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Comment by bleezy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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