Ask HN: Where to move within US? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where to move within US?

17 pointscodegeek38 comments

Tired of living in the Expensive East Coast and specifically NJ. Everything is so expensive while the infrastructure is so shitty.

My wife and I have been contemplating moving to a different state within US and would love to get your opinions. We have 2 toddlers but really no other huge requirement.

We have looked at Texas, Florida and even Georgia. Warmer weather, not much snow and low taxes. What else ?

Note: We have lived in HongKong when we had no kids and absolutely loved it. But with kids in equation, we want to stay within the US for now.

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A lot of people are moving to Austin, Portland, Seattle, and Denver/Boulder. No state income tax in Austin or Seattle, no sales tax in Portland. Home prices are rising in all of these areas, but are a bargain compared to the Bay Area or NYC. And you can still see a show, go to great restaurants, meet interesting people, find a good job, and have a livable amount of space for a family.

A place where you can get a cheap, large home, and pay no state income tax is Vancouver, Washington. The city itself isn't very interesting, but you are across the bridge from Portland, where there is a lot of great food and drink, and you can shop with no sales tax. You will rarely see snow, but you will see a lot of clouds/drizzle for much of the year, which can take its toll.

Austin has a lot of tech jobs and is sunny for much of the year, but brutally hot for at least 3-4 months if you aren't used to it. It's a fun place to live.

If you want more of a small nature town feel, you could try Bend, Oregon or Boulder, Colorado.

I have lived in Portland, Seattle, and Austin, and spent a lot of time working in SF, so let me know if you want more specifics on anything.

Have you considered somewhere near Research Triangle Park in North Carolina? You've got a few mid sized cities to choose from or you can buy an acreage if that's what you're into. There are several tech companies around here as well as large universities. I haven't looked at the start up scene but I've heard there are a few startups based around here.

yea that option is also viable. Thx. Will look into it.

Consider Atlanta. Plenty of tech companies (although less startup-oriented and more corporate; whether you see that as good or bad is something you haven't elaborated on). Everything is cheap and the infrastructure is shitty. When it threatens snow flurries a couple times a year everybody freaks out and stays in and it's really easy to get to work. Summers aren't too bad if you're used to NJ; it doesn't really get _hotter_ here but it stays hot _longer_, and everything is air-conditioned well.

With two toddlers, public schools may be something worth considering. In both Florida and Georgia all school districts are at the county level. [1] This means that even the best local public schools are subject to county politics in regard to funding and curriculum and staffing. Consequently, while a particular school can do some things via PTA, there isn't really fine grained local control [e.g. people can't choose to tax themselves to make school funding a priority].

On the other hand, if public schools aren't a priority, then it's a bit different, I suppose. Keep in mind that Florida has low taxes and low services. Compared with NJ, that's probably true of Georgia and Texas, too.

North Carolina is another option worth considering if you're moving south away from snow.

[1]: My recollection is that Texas has school districts at the municipal level. You can google it up to verify.

Texas school districts are independent of any other body with one exception: Stafford MSD (southwest of Houston), which is municipal. Some are county-wide. Some cover large territories of low density ranchland. Some don't even cover one city.

In Georgia _most_ school districts are at the county level. But in some cases a city has a school district independent of the surrounding county - often if not always this is the county seat. In the Atlanta area, at least, Atlanta, Decatur, and Marietta have separate schools from the surrounding counties. (In the case of Decatur, this fact explains a lot of the higher property values there compared to adjacent unincorporated areas of DeKalb County.)

Arizona gets a bad rep as super hot, but Tucson is not nearly as hot due to being slightly higher altitude. Also, the government tends to be "smaller" and less intrusive than other states such as say Illinois. I lived there 2 years when stationed at Ft Huachuca during my UAV training, loved the state and would live there again if given a chance.

The Raleigh/Durham/Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina is nice: lots of tech, good weather, and salaries seem pretty good.

