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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

>We could have moved to the suburbs, but we really hate car culture and wanted to live in a biking city.

Oh, so it is totally possible. But not if you want to live in a big city.

I feel like every statement of that form has an implied "with the lifestyle that I want".

If you remove that constraint then it's always possible for a software engineer because they make more than average and that average person does live somehow.

Yep.

Invoking Reductio Ad Absurdum, there's always a place for us in the ghetto too, the only question is do we want to live there?

The word can't is used in the title.

Suburbs are perfectly reasonable places to live. You just have to get over yourself a little bit and buy a car.

I know you're responding to a different comment, but I want to clarify that I am not claiming that suburbs are unreasonable places to live.

OP said that they didn't want to live in a suburb, which is a reasonable view to have. I don't want to live in one either.

Right, so instead of simply moving to the place where they can have the lifestyle they want, they should suck it up and buy a car like good Americans.

I think he/she was responding to the post that compared suburbs to ghettos. That's no more useful than me saying the same thing about living in a big city. Suburbs and city can both have perfectly good quality-of-life, regardless of preference, neither is a ghetto.

That doesn't make much sense. A bike oriented life should be the more affordable, more attainable lifestyle than the car lifestyle.

High rents in a bikeable city center can wipe out the savings you get from not owning a car.

My car-related expenses per month for two commuting drivers are $100 insurance, $150 in gas, and maybe $100 depreciation and maintenance. My cars are old and are not a fashion statement by any means. I would have to pay much more than $350 to get the same amount of house near city center. I would also sacrifice the ability to conveniently go long distances.

I guess that is my point. How backwards is it that living without a car in a small apartment is MORE expensive than living with multiple cars in a large house.

Not at all. Cars are technology; land is land. Our society is highly optimized to promote the availability of ever-cheaper, ever-better technology, and also to make sure that real estate assets continuously appreciate.

We should certainly expect a lifestyle based around consumer goods mass-produced under mature and technologically advanced industrial capitalism to be cheaper (and get cheaper over time) relative to a lifestyle based on around living on the most central, premium land.

> I feel like every statement of that form has an implied "with the lifestyle that I want".

The perspective confuses me - isn't "having kids" the lifestyle that they want? If that is the priority, then other aspects of life must be flexible to accommodate.

I guess I thought that their preferences were

* Have space for two children, presumably with separate bedrooms. Potentially even more than one bathroom in the apartment.

* Live in a nice, urban area.

* Bike 15 minutes to work.

They are able to afford this in Berlin, but probably would't be able to do the same in the US.

I am genuinely surprised that that combination is affordable in Berlin. Not like that is a small city or anything. How can you possibly find that much space at an affordable price?

I don't know about the differences between Berlin and the US beyond cursory knowledge.

But from having bought a place in a high demand area recently, the thing is always "who are you competing with". When the average person with 2 kids and a dog are looking at the same houses in the same places as the other family with 2 kids and a dog, there will be differences, but overall it won't be too bad. The problem start when that family wants the exact same house/condo/whatever as the 2 highly paid software engineer with no kids.

Then you're screwed: you're competing on a different level. And there's starting to be a lot of people with high dual income and no kid. The US is generally a nation of divide between the haves and the have nots, but the cultural divide is making things waaaaay worse.

Housing size. A 2 bedroom house in The New World is nothing like a 2 bedroom place in Europe. I bet the Berlin housing is a LOT smaller than a US place.

Even in SF, the housing is a lot larger than almost all of Europe. London is a disaster if you expect much if any space.

Agreed about London vs. the US, and the same would hold for Paris, but Berlin is the exception: apartments (and expectations) are huge compared to any other capital city.

I'm not sure why that is. Being physically cut off from the world helped keep prices down for sure, but it doesn't explain why apartments are large relative to the number of bedrooms.

We have a kid and also favor urban living. If we lived in the suburbs we’d be miserable, which wouldn’t be great for our kid.

So we live in the city in a “small” (by modern American standards) condo and we’re super happy with it.

There are plenty of cities in the US where this is possible but they may not be as desireable. Europe has a couple thousand years advantage on the US in offering cities vs suburbs.

There's no way a single software dev in the States could live that close to work, in a nice part of a major city, and also be able to afford space to house and take care of two kids. So his story seems pretty relevant.

Besides, if you're going to do software dev you typically need to be in a city to have options, so the squeeze factor is still there. I can attest to this as well; I'd much rather take the lower rent and live further out. I never even do anything in the city.

Perhaps an average developer couldn't as the average is around $100k, but a realistically high earning one could. Consider someone who is a staff/senior staff/principal engineer at one of the usual places or someone who went through a nice exit. Forgive me if I read your comment too literally.

I think that's generally the conclusion that I come to: I'm very happy being realistically rich in America, but I'd much rather be in Europe if my financial situation were average for a software developer.

$100K is a lot of money if you're not in the bay area or Seattle. People have such warped perspectives.

