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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Cost of living in Columbus is low if you are looking at it with Coastal city eyes. That being said, its still the most expensive city in Ohio. Houses in the hot neighborhoods people write articles about were hitting 700k 6 years ago. Rents in new apartments are like $1300 for a 1 bedroom.

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> That being said, its still the most expensive city in Ohio.

Yes, because it's the only major city that's growing. Cleveland, Cincinatti, Toledo, and Dayton are all losing population year-over-year while Columbus's grows.

Cincinnati (double n, single t) is actually growing in population: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2021/08/12/census-2020...

Just remarking its not entirely cheap. You can move there and get a job that pays well, but you aren't alone, other people are going to have well paid jobs too and you will find the same competitive housing market for decent neighborhoods that you see in places like Portland or wherever. Especially when you consider how your full tax structure works it might not be as much of a deal over time as CA with prop 13 as your taxes will be reassessed every few years and if the market climbed, so did your tax bill. There's probably fewer opportunities to leg up your earned income to match in a place with less jobs and smaller network effects like Central Ohio than there is in major job centers with more options for lateral moves.

I don't get why cost of living is factored at all.

The biggest expense is typically housing. And if you bought the house, it means the biggest expense is... building equity into an asset you can sell afterward.

Keep in mind the engineer who purchased a 2 million house in Palo Alto can sell it for two million, and then move to Ohio to a much cheaper house purchased in cash. The reverse isn't true.

You also pay taxes. But you are right that for the first movers it will be an easy transition into living opulantly in Ohio. The same can't be said for the next generation of workers, who graduate and have no capital accrued from working at bay area rates, and start their careers working for these Ohio based employers at Ohio based salary rates, and since Columbus is experiencing the same lack of supply issue everywhere growing faces, this generation are going to find a cutthroat market for them like the current generation of engineers fleeing 2 million dollar homes in Palo Alto.

As long as the market is allowed to build housing to meet demand it's not too bad.

Main issue in Palo Alto (and to a large extent the rest of the bay area) is that there's massive population growth in the bay area, but very little housing is allowed to be built. This creates artificial scarcity and the people that bought houses 30yrs ago accrue massive wealth because of it at the expense of new people (and the new people that manage to buy at exorbitant rates also end up paying the majority share of taxes too).

This is the natural incentive made worse by things like locked property taxes and rent control. You really need legislation that allows the market to build (easier said than done).

The (build) supply side of the housing market is complicated.

Remember that even when you aren't hampered by lack of space and/or zoning, most build starts are still 'investments'. I knew a whole lot of folks who did homebuilding in the first decade of the century. Housing starts were all over the place, partially because the investors were sure that with prices rising, it was a sure thing, right?

But then the market glut happened. Housing starts stopped. All of those folks left homebuilding and few if any ever went back to it.

I think nowadays Investors are back to preferring smaller buildouts, potentially in more phases. The supply/labor issues from covid haven't helped things lately though.

Population isn’t coming from nowhere. You can also directly compare the amounts new housing vs new commercial development in the Bay Area to see what’s going on.

The rules created by existing residents where designed to push up rent and home prices, and they have succeeded.

But unlike Palo Alto, Columbus can expand in all directions indefinitely. So while it may have housing issues, it would be completely surprising for houses to get as expensive or even relatively as expensive as a place like Palo Alto. Though the downside here is because of car-first urban planning and design we will create our own little version of Houston.

Is $1300/mo supposed to be high? I've seen parking spaces going for $600/mo where I live.

IMO thats high for ohio with the wages seen, considering you can find studios at that rate or 1br for a few hundred more in the LA area.

LA has by far the worst wages-to-rent ratio in the entire nation so I'm a bit skeptical of you claim here. Also note that the other post said a new apartment.

You are welcome to peruse craigslist and fact check my claim yourself. I do note the poster said new apartment, that poster was me. It is still surprising to me that for the money spent living in Columbus, you can live in LA. Even if the acommodations are a little bit older in the LA example, it's not like you are getting a multibedroom apartment for the price of a studio in LA or anything. Plus minimum wage is $15 in LA and $9.30 in Columbus and more skilled jobs go up from there accordingly (SWE in columbus make like 70-80k probably). Here's a studio clocking in under $1300 in LA in Koreatown, which would be very convenient if you worked in hollywood or downtown LA:

https://losangeles.craigslist.org/lac/apa/d/los-angeles-stud...

Apartments.com says theres like hundreds of studios available at this price range across LA:

https://www.apartments.com/los-angeles-ca/under-1300/

And in a very favorable neighborhood. You can get much cheaper rent in an "up and coming" neighborhood.

1 bedroom apartments go for closer to $700 or even as low as $400ish in Dayton just an hour and a half south of Columbus. Even here though housing prices are skyrocketing, so that won't be the case for long. Prices in Columbus are going to be absolutely ridiculous once this fab opens unless housing prices plummet for other reasons.

Agreed on the skyrocketing prices. Local here - I live 15 minutes from where Intel is breaking ground and it's bittersweet to be honest. I make good money for this area as a Software Engineer, but it's not coastal money and I can see the writing on the wall. I grew up in this area and have watched the locals slowly get pushed out. It's somewhat sad, but what can you do? Single family homes have went up 40% in the last five years and I'm guessing it will only get worse. The theory is that Columbus is supposed to grow by one million people in the next five to ten years, so a tech hub in New Albany will only exaggerate this.

All that being said, I have every intention on trying to work for Intel or at the tech hub itself, make my money/deal with it until retirement age, then get the heck out of here and find a place far far away where I can get something that looks and feels like this place once was.

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