Not So Much ‘New York Poor’ as ‘Pittsburgh Rich’
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Our first child was born in Brooklyn, second in New Jersey, but my wife and I are originally from the Pittsburgh area. Returned to Pittsburgh while our kids were still in pre-school.
The Carnegie Library system is outstanding. The Squirrel Hill and Oakland branches (most convenient locations to us) have large, comfortable children's sections. With their loan system, can request pretty much any book you can think of and pick up in a few days in the branch closest to you. My kids understand the system and use it to get books by authors they like.
Children's Museum, Phipp's Conservatory, and Carnegie museum are all great for kids. Generally, if you go more than once a yearly membership pays off, and a lot of these are connected (membership in one gives you admission to others).
A few years older now, we got season passes to Kennywood and Sandcastle. Kennywood has fantastic roller coasters, especially the older ones.
Schenley and Frick parks are immense. With the Pittsburgh topography, you can walk through trails and feel totally removed from the city.
In many neighborhoods, you can own suburb sized homes for cheaper than the suburbs, with access to all the city amenities.
My kids walk 3 blocks to school.
I could go on. Pittsburgh is a great place to raise a family.
The people I know who still live in NYC end up spending much of their salary hiring people to watch their kids, and then there's the competitive nature of getting kids into preschools, kindergarden, etc. and all the costs associated with those.
Maybe the seeds were sown in the '90s and they sprouted in the aughts? I'd have to know what was attempted in the '90s to evaluate the question; looks like I have some research to do. ;)
not nearly enough new-world accoutrements
Can you give examples? As others have pointed out, I think PGH does a great job of bridging the gap between a large, cosmopolitan city and a small town where you don't have to feel lost forever. Of course, as you point out, the flip side to that it is a small town--you have to very careful to avoid burning bridges because it is highly likely you may need to cross that bridge again at some point.
(Edit: fixed formatting)
As a mostly life-long 'burger (up until I was 26), I disagree. In fact, I'll claim that if you're a software engineer in Pittsburgh, then you're in a dead-end job as long as you remain in Pittsburgh.
Yes, you'll have a very nice quality of life; however, you have significantly less opportunities as a software engineer there. Aside from a few firms, Pittsburgh doesn't have an industry that provides the environment, training, challenges and opportunities of both large technology firms and a robust startup community that you see in other major tech hubs. This lowers the wages and, to be frank, lowers the quality of engineers available to hire in Pittsburgh. It makes it more difficult to move out for engineers who have spent the formative part of their career in Pittsburgh.
And that's fine. Software programming isn't the be-all end-all of human activity. It's awesome to be part of something bigger, delivering real value aside from shipping the next social-photo-sharing-app. But just because you can get software programming jobs in Pittsburgh in no way allows Pittsburgh to compare to San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, LA, Boston, Austin... It's just not the same environment and we shouldn't pretend it is.
On the other hand, given the rate that Google is growing in Pittsburgh, I suspect they'd disagree with you about available talent quality.
(On the third hand, "quality" is a fuzzy metric unless we nail down more concretely how one would evaluate it. Is someone writing thousands of lines of code per day at Facebook higher "quality" than someone writing a hundred lines of code per day on machine-learning cancer detection logic?)
That's not to say there aren't good, indigenous engineers, but, rather, that Google has a nice farm system in the local universities.
You make it sound as if these trends were inauthentic. I think they were, in fact, organic outgrowths of the city's strengths. As long as Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh are there, there will always be a strength in tech and medicine. I was a bit too young to be much of an observer of the 80s as they happened, but finance was most likely a strength due to Pittsburgh's prior status as headquarters for a significant number of Fortune 500 companies and banks: PNC, Mellon Bank, Gulf Oil, US Steel, Alcoa, HJ Heinz, Westinghouse... At the tail end of the postwar industrial boom, there must have been a good deal of money in Pittsburgh, ready to create a financial hub.
I just wish Carnegie didn't have to do all that evil stuff to make it happen. :/
This sounds a lot like Georgia's PINES system.
