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Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

Not just Bay Area, pretty much any middle to big cities. Housing ownership dream is dead, cost of education has skyrocketed and healthcare is just a mess. That’s everywhere. The only thing on top of that we have got in Bay Area is increasing petty crime rates with no consequences. But that is on Bay Area residents for consistently electing egghead politicians.

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Take a city like Columbus, Ohio. Home ownership is relatively cheap and easy, school are great, healthcare is no more messy than the average in the US. Crime is negligible, it's clean, has tons of great restaurants, good sports, very cool and unique neighborhoods with easy access to everywhere else. There are so many cities like that around the US that people on the coasts seem almost blind to.

The main downside is winter but aside from that it's a pretty great area. Especially on a tech salary. People say, "Yeah but... Ohio". To which I say, they really, acutely and deeply don't know what they are talking about.

I grew up in Western New York before moving to the Bay Area for work. People really love my hometown.

It’s okay, you can adapt to any place and make the most of it. But I think the coastal cities are much better places to live. More opportunity, more food, more people to learn from and things to do, more variety. There are cost of living trade offs for sure, but I wouldn’t go back.

I hope Garry Tan is successful fixing SF. I’ll do what I can to get the bad politicians out.

Not sure you can say Columbus has negligible crime, unless you mean Dublin or something. Columbus has had around 200 homicides this year. SF, with swhichlmist identical population in city limits, looks like it's had fewer than 60. Columbus is only marginally (25% or so) less murderous per capita than Chicago, where I live, and certainly nobody says we have negligible crime!

Well, public schools are still free everywhere. And in state public universities are still fairly affordable - the one in my hometown offers $1k tuition for the year now.

I live in a city that most of HN would call a rust belt post-industrial shithole. The kinds of petty crime, squalid behavior and cost of living issues I see people say "is only in a few areas" in defense of SF I haven't seen in any area.

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