Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know about D.C. or Detroit, but here is my instance of the class "Pittsburgh":

85 year 2000 sq. ft brick house on 1/4 acre. 4 BR, 2 ba, 2 car garage. Totally gutted and modernized. 3 miles from downtown, 1 mile from Oakland (Carnegie-Mellon, Pitt, Carnegie Museum/Library, Schenley Park). Walkability index 92. Within one hour flying and 8 hours driving of 50% of the U.S. population. $160K. Same house in Miami: $500K. Same house in California: 7 figures + first born.

4 distinct seasons, but some people still don't like the weather. I prefer these thoughts:

"Everybody complains about the weather but no one does anything about it." - Mark Twain

(Looking at gray sky) "What a beautiful day, Herman!" - Lily Munster

Or me: Here's my house: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

I have the bottom floor. 3 bedrooms. 3 roommates. $1200/month rent, so I'm paying $300/month. (my girlfriend and I share a room.) I live in one of the more affluent neighborhoods in town. Yep. It's that cheap.

20 minutes walk from CMU, 30 from Pitt. Buses come either one block or 4 blocks away. CMU shuttle goes _past my house_. One block away: 4 bars. A restaurant. Two coffee shops. A bunch of other junk. A Japanese grocery store two blocks away, regular groceries about 5, a Whole Foods about 8. My two neighbors on either side are families.

Pittsburgh is sweeeeet.

Can you live there without a car?

Yep. I do bike a lot because I dislike the bus, and they're never on time.

Yup. I pay $400 for a 2br, all to myself, in Oakland. Doesn't get much cheaper than that.

The weather is pretty bad though - and I say this as a native.

I don't like the weather. It's too rainy and spring and fall are far too short (some of my friends call fall/spring "poorly dithered winter and summer", since it tends to just jump back and forth between cold and hot for a week or two).

The airport is about an hour away so nothing is an hour away flying unless you just count fly-time!

A house like that isn't 7 figures in California - it would definitely be above 500k but it wouldn't break a million in a lot of places near SF, LA, or SD.

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