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As someone currently living in the Midwest/South. I love how spoiled I am with my low cost of living in a relatively under-exploited quirky/cool/hip destination.

If I knew a secret to get better tech jobs out here, I would do it yesterday. (If someone wants a technical cofounder in an interesting location, let me know. ;)

With so many of my friends on the West Coast, I feel the siren song myself, and it's tough to combat network effects.

Six figures in the rust belt is the life. I live in a beautiful historic home for a tenth of the cost of the ones shown in the article. I can afford to have my wife stay home while our kids are small. I'm dumping close to a quarter of my income into retirement savings despite still having significant student debt. I'm close to family members to help with the kids (a problem for my childhood friends who fled to the coasts after college.) People talk about amenities being better on the coasts, but I'm an hour from downtown Chicago, which is easily the second-most spectacular urban center in North America. Plus I'm close to great weekend destinations like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Nashville. As for outdoor amenities, I'll put the great lakes up against any other region of the country when it comes to natural beauty. Western Michigan has some of the nicest beaches in the country. It's one of the many hidden-gems of the flyover states. Yeah the winters suck in the upper midwest, but they also end and the summers are spectacular.

You don't even have to make six figures to have a good life in the mid-west. My first job was in a mid-sized Michigan town. Starter homes were 150% of my annual pre-tax salary. Schools were very good. Of course the town couldn't offer what a big city could, but it had enough.

My boss was making under $200,000/yr and he was living a similar life to someone making over $1M on the coasts.

I lived in Buffalo for a while and can attest to the accuracy of this account. The great lakes region is beautiful and underappreciated, and in many ways superior to SeattleSanAngeles, and not just as a matter of cost.

Amen to that. Every time somebody starts talking about making the Midwest some sort of Silicon Prairie I just wanna smack them and ask why we want that sort of nonsense and baggage coming out and dragging us down and then having transplants act entitled to the right to live here.

That will just turn the west coast housing problem into a midwest housing problem.

If you think that businesses moving into the midwest will evenly distribute over its entirety, think again. Network effects will cause companies to cluster together into hubs no matter where they go.

Starter homes are $80,000 in Cleveland Ohio.

Starter homes are $800,000 in Seattle Washington.

It would be a long while before it becomes a problem.

It seems like there may have been a tipping point sometime in 2017. We are seeing a lot of satellite offices opening in Chicago. Foursquare, Glassdoor and Reddit have announced or moved recently, while Google has been amping up their office. I assume it’s caused by cost of living in SF and Seattle, but can’t be sure.

>I sincerely hope that various companies start aggressively opening offices in middle America, the south, upstate NY, etc. Maybe someone should produce a few goofy TV shows about how 'quirky' and 'cool' and 'hip' those destinations are, turn them into the new cultural mecca for all the flighty trend chasers, and let the west coast housing mess take care of itself.

God, I hope not. California can stay in California, keep it out of the Midwest.

Man, fuck this sentiment. It's just as bad as the whole "get these foreigners out of here!" anti immigration sentiment that's taking hold all over. There's an exceedingly high likelihood that your family moved to the Midwest from somewhere else at some point in time. Cities and regions change over time, people move to where there's an opportunity for them to have a better life. Just because you were born somewhere doesn't entitle you to that place staying unchanged.

Well it's probably not natives who'd be moving out there. Think of it as a polite invitation to transplants to go home.