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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

It still boggles my mind that people pay $2k-3k per month for a tiny apartment in NYC or SF. You buy a decent house in Pittsburgh for what 2-3 years of rent in SF will get you. I'm sure Chattanooga is similar to Pittsburgh in terms of what 100k buys.

I love NYC, and SF is startup mecca, but on paper it just makes me question whether it's worth it.

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How could it boggle your mind that different people have different values? I'm happy to pay a premium to live in Boston and not Pittsburgh. That's a very easy decision for me to make, on paper and in practice.

Aside from preferring Boston, volume of living space is also unimportant to me. I like renting. I don't take up much space and don't see the value in claiming a bigger footprint than I need. But I couldn't feel confused that others disagree, unless I felt my values were somehow correct or absolute.

From my experience the NYC jobs pay more than the ones in other places, so if you're not working remote it can make sense. Also, I like NYC as a city way more than Pittsburgh.

Yeah, I figure that the salaries are more to offset. And NYC is definitely a much better place than Pittsburgh.

The question is really: if I can own a house in Pittsburgh and visit NYC for 3-4 months a year, and still spend less than renting in NYC, does it make sense at all to live in NYC?

But never mind me, I'll probably end up in New York regardless :)

Bought a bungalow here on very lean startup salary. Mortgage significantly less than avg rent in SoMa/ Mountain View. Small yard for my dogs, great school if/when have kids. Less than 1 mile from a ton of restaurants, bars/taverns, whole foods.

Great life for a mid-20's person and still get to travel often.

Don't want to diss you or anything, but as a European I find bungalows (usually in track row hosing) depressing. Also, less than a mile is not really close. To me close is something that is within a block, that I can just walk within 5 mins.

I live in NYC now, (east village), and there are about 100s of restaurant's, shops, bars, cafes just within 5 minutes walk. The diversity is ridiculous. (I don't think anywhere in the world you find so many kinds of nationalities and cousines in one place).

No diss taken, Sir. We may be thinking of the same type of house, perhaps not? But no matter.

I love NYC, and have visited 3x this year. It is an amazing place. I'd say that Chattanooga will not be comparable in almost any metric - # of X, density, variety.

I think for many living in American cities other than NYC, SF, downtown Chicago/ Boston/ DC/ ATL/ Seattle/ a few others - being able to live, walk, eat, get groceries is fairly unusual. Especially for a relative low cost with decent-to-high quality of housing.

It still boggles my mind that people pay $500-800 per month for an apartment in Pittsburgh or Chattanooga. You buy a decent house in somewhere else for what 2-3 years of rent in Pitt will get you.

You get paid more to offset the high rent in these cities.

Not even close. Especially if your marginal tax rate is like 40% or more by the time you add all the taxes up.

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