of parks and playgrounds. They are going to be more concerned about the proximity of trendy restaurants and Porsche dealerships.
I live in a high cost city where I was raised. All my friends live here. My job is here, and it would be really hard to transfer it to a mid-sized city. The rent is expensive but I don’t have to buy a car. If I thought transit cost too much I could buy a bike and use it when weather is good. (A car has a monthly cost, plus gas, plus insurance, plus maybe parking, any of which is more expensive than a transit pass. That would be a big chunk of rent.)
As it happens I can’t drive, so moving to a smaller town just isn’t happening.
Some people just seem to really like certain cities but lots of people also make the mistake of believing that everyone thinks like they do. I live in the greater Boston area but very rarely ever go into the city itself just because I don’t like it that much. I used to live there in my 20’s and it was fine then but it was time to get the hell out of there when it was time to have kids. I find it overly expensive and inconvenient in general. My life has never revolved around restaurants or museums and I don’t like crowds of people.
I have most of it worked out now because I live in a smaller exurb (one of the safest places in the country) and reverse commute to an even more rural area. I love to travel and experience things in other cities but I have very simple needs for my day to day life that could be met by almost any backwater place in the country. Is there a gas station, a grocery store and internet access? If yes then we are all set. Amazon Prime can deliver all the same shit there as you can get in NYC much cheaper and I know how to cook better than most restaurants. I guess I am lucky in that respect.
I think it is funny how many people think a Dallas suburb is some type of cultural backwater. Much of my family lives there and the Dallas-Fort Worth MSA is the fourth bigger metropolitan area in the country just behind Chicago and well above the Bay area, Boston and Washington DC. If someone can’t find something that suits them there, that says a lot about them. I would kill myself if I was ever sentenced to life on Manhattan Island. The Dallas area wouldn’t be my first pick either despite my mother’s delusions but that is only because it is way too big. Still, you can get a killer house there for a whole lot less money than Los Angeles or most similar places and there are plenty of jobs in every field.
LGBT communities vary from place to place, and perhaps more importantly, so do the straight community’s feelings about LGBT people. I’m not familiar with the Oak Lawn neighborhood, but while it may be very nice, Texas law does not protect LGBT people from employment or housing discrimination.
ETA: Wikipedia tells me that the city of Dallas does have anti-discrimination laws that protect LGBT people, but that these are not actually enforced. I don’t know anything more about the subject than that.
My brother lives in LA, in one of the most expensive areas in the country, but he works in Hollywood. He makes a really good living as a CGI artist. He’s not chasing a dream, he’s actually living it. He couldn’t do it anywhere else. He used to live in an apartment with a huge monthly tag, but he just bought a house with his wife, and now that it’s an investment, it actually makes a lot of sense. It’s really expensive, but the resale value is good as well.
Not to mention that my brother makes a good living. A big chunk of his income goes to his mortgage, but he can afford it. It’s sort of ironic. He makes unimaginable amounts of money for my part of the country, but for where he lives, it just plain old middle class.
I know NYC & not SF so much but there’s a vibrancy in NYC that doesn’t exist in smaller cities & especially outside of the heart of the city.
One doesn’t need a car (whether you don’t want one because you’re green or can’t have one {DUI suspension?}), it’s easy to walk / public transit / taxi wherever one wants to go & at all hours of the day/night. The public transit near me runs very limited, if at all after midnight. When we were kicked off the NYC subway at 4:30 am due to an emergency (person on the tracks; never found out if it was a fall or jumper) we walked up to the street & immediately hailed a cab; try doing that in the 'burbs. Also, as intimated above, if one’s transit costs are only a monthly pass, one can afford to spend more on housing because they don’t have a car payment/insurance/repairs/parking.
One can get any type of food (almost always delivered, too). There’s museums & theater & opportunities that just don’t exist in smaller communities. It’s not for everyone, but for a portion of the population it’s great.
As an anecdote, my cousin lived on a busy main / 4-lane arterial street while I grew up on a quiet, residential one. She spent a night at my house & hated it - it was too quiet for her to sleep. When I spent the night there; I hated it because it was too noisy for me to sleep with cars constantly driving by.
Again, people have very different preferences. I love driving and hate public transportation or even cabs. Paying for driving my own vehicle has never even been a question. I would pay more if I needed to. Not being able to drive myself whenever and wherever I want sounds awfully like a handicap to me and I don’t know why some people inflict that on themselves intentionally.
As for the “vibrancy”, that is a double-edged sword. I used to live in New Orleans which has a very strong culture of its own that even New York and San Francisco do not have in some ways. I found it exhausting and never want to live there again even though I love to visit for a few days. The same is true for most famous cities. It is fine to go and then get out but I don’t need to stay there forever.
In my experience, most people in famous cities rarely or never do the things their cities are famous for. How often do you think the average New Yorker goes to the Met, Broadway or the Statue of Liberty? Almost never. I have lived in the Boston area for 20 years and have never walked the Freedom Trail, been to the Isabella Stuart Gardener museum, the USS Constitution or the Museum of Modern Art. OTOH, I have probably gone to more attractions in San Francisco than the average San Franciscan has simply because I have gone there on vacation and made it a point to.
I was slightly wrong on that when I fact-checked again but it is still fairly close. It is about 7 million for the Bay Area if you define it generously and 6.5 million for the Dallas-Forth-Worth area. The main point still stands though. There is nothing small about the Dallas area. It is ridiculous to think a Dallas suburb is in a cultural backwater. It is true you have to drive to go to museums, restaurants or anything else but the same thing is largely true of L.A. There are a few walkable communities but you need a car for the vast majority of it.
I’m not a city person, but I could live in SF for a few years. It’s not your typical city. I lived in Palo Alto when I first moved out here, and it’s quite nice. Frankly, though, I like living closer to the hills and Downtown PA is right in the middle of the “El Camino Sprawl” (pardon the bilingual redundancy) that runs from SJ up to SF. I still spend quite a bit of time there, though.
Not sure if I’d like living in NY unless I was insanely rich. I enjoy visits, but there’s nothing like being able to pop up to Napa or Sonoma for the weekend. Or 3 hours to Tahoe. Or just across the GG Bridge for the Marin Coast.
SF is becoming the playground for young, childless techies. As you noted, above, that is changing the character quite a bit, but culturally it’s still incredibly diverse and active.
To answer the core question in this thread, a major factor is geography. Most of the really expensive areas in the U.S. in the world are geographically constrained. That especially applies to Manhattan and Hong Kong (islands) as well as coastal cities like Boston, San Francisco and to a lesser extent, Los Angeles.
Port cities tend to have a varied culture due to their history but their isn’t much inherently good or bad about them otherwise. They simply just run out of new land and the law of supply and demand kicks in. That is especially true in San Francisco, Boston, NYC. Plenty of people buy properties at huge prices just to knock them right down just because they want the square footage (not acreage because that is just crazy).
The Dallas area isn’t like that. There is a virtually limitless amount of land stretching in all directions with much more for the taking. That limits the housing prices to cost of construction plus a cheap lot which is a fraction of what it would cost in other cities even for a McMansion. The downside is that the area is geographically huge with nothing to stop it in any direction. I learned to translate my mother’s terms. “Down the street” means 30 minutes by car and “Across town” can mean up to two hours and 60 miles one way. That seems to be typical there. The housing prices are very cheap and jobs are plentiful and fairly well paying but you better get used to spending a whole lot of time in cars.