Cannot edit the text anymore. Just wanted to mention that I have a bootstrapped product that I run and ideally would love to stay closer to startup ecosystem. Of course, California is out of question again due to the excessive cost of living.

Austin has a huge startup culture, the Mayor of Chicago is trying really hard to bootstrap a similar ecosystem with tax incentives, and Portland is really just a smaller and slightly cheaper SF.

I would say Portland, Austin, and Seattle.

For startup ecosystem, Seattle probably has the best followed by Austin and then Portland.

For cost of living, Seattle is the most expensive. I'm not sure about Austin but Portland has been increasing the past couple years.

If Seattle is a choice and you are planning to enroll your toddlers in the public school system when they're older you might want to track what's happening with the public school teachers.

Just speaking as a parent, which probably makes me a minority in this conversation.

It really depends on where in California. The Bay Area is exorbitant but Sacramento is quite reasonable in comparison. It has good schools and it's a 90 min drive to San Francisco. And I do mean drive... public transportation between metropolitan areas in CA is pretty much useless.

But beware, the summers are hot, and quite long. We are in currently the middle of a 4-day 100°+ heat wave. The winters are way milder than you have seen in NJ, some frost early in the morning but no snow.

What convinced you California is out of the question?

If anything was possible, would you want to live in the Bay area, find a co-founder, and grow the bootstrapped product into a company?

I say this because your comment is contradictory. You "just" wanted to mention something important to you that may be frightening. And then you doubled up trying to convince us the entire of California, which includes the expensive Bay Area and all the other inexpensive areas, is "out of the question".

I think you want to start a company, and it's frightening as it should be.

You only live once. The choice is yours.

Boise, ID. Very, very cheap to rent anything (whatever you're thinking for an amount that's "very cheap", cut it in half and you can probably find something nice around Boise for that amount). Groceries are pretty inexpensive, and everyone is very friendly. Cable One has 100Mbps connections for $100/mo ($75/mo for first three), and the schools are adequate if you're willing to encourage your kids to learn more and be proactive about their education on their own. It's a great place to grow up, and it's a great place to live and work. Highly recommend it.

If Boise is too small for you, pretty much anywhere in the Pacific NW is a good option. If I didn't live in Boise, I'd move to Portland.

How are employment opportunities in Boise? Only companies I'm aware of are Micron and HP.

There's a ton of smaller tech companies here. Balihoo, Clearwater Analytics, FFW, Bodybuilding.com to name a few. I've lived here all of my professional life and haven't ever had a problem finding work (either local or remote).

Since you mention children, I feel obligated to say that imho as a Texan parent, Texas public schools are a travesty. Even the good school districts are hampered by the nonsense the state gov pushes down (e.g. just google "texas textbook controversy" and ... pick a year).

It's for this reason that we're looking at leaving Austin, even though it is otherwise quite a nice city, before our kids hit school age.

Curious why you didn't mention your professions. That's the most important consideration.

One thing is for sure, the East Coast / NY metro does suck if you're not incredibly wealthy. Quality of life is so poor. If I can't get into an upper income bracket while here I'll be out the door soon.

Don't move to Georgia (I assume when considering Georgia you meant Atlanta or suburb of Atlanta).

Pros: Low cost of living, lots of space relative to other places, people are probably friendlier than they are in NJ.

Cons: Traffic is absolutely horrendous (only LA has worse traffic), high crime (in the city--it varies by suburb), really hot and humid summers, terrible mass transit (combine that with terrible, terrible traffic...), backward politics (I'm saying that not as a conservative or liberal, but rather as an observer. In 2012, the GA Secretary of State basically openly endorsed the idea that Obama may not have been born in America...), bad schools.

The tech scene is decent thanks to Georgia Tech. But you can do better than here.