Salaries here are substantially higher (I doubt devs make $150k+ in Pittsburgh, in NYC that's very achievable), and that makes a huge difference in accumulating savings. Yes, living expenses are proportionally higher here as well so I'm still only left with a small percentage of my paycheck. But that small percentage means a lot more because it can be spent on global goods like travel or savings.
Spending a couple grand on a vacation is basically a rounding error in a NYC budget, but it'd be a decent chunk of a Pittsburgh salary. Similarly, saving just a bit of my income in NYC for a few years makes it easy to build up a large nest egg for a down payment on a beautiful house somewhere like Pittsburgh.
If I'm way off base, someone please let me know. If it's actually possible to make $150k+ in a cheap area, or with remote work, I'd be interested to hear.
Sorry, I don't mean to be a jerk. Just wanted to let you know.
Fixed that for you ;)
As someone who grew up half an hour _outside_ the city, it's been interesting to see which chunks of Pittsburghese I picked up, and which ones I didn't. Some if it is also age: my grandfather speaks with a more significant amount of it than I do, even though his home was half a mile from my childhood one.
I lived in that town from age 7 or 8 until I left for college (and was living there when Stayner disappeared), including a few years living near Bear Creek, and do not recall ever hearing anyone call it "the Bear Creek". It was just "Bear Creek". It immediately flagged the screenplay for me as having been written by someone not from there [2].
I thought this was kind of neat, because as far as I can tell there is no rule that determines what places get a "the" and which do not. It just seems to be arbitrary, and so someone just grabbing the name off a map has no way to know whether or not the locals put a "the" in front or not.
I bet there are lots of little linguistic traps like this waiting to trip up people trying to pretend to be from somewhere they are not.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steven_Stayner
[2] It's possible, of course, that people from different parts of town referred to that creek differently.
I was recently looking up the difference between "the Ukraine" and "Ukraine," because people really prefer the second. It was said that 'the' is used when shortening the name: "the Bahamas" instead of "Kingdom of the Bahamas." "The Ukraine" comes from when it was a territory of the USSR, rather than a country in its own right, and when it gained independence, it was just "Ukraine."
Some food for thought.
It's possible with remote work (I know at least a few people who do), it's just difficult to find those opportunities.
I'm sorry, but Pittsburgh has very few software companies that provide the sort of training, environment, experience and challenge that allow an area to develop and produce top technical talent. Yes, Pittsburgh has great universities, a small startup scene, and some amazing medical and applied science companies, but the software development industry there is extremely small.
I lived there until I was 26. I worked 5 years for Sony out in westmoreland county. When I started to do some freelance work, I had local Pittsburgh recruiters tell me I could never make what I was aiming for. So I took a contract just a few hours away in Philly that paid double what I could get in Pittsburgh. I don't know if there's a single firm in Pittsburgh, aside from perhaps Google, that could match the salary I currently have or the offers I've had from large tech firms in LA, San Francisco, Seattle and NYC.
I'm not sure what you find offensive about the idea of working for a company that is trying to solve one of the hardest logistical challenges in history, at scale. It doesn't seem very glamorous, until someone needs socks (or medicine) right-the-hell-NOW.
How long ago were you 26? Wikipedia tells me Sony was out in Westmoreland between 1990 and 2008; if you're drawing on knowledge from the '90s, other comments in this thread suggest to me your perspective is woefully out-of-date... And at the rate things are growing, 2008 may still be out-of-date.
You're overdue for a visit. ;)
My personal experience (10 years in mnt view, 4 years in Pittsburgh): not even close when you compare free cash flow. I have way more now in pittsburgh for savings, vacations, etc. You have to consider total cost of living (taxes, real estate, cost of living, etc). I'd estimate even with 25% more salary in CA, you would have more spending money in PA.
The big thing you give up is diversity of jobs and choice. If you like to hop around a lot, try new things, there are simply not as many good options. I'd still recommend bay area right out of school, but seriously consider Pittsburgh, Seattle, Austin, Raleigh, etc when you are at the stage you want to buy a house.
I speak from experience as sure my paycheck was larger when I lived in DC, but I could never afford to own a single family home. Now I own what would be the equivalent of a mansion in DC for less then what my suburban Maryland townhouse went for.