I intentionally used the literal average.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

I am not arguing that this is or isn't a lot of money. For the record, I think that it is a lot of money. It's just not enough money to live OP's lifestyle in the US.

It's not enough money to live OP's lifestyle in the bay area. SLC was given as just one example of a city where it is.

SLC is not a nice, dense urban city in the way that Berlin is. It thus would not provide OP's lifestyle at any level of income.

It is disingenuous to equate the two.

It is also disingenuous to conveniently omit the fact that Berlin, as a major German city, enjoys economic benefits gained at the expense of other EU member countries. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Cool - Houston, then.

Is that supposed to be a joke? Houston has a similar lifestyle to Berlin?

Mid-size city, similar size and population, more affordable. Living in the city and owning your own home there with one job is completely doable, as is childcare.

Usually 'lifestyle' in the context of affordability is used to describe a set of activities that cost a certain amount. Like eating out, going to the movies, having multiple cars, etc.

Houston is probably one of the least walkable cities in existence. It is nothing like Berlin.

Name ANYWHERE like Berlin. Surely that's the question? You can't swap Berlin for anywhere, surely? It is majorly disingenuous to choose Berlin, or Rome, or London, Or Paris, or Tokyo and ask for a similar place. There is NOWHERE like these cities. There can't be. That is their unique charm.

I live in a 3k sqft house in Salt Lake City with a wife (who doesn't work) and a kid. I commute about 25 minutes to work, but my house is a 0.7 mile walk down a nice, sidewalked suburban street from a software engineering company with about 100 employees, good salaries, and a good reputation.

In SLC it's easy for a software engineer to make 100K and support a family in a large home on a single income. We moved out here from California for this very reason.

Maybe you don't consider SLC to be a 'major city', but you will probably find similar lifestyles for engineers outside of California, Boston, and New York.

It's like the rest of the country doesn't really exist to certain people.

There are SO many cities with environments that this is possible, you just have to do a little cursory research. Businesses in these cities are hiring all the time because no one thinks about them. They don't have enough Starbucks or bike lanes. So we get articles talking about "can't" when it's really "won't."

Austin, Dallas, Kansas City, Des Moines, Detroit, Tampa, Miami...

The list goes on and on of medium sized cities starving for dev talent without enough coworking spaces or incubators.

> It's like the rest of the country doesn't really exist to certain people.

It's more that the rest of the country isn't comparable to Berlin. The cities that you listed are a great example of this.

> Austin, Dallas, Kansas City, Des Moines, Detroit, Tampa, Miami...

None of those are nice, dense urban cities in the way that Berlin is.

My goal is to tear down the premise of the title, not to compete with a bunch of commenters moving the goalpoasts farther and farther.

The real issue here is that quality urban environments in America are becoming increasingly expensive to live in. If you can't afford it, but refuse to try and work to turn a medium-sized city into the city you desire, maybe you should tone down your "why our families can't afford X" rhetoric, because it's disingenuous.

> If you can't afford it, but refuse to try and work to turn a medium-sized city into the city you desire, maybe you should tone down your "why our families can't afford X" rhetoric, because it's disingenuous.

If a software developer likes Berlin and wants to live in a city that provides a similar lifestyle then how do you propose that they turn Des Moines into something that provides a similar lifestyle to Berlin?

If there is any disingenuity in this discussion it's in equating Berlin to Austin or Dallas or Kansas City or Des Moines or Detroit or Tampa or Miami.

Those are perfectly reasonable places to live, but they are not substitutes for Berlin if you want to live in that kind of place.

If those cities are perfectly reasonable places to live, but Berlin is where you want to live, then you should write an article with a premise that reflects how you feel that American cities cannot compete with Berlin.

I'm going to repeat myself one more time because you seem to be missing my point: I am saying the premise is flawed. I am not comparing Miami to Berlin, I am saying that the author is insisting on certain prerequisites and then saying that his family can't afford to live in AMERICA at all.

If you can't agree that this is disingenuous then we are going to have to agree to disagree.

You appear to have missed that this thread is discussing a specific person's choice to live in Berlin and not the article.

Why would I move to any of those places when everyone that already lives there is getting exactly what they wanted when they chose not to build a dense, livable city? The residents of those cities chose to build a place that I don't find desirable. It's pretty unreasonable of you to expect me to move to one of those places and immediately start campaigning to change how those people want to live to suit my lifestyle.

In contrast, the place that I actually want to live, Seattle, has everything that I need in a layout I like except that I can only afford to live on the outskirts in a crappy neighborhood. If they would let people build 6-story buildings in better neighborhoods then it would be perfect.

It's like the rest of the country doesn't really exist

I grew up in the Bay Area. I see the same thread talking to people who still live there.

That's the key, get out of CA, and get out of the bay area. It's hard to do, but worth it in the long run.

Seems totally doable in Chicago.

I do all of this in the Midwest. The city may not be as major as huge coastal cities but it's by no means a backwater.

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