There's very few places where there is an overlap of "jobs that pay $100k" and "homes that can be afforded at $100k salary".
There are many places throughout the south, midwest and northeast with decent job markets and dirt cheap housing. The mortgage on my 1800 sq foot house is nearly a third of the cost of my tiny one bedroom back in Seattle. The cost of the entire house is a tenth of a house in the Bay Area.
I am fortunate to work remotely but when deciding where to live I wanted to be able to afford to keep this roof over my families' head even if I didn't have a Bay Area/Seattle gig. I think the biggest obstacle may be coming up with enough cash to secure the financing in the first place, and for that I am grateful to have lived and worked in a tech hub.
Living in Seattle on two high incomes(maybe not relative to you, but still) and having no kids was amazing. Paid off about 80k of student loans in a short amount of time. However, the prospect of having a massive 500k-1m mortgage in a boom or bust town was just too much for me. Here, If the housing market flipped upside down and my house magically worth 0$ id still come out alright! It's that, plus I can afford my housing while working at Starbucks(exaggeration) that gives me peace of mind.
I will say though, if Seattle's housing market crashes I'd be back in a heartbeat. I miss the water and the mountains!
Also FWIW my company is remote first, and I get paid the same in Seattle as I do here.
In 2008 it was systemically threatening, I don't see it happening this time. Yet, I'm a little bit like you, I am hoping prices will go down, because I want to buy a condo or 4 unit duplex as an investment and I've been waiting for prices to go down. For years ;-)
In Seattle there doesn't seem to be enough new housing to make prices go down on sale purchases. Unless Amazon goes down I don't see demand lessening. The only thing I see easing is apartment housing. And we need an easing so that people not in "the industry" an afford to live here. Theoretically more apts should lower prices for condos eventually. But it hasn't happened.
As an Amazonian that works remote, I have the same payscale as everyone else in Seattle.
2) Remove most of the coastal cities (SF, NYC, Boston, Seattle, Portland, etc. etc.)
3) End up with a list of metros with decent paying jobs and not exorbitantly expensive housing
Plenty of machinists, auto mechanics, health care professionals and welders aren't gonna have much luck working from home.
I'm putting together a list of the best places to live for remote workers with families, hoping to turn it into a little website that you can filter by schools, available internet speeds, median house price, that sort of thing.
Hopefully it will help someone out there when there's more data.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X2JihFpA97EEAMz8kD-j...
So I can direct people away from where I live, so the prices don't skyrocket.
And then we all saw what happened to Portland, Seattle, and Austin once the word got out and everyone knew about these "secret" cool cities. So now we keep our mouths shut and enjoy our beer and beaches without all the tourists and transplants.
That's the goal anyway, and then from there I could open source or just do weighted average input for people to rate their favorites w/ no login required.
It's early days.
But that's really only available for a small subset of the population.
I never saw any sense in that. Would they start paying you more if you later moved to a more expensive location?
I work freelance remotely for no country in particular and my current location is never a factor for prices.
But I work to live, not live to work. My job is a means to an end, that end being to have a fulfilling life that doesn't revolve around what I do for a living.
Because of that, I find the quest to climb the corporate ladder has lost it's appeal. I'm cool staying at my current, well-paying, work from home job until I retire. I don't want to be running a company, I want to be running my life.
Corporate ladder does seem a bit... sad? But maybe some people like it! More power to them!
Cool thing about a small business is you can create a long term sustainable lifestyle that suits you. I like the philosophy of TJ Holowaychuk with Apex (created expressjs and a million other amazing things), super cool. At one point it was referred to as a “non startup”. Love that dude :-D
Nothing wrong with building a company up to an ipo either, that could be a blast depending on the people and context.
I know a guy that has done this for a few companies and then moved onto consulting for them. Makes SV money in the midwest. Works whenever he wants, 99% of time remotely, and companies will sometimes wait if he has too much going on to do work for them.
The guy is living the life. So, I want to do the same.
But you may be the only doctor around for 10s of miles. Which is why you'd be so valuable. I'm sure there are other $100k to $200k jobs that small towns need.
No, you won't get high-tech or programming in small-town America. But there's more to life than just the tech-field. Its easy to forget because we're mostly programmers in this website.
Part of the problem is these jobs don't have the sex appeal of SV tech so they aren't on people's radar or just not considered desirable because of the nature of manufacturing work.
A three hour commute is easier when you only do it twice a week, or a few times a month.
Your Friday night at a bar is their Friday night around a fire with their hounds.
Listening to an extremely noisy engine for hours on end is not my idea of "enjoying nature".
I've lived in rural areas. They generally suck, even for nature. In America, all the wooded land is "POSTED" (no trespassing), so you can't go there, and will probably be shot if you do; you have to find a park instead. If your rural house is located near a park, great, but otherwise you're out of luck.