I can take a meeting with even international clients in NYC without ever leaving. They come here. If you're in art, yes you want to go where you can live cheap, but if you want to make a splash you need to be somewhere where there is sufficient disposable income and a big enough transient population to support viral awareness of your art. Pittsburgh doesn't have enough of those things. I think Pittsburgh is a wonderful city, filled with great parks, cheap beer and good folks. But I haven't visited there in years and there is a reason why
Pittsburgh may not have an airline hub or access to the ocean, but it's been a transit nexus for decades; it's the last major city anything going from the New York / Philadelphia area along I-76 will hit before crossing the Alleghenies. As such, it sees a good assortment of art events and shows as they tour; theater tours (especially with significant technical needs) tend to be convoy-of-trailers affairs. To drill in on the arts specifically: I've seen Wicked, Addams Family, and Mary Poppins without having to plan a weekend for the event. There's also a Tony-award-winner-producing college in the city, which creates some excellent local shows as a side-effect.
You also may be under-estimating the effect of real estate value in a world where people can make a productive input without needing to physically geo-locate with the rest of their company. Pittsburgh is a growing location for software and other engineering. Apple, Disney, and Google all have offices in the city. Ports still matter, but not as much as they did in the days where the only meaningful value was in goods; in a service economy, things are more distributed.
I'm from New York City but went to college in the 'Burgh, and while I do have an affinity for the place given the four years I spent there, I'd never choose to live there. It's a remarkably isolated city...
The last time Pittsburgh was a real, honest transit nexus was some 60-70 years ago for the Pennsylvania Railroad. While USAir had something of a hub at PIT, it's been tertiary to PHL and CLT since the company was called USAir, and then they pulled out very quickly after they were acquired by America West. For road travel, maybe it's a pass through city if you are starting in Philly and are driving to Cleveland, Detroit, or Chicago, but most of the traffic in the NE Corridor opts for I-80 to the north, which is much more direct and a much easier drive than the Turnpike.
Pittsburgh also doesn't have much of a metropolitan area surrounding it. The drop-off from downtown to rural is rather stark. And while there are indeed some nice neighborhoods (Shadyside and Squirrel Hill within the city... Fox Chapel and Wexford to name a few outside,) most of the inner suburbs have an, IMHO, outer-outer borough NYC feel to them (i.e. Bay Ridge or Bay Side, not Williamsburg or Park Slope.) There is practically no commuter belt, so you either really have to like the urban core, or the surrounding mountain towns.
So yes, it's an isolated city. Even Cleveland and Baltimore have more of a metro-urban feel to them in some respects. It's certainly not an issue for many who choose to live there, but it's always been my reason for staying away after college.
As I see it, there are a couple of rural pockets near the city but they're the exception rather than the rule. There's an approximately 20 mile buffer of suburbs between the city proper and rural areas.
Maybe it's a difference of experience so where do New York eyes see as rural near the city?
I'm reminded of a quote by Patty Smyth: "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."
http://gothamist.com/2010/05/03/patti_smith_suggests_finding....
I really do think that tech needs to embrace the need to branch out. I understand SF is a great place to fund tech companies, and that VCs (and often CEOs) appear to prefer it.
But it is frustrating to see tech elites (I'm talking about the sort of people who get to pick up the phone and vent a bit to the elected leader of the world's largest military about their company's hiring woes) insist that there is a severe shortage of tech workers when they continue to create 110k a year jobs in a city where the median 3br house costs 1.1mil. I agree that SF should build more, but this isn't going to be the solution.
If you're offering 110K a year for developers in Detroit, Poughkeepsie, Baltimore, St Louis, Minneapolis and you can't find anyone, ok, maybe we can start talking about why and how the government can help. But if you're creating 110K a year jobs in a place where two full time workers are looking at roughly 50k in child care costs and a 1.1 mil bill for the median 3br house, well of course you're having trouble finding workers!
His conversations with me have been interesting, with the main point being that he has to pay WAY more for talent, space, everything. His main frustration is he doesn't need the mythical "10X" developers. He just needs people who can deliver, and has to fight for talent with dozens of apps which have premises so silly that he can't believe they are funded.
