That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company.
The large house with an acre of land gives you other opportunities, but if that one specific dimension is what you care about then it falls short.
- Good schools
- Lots of like-minded people to befriend
- Lots of places to eat, activities, venues, etc.
- Several higher and continuing education opportunities
- Good (well, better than almost all mid-sized cities, at least) public transit options
I definitely understand the appeal of living out in the country, but, for reasons I don't entirely understand, on many threads like this, people seem to completely overlook all of the myriad ways that living in a city is actually great.
It's not all grim concrete jungle hellscape. If I lived out in the sticks, I could afford a couple of acres and a +2,000 square foot home. But I couldn't afford a zoo, aquarium, bike trail, running path, music venue, movie theater, personal chef, playground, and coffee house to go with it.
The fundamental tenet of urban density is that by giving up some personal space, we all get access to a much greater variety of shared spaces.
Perhaps if you live adjacent to a major national park or forest, or marine preserve, but most easily habitable rural areas are not that, and instead are industrially farmed or extracted from - essentially factories. Sure, there are exceptions, but not enough to accommodate the number of people that it would take to make a difference in cost of living in urban areas, not without ruining the access to wildlife viewing that makes those places unique in the first place.
> bike trail, running path
The environment doesn't provide either of these. They are created by many people either re-using the same route routinely, or by some institution building and maintaining them.
...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord.
If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.
Why would they do that? They only pay as much as they do in Silicon Valley to offset the cost of living.
The relevant statistic to compare is actual housing cost vs actual compensation in both types of places. For many types of tech jobs, the number still favors big cities, if not in percentage terms, then in absolute numbers.
And when it comes down to a real life decision, there are plenty of other factors (financial or otherwise) besides that one statistic.
It's not trivial to do this calculation. Some things will surprise you:
You can get cheaper electricity bills in Seattle than where I live (Naples, FL), but you don't need air conditioning in Seattle. Living in Florida without AC is ill-advised.
$12000 doesn't mean the same thing when you consider the cost of living difference between the urban and rural areas.
$12k goes way farther towards purchasing goods and services in the rural area, so naturally it seems like an awful lot of money there, but it purchases far fewer goods and services in a big city. This is similar to how household incomes between different countries aren't directly comparable until you adjust for Purchasing Power Parity [1].
That doesn't mean that all big city dwellers are better off. Some undoubtedly are, and some are definitely not.
We actually agree here. I think we're speaking past each other.
I'm arguing that "only $12,000" is dismissive of how impactful a difference that makes to the lives of people who don't live in a big city.
But the $12k in question isn't a fungible $12k. It's specifically the difference in housing costs between urban and rural in the example given earlier.
If the point is that many people in rural areas are economically struggling, then yes we agree, just as many poorer urban dwellers are (and to whom a random $12k received would also be hugely impactful), but that has nothing to do with example proposed.
> If the point is that many people in rural areas are economically struggling, then yes we agree, just as many poorer urban dwellers are (and to whom a random $12k received would also be hugely impactful), but that has nothing to do with example proposed.
My point was that the OP's use of the phrase "only $12,000" is offensive, classist language in the context it was written in. That point is unrelated to the rest of the discussion.
I don't get why anyone would want to double down on defending this language, especially since you weren't the person who used it. But here we are.
But hey, if $12,000/year is peanuts to anyone reading this thread: https://www.patreon.com/ciphpercoder
OP wasn't talking down. They used "only" to compare the difference in housing cost to the much higher difference in wages between rural and urban areas, as in $12K housing cost increase < $40k salary increase, not to imply that $12K is inconsequential in an absolute sense.
$12K out of most people's pockets is a lot of money (including if it were out of mine), but the OP wasn't implying that it isn't.
They were making a simple observation that:
big city salary - big city housing costs > rural salary - rural housing costs
Looks like they even responded below stating precisely that.
There's real classism out there, often expressed across the rural/urban divide, but this isn't an example of it.
Unfortunately I haven't seen many roles in, say, Dallas or Atlanta where the pay is only 20-25K or so less than my current, total-comp wise. It'd be a bigger drop, usually. The rent gap is steep, but the comp gap can be larger.
In education, both schools and universities, Chicagoland would compare very favorably with Bay Area (stepkid went to schools in both; entirely unimpressed with BA schools).
In job opportunities at FAANG-type companies Bay Area obviously comes out ahead,but for the vast majority of people both in and out of high tech Chicago both has jobs and is actually affordable and salaries are lower by a far lesser amount than the cost of living, at least if you believe all of the comparison sites like Numbeo. In my personal experience I've had much more money left over in Chicago, working for as Chicago company than working for one in Sunnyvale, and that's even before adding up intangibles of better (well, for the USA, anyway) public transit, better museums, theaters, etc. etc.
On climate BA might win on paper, but personally I like to have actual seasons.
Nice, I've lived in both and Chicago winters made me want to kill myself. If all else was equal I'd pay significant sums to live in the Bay Area simply because the weather.
Of course if I had the same living conditions in Chicago as in Bay Area and had to dig the car out every morning, I'd think differently, too. But of course in Chicago one can afford a nice place with a garage in a hot area for less money than a cardboard box in SV.