Comment by icesoldier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icesoldier | Hacker News Reader

Any time I see stories of how crazy the situation surrounding the SF housing market is, I compare it to my own city (Amarillo, TX), which has the opposite situation. A much smaller population over a larger area with plenty of land to sprawl into means that the population density (and average rent) is much lower. My 1 bedroom apartment is ~650/mo, and my impression is that that situation would be a laughable offer in any larger city.

The only issue? Amarillo is pretty far away from the other larger cities. In the plains, we talk of distances between cities based on the number of hours it would take to drive that distance. Six to Dallas/Fort Worth, six to Denver, four to Oklahoma City, ten to Houston. Combined with the lower population, not much of an urban culture makes it out here. I don't mind, though, and because of the low cost of living and the Internet bringing the world to me, the low cost of living makes up for it. I'm not working with a startup nor on any products of my own at the moment, but should I start, I don't think I'd relocate unless a very compelling offer came my way.

You talk about time to other cities because it's a constant.

We talk about miles because otherwise, we'd have to say,"I live seven minutes from downtown SF between 10pm and 7am, an hour and a half between 7am and 10am, twenty minutes between 10am and noon, an hour between noon and 2pm, forty minutes between 2pm and 4pm, an hour between 4pm and 7pm, and half an hour between 7pm and 10pm."

Very true. That the roads between these cities mostly go through sparsely-populated rural areas helps.

EDIT: Though, the point I wanted to make was that it was an abstraction over the longer distances between the cities. To rephrase my examples, it's 360mi to Dallas, 430mi to Denver, 260mi to OKC, and 600mi to Houston. (Now that I'm looking up distances, I can add 500mi and 7.5 hours to Austin in that list - that length isn't in my cache, so to speak.)

There are plenty of larger cities away from the Northeast and West Coast that have similarly cheap rents. You could live in Minneapolis for about the same amount of money, Milwaukee for similar or less money, Pittsburgh for similar money, and Denver for similar money.

Chicago and Portland would both be not much more.

All of these are relatively large cities (~1.5M+ in the metro area) with a lot of cultural institutions, and many have pretty decent economies (especially considering that high housing costs aren't driving away lower-income folks, artificially raising the average). Minneapolis, for example, has a median income for a family of very nearly $60k, versus $42k in Amarillo.

There's a large middle ground in this country between small, remote Texas cities, and hugely expensive coastal megalopolises.

Excellent! Thanks for the information; to be honest, I hadn't looked and made an erroneous assumption. I had let the HN bubble affect my perspective, too, so now that I think about it I had an awkward view of the scale of cities across the country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com