I got an offer the other day for 120k in SF. I did the math, and said no. I'd be better off taking a job for 85k in Austin.
And regarding Austin getting more expensive: There is a huge differentiator here. Austin has a booming housing market AND a booming development market. There is tons of new housing being built, and a lot of it is very interesting, moderate density in-fill development relatively close to the downtown core. There's one company building neo-traditional development neighborhoods in old strip mall locations where the houses all have solar panels and uber modern designs. They go for 270k for a 3 bedroom. Hardly exorbitant.
I'm a developer in St. Louis who thinks about this sort of thing all the time. Look, I like San Francisco. I'm there a few times a year and it's great. But is it $60k/year more in cost-of-living better than Kansas City or Austin or Pittsburgh? What if the difference in salary is only half that? I don't know, but I don't think it's obvious.
This is false. Have you checked actual rents and commutes in Austin rather than silly online calculators.
Yes, you get to avoid state tax in Texas. That is the primary advantage.
Rents within short commuting distance of downtown are ridiculous. Both IH35 and Mopac(Loop 1) have ridiculous traffic with no mass transit in sight. IH35 through Austin is actually acknowledged as a traffic nightmare in the same class as 101 and 405 in LA!
And, finally, you get to live outnumbered and surrounded in a state that wishes Austin would simply vaporize because it's full of "daymn libruls".
So, yeah, all that cheap housing is available. It's just a horrible commute from a community that likely hates your guts in a state that doesn't care.
Don't get me wrong. There is a lot to like about Austin. But this isn't 1996 when Austin really was 85% the cost of living of the rest of the country when I would fly in from California, buy a $4.95 submarine sandwhich and get back "3 feet" of food because I forgot where I was.
In fact, there was a discussion on the Austin reddit about this very subject today: http://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/28cmrs/psa_when_you_...
I agree with this. I've lived in Dallas for 10 years and I've seen a lot of change since I moved here in 2004. The later waves of Asian immigration and other folks fleeing the freezing Northeast winters is starting to make Texas a bit more blue these days.
On the flip side, housing is no longer cheap in many areas. If I were to buy a new home the same size as my current, 6 year old home, I would likely have to spend twice as much as I spent in 2008.
"Then I walked up the street, gazing about till near the market-house I met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and, inquiring where he got it, I went immediately to the baker’s he directed me to, in Secondstreet, and ask’d for bisket, intending such as we had in Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I asked for a three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So not considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater cheapness nor the names of his bread, I made him give me three-penny worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surpriz’d at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walk’d off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5823
Almost 250 years later, sounds like this is still happening.
There isn't a single place in the entire Bay Area that is remotely as affordable. Also, Austin is a buyers city. The rent to home price ratio clearly tilts towards buyer. This is because of the tremendous amount of development upping the supply of new homes for sale, but not for rent.
A big part of this is that people used to find a way to move to SF because they wanted to live there. In a way, finding a job that allowed you to live in SF was like finding a job that allowed you to be a musician, or pursue an art. SF wasn't a horrible place to pursue a career, but it wasn't the alpha city either. Finance and Law? New York, London, maybe Chicago. Entertainment? LA. Fashion? NY or Paris. Truly career focused people probably went elsewhere. SF wasn't a complete backwater, you could still pursue a career here, but you were in SF because you wanted to live in SF.
High tech was around, but it wasn't nearly as big, or as culturally high profile, and it was heavily centered in the south bay. As a result, you really didn't have people here who didn't want to be here who had to put up with it anyway. And no doubt, there's a lot you have to put up with in SF, even if, on the balance, you really like it.
Sometimes these "SF != cool city" posts unfavorably compare SF to NY (in my opinion, we need a type of godwin's law here - SF should never be compared to NY, and whoever makes this comparison loses the argument immediately). In the past, we'd probably ask "then why are you here instead of NY?", except that we wouldn't get a chance to ask - none of this would have even happened, because he would be living in NY.
But now? He has to live in SF to get funding, and he's not happy about to be in SF, and from the reaction, I'd say nobody is particularly happy about it.