I moved to Reno, NV to be near my wife's family a while back and have surprised myself by loving it. Very family friendly, small enough to get around, very good visual arts scene driven in part by burning man, decent in town research university, beautiful scenery, near the resorts at lake Tahoe, and what appears to be very good city governance.

A small but well supported startup scene exists, but is consumed by "gaming" (gambling) and medical startups. Opportunities related Tesla factory is also sucking up investment dollars. The plus side is that you are only 3.5-4h from the bay area, and there is a community of angel investors living in lake Tahoe.

Can I just say: Cost of living ONLY matters if you're compensated from out of state.

A lot of people look at CoL and think "wow for the $120K I make in NYC I could live like a king in Oklahoma!" But the reality is that places with lower CoL also have lower salaries, so a $120K NYC salary might be $60K in other states, with the same job, same responsibilities, etc. It is relative.

Oregon has a lowish CoL and a low amount of snow. Ditto with Ohio. No clue on startup culture. Utah (yes, that one) seems to be an up-and-comer in terms of startup culture, and while it does get a lot of snow, they're very pro-active in clearing it which is nice.

I agree with you. But cost of living is just one factor for us. We care about a peaceful environment, hopefully lower taxes (even if we make less ), decent infrastructure (in NJ, we have shitty roads with high cost).

To be honest I'd put Northern Utah on your list (Salt Lake area and north)). Low taxes, good infrastructure, low crime, nice people, growing startup culture, amazing for B2B startups, etc.

Sure, there is a religious aspect which puts people off. But like it or not, that religious aspect makes everyone quite pleasant and makes the area a nice place to live (even for those who aren't of that specific denomination).

Experiences vary. Mormons, like many other groups, can be tribal and this can be hard for kids who will have a harder time fitting in.

I grew up here. For a long time, I thought that the "not fitting in" that I experienced in junior high and high school was because I wasn't Mormon. Eventually, I figured out that a big part of it was just that I was a nerd...

The startup scene is bigger one county south - in the Provo/American Fork area. But the Mormon culture is heavier down there. (Every place I've worked, there's been coffee in the lunch room. Everywhere else, it just was there. But down there, it felt like religious tolerance.)

I live in the Atlanta area. I could literally have the same job in the SF area (where I used to live) for 20% more - my company has an office in Palo Alto where there are people with the same job title and the same responsibilities. However this would more than be eaten up by the increased cost of housing. Say my take-home pay is 100 arbitrary units; my housing costs about 20, leaving 80 for everything else. In the Bay Area I'd make 120 but I'd pay at least twice as much (40+) for comparable housing, leaving 80 or less for everything else (and everything else costs more there). Salaries are higher in higher-cost markets but that difference usually doesn't make up for the cost of living difference.

20% bump is surprising, my company has an SF office and I've been told that as a rule, salaries are twice what we get in Portland. However I still feel that increase would be eaten up by housing costs.

These salaries are supposedly tied to the cost of labor in various markets, and we're a large enough company that they do a lot of surveys of economic conditions, what competitors are paying, etc. to set salary bands. But the cost of the sort of technical labor we're talking about here might vary more between SF and other markets than the general cost of labor.

There are some true hidden gems in the often over-looked 3rd tier Southern markets, especially in bang-for-the-buck livability...consider Asheville, NC & Franklin, TN > http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/29/9-southern-towns-yo...

Franklin/Nashville area is pretty nice. The prices are very cheap and the tech scene is emerging. The people are super friendly too.

I hear Tx is nice...not sure about infrastructure though. We too are looking to make a move, though we're not even in the planning stage yet.

I just moved to CA, Bay area and the whole climate here is insanely healthy.

I am running 7 miles at the morning before going to work. I never did it in my life before. Ever. And I'm 51.

Then whole day just flows. I thought it's Thursday but apparently it's Friday already.

Something is in the air here. Something really good.

New Orleans is wonderful this time of year. ;)

But bring a boat in case of a Katrina 2 coming in

Living on a boat is always an option on the gulf coast.

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