but it's not only a salary to cost of living differential. some of these geographically uninspiring places will have to pay a premium to attract people, and compete with areas with greater potential for high quality of life.
YMMV obviously, but if you dismiss most of the rest of the continent as "geographically uninspiring" you're going to miss out on a lot.
KS? sheesh.. no way man
If you're living in a city, your day-to-day lifestyle is going to be pretty much the same anywhere in the US, or really anywhere in the developed world.
Yes, that includes Kansas City.
I like not having to own a car.
I noticed that too. I miss that part of the Midwest as well. I am on the East coast now and here people are too aggressive and competitive, even without an obvious reason to be so. I mean they are still genuine, just genuine in their open hostility so to speak.
They say these are just stereotypes and are not accurate, but I don't know, seem to jive pretty well to what I noticed.
The bay area is way overcrowded, poor infrastructure, way, way too expensive, and if you want to get out of town for the weekend you fight traffic for 4 hours.
I understand california dreaming... it's been the best marketed state for decades.
But its' just a dream.
1) Work in Silicon Valley. You earn 30% more but pay 200% more in rent. It takes you 10 years to save a $200k down payment, and in the meantime you have lost 100s of 1000s of dollars on rent.
2) Work in the Midwest. You earn less but pay a third for rent. It takes you 5 years to save a $200k down payment. You then lateral to SV.
Ok, I'm biasing the question. But personally I'd prefer to delay gratification rather than delay homeownership.
You can save that down payment in 5 years probably. With higher incomes come higher saving margins.
With lower house prices, you also need a lower percentage down. My credit union says you can do 3% down on up to $625k of loan. 3% down may not be the best idea, but waiting until you have 20% down can be a lot of waiting if you'd like to buy a house here. Putting a small amount down, means you do have to pay mortgage insurance (which wasn't very expensive in 2009 when I put 10% down), but it gives you a lot of flexibility.
If the recession deepens, and you lose your job and the housing market tanks, you can stop paying your mortgage, foreclosure is slower than eviction for not paying rent, and most California foreclosures are nonjudicial where the lender can take the house, but has no claim against any of your other assets. If you resume employment during the foreclosure process, you may be able to cure the default.
If you stay employed, you will hopefully at least get cost of living raises, while everyone else's housing costs are going up, yours will be flat -- you can put some of the raises into paying down your mortgage to get a more comfortable equity situation (and get the mortgage insurance removed). When the economy starts to recover and bring housing prices with it, you'll get some equity that way too.
In life, there's more than home ownership.
And, yeah, as much trouble as I have with NC politics, I would take North Carolina in a heartbeat over pretty much anywhere in Kansas.
BTW I make my own BBQ so I have all I need.
I find that Silicon Valley's proximity to mountains and bodies of water to be overly confining, and I place 90% of the blame for its housing prices on the Bay Area's geographical restraints. Great Plains cities don't have to worry about that because they can just sprawl outwards; geographically-restrained cities have to get expensive and/or get dense when there's a huge influx of population.
Let's pop onto Google Maps and check out some of these cities at the same zoom level (caveat: I'm using a maximized Chrome window at 1080p, so if you're on anything else it might not display the area I intend):
The Bay Area: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6179156,-122.1933201,11z -- notice how almost everything is developed in this narrow little strip around the bay. Only in San Jose do you see any real development inland, and it's honestly not that much compared to cities in other parts of the country. Really, even if you could sprawl more inland without hitting mountains, you'd still have massive bottlenecks commuting to anything in SF because it's on a peninsula.
Kansas City: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1155568,-94.7391727,11z -- it's spread out, and it's got more than enough room to grow outwards for quite a while. If it becomes a hub or something, it can just keep growing out to relieve the pressure.
Columbus was the picture in the article: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9312081,-82.8231266,11z -- not as big as KC yet, but check out that room to grow!
The Twin Cities, mentioned as a former tech hub in another comment here: https://www.google.com/maps/@45.0593467,-93.2436588,11z -- big and sprawly, the exurbs are just waiting to be filled in, and there's still plenty of room to grow beyond that
Dallas, my own hometown: https://www.google.com/maps/@32.8116737,-96.9491413,11z -- I can elaborate more since I've lived here for over 30 years. I chose this zoom level because it's the widest one that would fit the whole Dallas area. Built smack in the middle of a prairie, I have seen the suburbs continuously sprawl north and east, plus I've seen the formerly-empty suburbs in between Dallas and Fort Worth fill up like crazy. You can tell the age of certain parts of town because our freeways are built in rings, like a tree. When I was a kid, the two northernmost freeways (President George Bush Turnpike and Sam Rayburn Tollway) didn't exist. Half of Plano was farmland, and the suburbs to the north, east, and west of it weren't considered part of the contiguous metroplex. Now, we've filled in the gaps between Plano and Lewisville, built up Frisco and Allen, brought the contiguous metroplex all the way up to Propser and Wylie, and now we're working on bringing Celina in. Mark my words: in the next five years, they'll start upgrading US 380 to freeway status. And within a decade, the contigious metroplex will reach to Gunter and Van Alstyne. And development to the east will bring Royse City and Forney in as well. House prices are spiking now due to a bunch of companies moving their headquarters to the Dallas area, and creating massive demand out of nowhere, but once construction companies start reacting to that demand, we're going to see a massive explosion in house-building in the exurbs, and house prices will fall back to their old levels once new development is complete. Oh, and the concentric circles model we're using for our roads makes commuting much easier than something like SF where the bay gets in the way of going from one place to another. You can easily reach downtown from the exurbs (and it doesn't matter anyway because most of our tech industry is in the inner-ring suburbs, not downtown).
So if I'm going to take geography into account when moving somewhere, I'm going to prioritize someplace built on a prairie, because that will give me low housing prices and low density.
Kansas City doesn't fall into that category for me.
Keep in mind I'm caveatting my statement by this narrow definition alone. However for many people, this is a major criteria
Flat.
(And are you seriously going with "look how much sprawl we'll have!" as a selling point?)
The drive down to Witchita from Topeka certainly has its own class of wonderful views akin to what you would experience between Heber and Orem in Utah. These are just different scales of horizon, and both are enjoyable.
What would be really nice though, in the Kansas City area, if there was more light-pollution discipline to maybe bring back the experience of seeing the Milky Way again, without a long-ish drive.
FWIW I'm in KC tech sector. If I want to get back to nature I just drive 1/2 hour south to the land that I own, and I make more than those figures touted above. You guys can keep your California.
Sorry, I'm such as scenery snob now, after moving to the Mtn West from the Midwest...