I like outdoors, silence, beach.
I feel miserable around all the other "robots" in the city.
I feel decent enough in the suburbs with less people and more space.
See, these low-effort insults work both ways!
https://www.unenvironment.org/explore-topics/resource-effici...
There wasn't much else going on in the town aside from the university + hospital.
Lets just say... Buies Creek, North Carolina. I've been to smaller towns, but I'd say population of 2,942 is small for most people. EDIT: Seems like prices may have gone up in recent years: I'm seeing $800 to $1000 on Rent.com, but there's still a listing or two for $600/month. Or maybe "word of mouth" is still king there.
Buies Creek is still reasonably close to the Raleigh metropolitan area. So this is still "somewhat suburban". I've visited my cousins in Coulee City, WA (Population 562), so I know what "actually rural" looks like too.
I live in a dense urban area of ~1 million, on a tropical island. My 550 sqft apartment is ~$520. Hardwood floors, natural gas range and hot water, structure is proof against typhoons up to Category 5 (already experienced several), as well as earthquakes. Gigabit fiber optic internet @$35/month Speedtests around 550MB. Daily flights to practically every major city in Asia.
HOUSES, however, are insanely priced. The mortgage rates are low (1-3%, slightly less than 1% if you are a government employee) but the principal is stratospheric for the size of home and land you are buying.
I'm actually pretty familiar with Buies...my mom's family all lives in Sanford and used to drive through there.
I work for a company that does rental listings so I look at these numbers a lot.
Its less about population size and more about distance from the urban center. Coulee City is a 2-hour drive from a major city (Spokane), while Buies Creek is maybe a 40-minute drive from a major city (Raleigh).
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From MY perspective, both Buies Creek and Coulee City are rural.
But from the perspective of someone who lives in Coulee City, they probably think Buies Creek is suburban (since it is commute-distance from a city).
Yeah - for a person who is adjusted to only living in big cities then sure. However, Buies Creek is 30 minutes away from the downtown of a city. It is not rural by almost anyone else's definition.
It'd be like saying Atherton, CA is rural because it's a "smaller" town of 7k people. Ignoring that it's within a 8 million population metro and within 30-45 minutes of a 1 million population sprawling city (San Jose) and another 800k+ densely populated one (San Francisco).
I've never lived in any big city. Literally never. Not even close, always 20+ minutes away from the major city.
The thing is: suburbia itself is a network of smaller cities. Buies Creek has no "smaller city" near it. Buies Creek IS the city.
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To continue your Atherton example... Atherton is a suburb of ___Palo Alto___, not a suburb of San Fran. It is a brisk 4-mile bike-ride from Atherton to Palo Alto and back, you don't even need a car if you live in Atherton and commute to Palo Alto.
There's NOTHING walking or biking distance to Buies Creek, NC. Rural is more about "distance from nearest metro".
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Buies Creek NC is 40-minutes to Raleigh. This is rural by my experience. True, Buies Creek NC is "less Rural" for people who are used to 2-hour drives (Coulee City to Spokane), but a 40-minute drive away from a big city is Rural by most people's definition of Rural.
lol - this is so disconnected from how anyone who lives a truly rural lifestyle would think of it.
20 minutes is a joke! Living multiple hours away is considered more standard.
99% of the rural population isn't Eastern Montana.
Rural is mostly about being far away from urban centers. Buies Creek NC is 30+ miles from its nearest population center (10k+ citizens). While Atherton is 4-miles away from its nearest population center (60k+ citizens in Palo Alto).
There's many places that have great ROIs but Palo Alto isn't one of them: they're dead last.
NIMBYism is going to absolutely choke the bay area over time, and newer generations of startups, VCs, and accelerators will wise up and broaden their horizons. The frequently parroted argument of "SF has the best pool of engineering talent" only goes so far.
Especially when quality engineers can move wherever they want, and Stanford and UC Berkeley aren't pumping out nearly enough CS grads to justify the absurd cost of operating for startups to stay there.
Less sarcastically: is there an index for this kind of thing? E.g. cost of living for an equivalent neighborhood plotted against median salaries for tech jobs?
There's a CompTIA "Tech Towns" report[1] from last year that does a good breakdown of salary + job opportunities vs CoL by city.
Anecdotally, I think it was right to rank Charlotte NC at the top. It's easy to find 100k+ salary jobs there if you have experience (avg is a bit lower though) - and median housing prices are like 230k. But the big downside is that you pretty much have to be cool with working for a bank.
[1] https://www.aitp.org/blog/aitp-blog/2018/10/23/tech-town-usa...
[0] Here's one: https://www.payscale.com/cost-of-living-calculator