I'm not sure what you consider the suburbs but I'm confident you could find that same situation or better so long as you looked at medium size and smaller cities or towns in the US.
Aside: I lived (and grew up) in several small-to-medium sized US cities prior to settling in Berlin. None come close to offering a similar range of cultural infrastructure to the typical medium-size European city, and quality of life is totally incomparable - again in Europe's favor.
Amen. I live in a US locale that is routinely described as one of the top 5 bike friendly towns in America. I bike around, look around, and all I can think is, are you kidding me? Narrow shoulders, aggressive drivers, high road speeds, poor air quality, no shade, etc...
Don't get me wrong, there's lots of good, but it's sad to think this is the best the US has got.
I don’t know what your vision of cultural infrastructure is, but I feel culturally satiated.
Multiple theatres, a decent opera house. A regular meetup for my favourite obscure card game. Being able to reasonably expect that essentially all the bands I like will play my city sooner or later.
There may be specific things you care more about that one city might have more of than the others, but, in general, all cities have this stuff (and it's a tragedy of human flourishing that people on the coasts think they don't).
But, also, don't get confused by looking only at the statistics for core cities. People look at, say, St. Louis, see that it has only 300k people, and stop there. But that's a wildly misleading number that's really more of a reflection of the fact that lots of people in the U.S. live in what are called "suburbs," even if those "suburbs" are actually still part of the urban core.
The St. Louis metro has 2.8 million people. 1.3 million of those people live in the core, urban city/county. That 300k number isn't useful at all. It's based on silly, irrelevant historical border-drawing.
The same can be said for most Rust Belt cities.
I used to live here, for example:
https://goo.gl/maps/RAYSkfs4Dtn
That's two blocks from a Whole Foods, walking to everything else you'd need, and 4 blocks from the light rail, which can take you to each of the region's two largest employment centers (Downtown and Clayton), its two largest universities, and the airport.
Ask a bunch of middle managers in a downtown office what they would consider too far of a commute for their current job.
Housing prices will fall off a cliff somewhere between the median response and the max response.
I doubt there is anyplace on the planet that fully meets the HN-Platonic ideal of a magical land with no cars, cheap rent in exclusively brand new or prewar mid-rise building, and bountiful jobs at hundreds of tech companies.
I’m in the "Midwest" and that’s at least 100-150k lower than I’d expect in an urban area.
After I got back to the city it felt incredible to bike through it. Everything you need is within a few minutes driving distance. Work is 20 minutes on bike and I don't live particularely close to it. No worries about parking either, because there is always some place that you can lock your bike to.
You really have to be careful with those articles -- most of them are basically marketing fluff. Grand Rapids has a good welcoming inclusive, but tiny tech scene. GR is only 'huge' when compared to smaller neighboring cities, which have practically nothing.
This isn't a comprehensive measure or anything, but just for a quick sense of scale, on Stack Overflow right now Chicago has 79 tech job listings. Seattle has 68. Detroit has 15. Grand Rapids has 2.
Grand Rapids isn't even remotely comparable to Detroit, much less any actual tech-focused city. And that's just jobs, ignoring all housing / transportation / cultural amenities and all other quality-of-life differences.
I've lived in Baltimore for 5 years(to escape DC), but I'd never work in Baltimore. I came here to because it isn't technically advanced. Beyond that it's packed to the brim with dope fiends. You've gotta be in third world don't get robbed mode 100% of the time, there are 17k abandoned townhouses in Baltimore, garbage everywhere, but the rent is super cheap if that's what you're into.
I've never been to Grand Rapids. If all goes to plan it'll stay that way.
Berlin is one the most incredible cities on earth right now.
A medium or large city in a major metropolitan area will have better options for indoor recreation.
I'd personally take the city surrounded by BFE if given the choice (actually, I'd rather live in BFE and commute into the medium city).
Are you certain? In my experience, there really isn't an "affordable medium size city" in the US. There are affordable suburbs of medium sized cities. There are affordable suburbs that technically lie within the cities legal boundary lines, and are so-called 'urban' (by legal/taxable status only).
But if "city" is being used as a measure of minimum density (and not a line on a map) then there is no such thing as an "affordable for families" large or medium-sized city in the US. Any urban area developed enough to have an average building height of 5 stories or higher is unafforable to the vast majority of US families.
This remains true even in the so-called "low cost of living" mid-sized cities.
Minneapolis.
A very, very rich urban environment (there are two cities there, after all) and cultural scene. Is currently, very affordable - even in the most desirable neighborhoods.
Denver also fit this bill up until 3-4 years ago.
You simply cannot compare it to a similar sized European city, or to any of the "big city" style US cities on the East coast.
For this exact reason I split my time between Minneapolis and Chicago and plan to move to Chicago as soon as possible full time. The lifestyles are not remotely comparable.
Minneapolis is a cool place, this is not an slight to the city or it's residents in any way. But Minneapolis is almost entirely suburban, and the parts of Minneapolis / St Paul that are actually urban (where "urban" means more than 75% of the buildings are 4+ stories), those parts are not affordable to families.
Honestly, I think it's a shame to limit the definition of "city" so stringently. Why can't a quiet neighborhood with tree-lined streets and kids playing outside be considered a part of the city and not a "suburb within a city?"
But whatever, I still think of it as the best city I've ever lived in and although I still work here, I miss living in it sometimes.
There are many places with relatively high salaries and cheap rents for software engineers, but ones where you can live in a nice area, be 15 minutes bike from work and not have a car?
The daycare and maternity leave are probably irrelevant. The OP could probably make enough more in the US that no maternity pay and high childcare costs don’t matter much but he’d still need a car.
Also, comparing Berlin to medium size or small cities will not make the latter look good. Cultural infrastructure is much better if you’re into that. I doubt a parent of a small child has that much time to enjoy it but even just English language cultural events, meet ups etc. will be way more active in Berlin than in say, Raleigh.
I’m not saying Raleigh is a cultural wasteland. I’m sure it has much to recommend it but to compare it to Berlin? Really? Berlin has almost eight times the population and has many very heavily subsidised national cultural institutions. I’m sure Raleigh has a better live music scene in English.
You should travel in Europe some. You would not compare anywhere in Western Europe to the US in terms of bike friendliness if you had.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...
i rent a 4br house just over the city line that's listed for ~$200k . 10 minute drive to downtown and a 30 minute commute to work. if i wanted to i could easily come up with the down payment for this house in a couple years on my entry level engineer's salary. in my office park alone, there are already several other software companies right there that i could conceivably work at.
once you rule out NYC, Boston, and the other megacities, there are still many mid-sized cities with good food, music, etc. they don't have nearly the same troubles with traffic, so it's often pretty easy to find a good job in the burbs if they dont do software in the city center.
Accepting a longer commute means more options, but the price is steap. Mine is currently 10 minutes and in a prior job I walked to work. However, that means I either need to move regularly or have a lot of options very close to me.
You can light your money on fire by renting or you can be paying off a house at the same rate at the time cost of whatever your commute is.
If you want to eat healthy the options for fast meals get expensive. If you prepare everything from close to scratch you can eat just as health at the cost of time.
I can easily live in the US, have a minimal commute, and save 1/3 of my income with my current lifestyle. I can't do that and have kids.