- Food: Walk out of your house. Go a few blocks. You will find ethnic food of your choice in New York or San Francisco. Hell, I live in the UWS in New York. Even here, in the midst of high residential nirvana, you can find random restaurants open at all hours of the night. Austin was a great city when I lived there. Except that the closest restaurant ( a subway) was 5 miles away. Ever want to do something crazy, like celebrate a birthday of a friend during thanksgiving. Not a chance. Everything is shutdown. This is not just an American phenomenon. I have been in Stockholm for the past few weeks. It is sunday afternoon and you want food? Nope, it is sunny out there so every restaurant owner in a five block radius wants to close his place and go hang out.
- Transport: If you want to live in an American city and not drive a car, I haven't found better cities to live than the two. It is ridiculous how well a city like Austin is designed for the four wheeled population. To the extent that pavements are an afterthought, sandwiched between lawns and tarmac.
- Culture: This is not going to be an issue for most people making the move. However, as a person who is a perpetual immigrant, I prefer cities that are filled with people from varying different backgrounds. New York is the most non American, American city that I have ever lived in. I wish I could say the same for San Francisco, but it really is a city of three major clusters.
The culture part really rings true for me. I was born in Asia, immigrated to Canada at a very young age, and now I'm in the US. I find it difficult and oftentimes annoying to live in places without this sort of diversity. I've been to, for lack of a better term, "whiter" parts of the US and have always been a bit uncomfortable. I've met very few hostile "real" racists, but in these parts of the country I feel like every time I meet someone I have to first break through the stereotypes attached to my skin color.
"Where are you from?" "Canada" (I speak with no trace of an Asian accent) "No, where are you REALLY from?"
In NYC the answer is "Cool, which part of Canada?"
Nevermind the people who just have to sneak in the "good at math" joke somewhere in there. Nobody ever means any harm, but it is profoundly annoying to go through life being the "other". In big cities this is never a problem - when I meet new people I'm treated as an individual first, not the sum perceptions of my race.
It's not an annoying problem or anything like that, it just speaks to a certain mentality in most of the country that's hard to relate to.
Hah. I feel ya. I was born, grew up in Africa. I am of Indian origin. I don't explicit identify as Indian. Hell, being asked if I am from India as the first question from the get go is pretty fucking infuriating for me. It is getting to the point where I occasionally ask if they are European? Not to say this doesn't happen in the big cities like NYC or SF, but it happens way less than it would in Podunk town, USA. But it happens more in SF with its huge Indian tech population than in NYC where tech is just one another industry. This [1] kind of hits too close to home sometimes.
That's a pretty typical (and healthy!) diet in a large city. I myself have recently relocated to a middle US city from NY and definitely miss the cuisine. I find myself feeling much less healthy and craving my old dietary variety.
So being near a bunch of different types of food is a must for me.
And bread, cheese/milk, egg and carrot - wow. How boring. Just because I don't want to cook doesn't mean I don't want my food to be good, flavorful, and exciting. I like food. I like hot, prepared food.
Also, one of the "things" about NYC is that going out to eat doesn't take much more time. Having food prepared for you is not an event, and you don't need to drive a few miles to get to a restaurant. From my apartment I can be ass-in-seat at 4-5 different eateries in the amount of time it'd take for you to start the car and pull out of the driveway. There's a reason so many of us complain about our small apartments but wouldn't trade them in for anything.
NYC has nearly perfected the craft of preparing food for you cheaply, quickly, and tastily. You can eat cuisines from the world over, a new one each day, without breaking the bank and without traveling more than 10 minutes from your home.
The sheer density of restaurants also helps quality. The are so many restaurants offering similar cuisines in any given area that they compete fiercely on price and quality. The result is that you can get an amazing quality of food at sub-suburban prices.
Even if you prepare your own food, in NYC the grocery is so close by you can buy in small volume and wide variety. You can practice an incredibly varied menu in your own kitchen because you don't have to buy in anything resembling bulk. You can buy just enough of some ingredient for one meal, and switch to something entirely different the next day, with little logistical impact. Swinging by the bakery for a fresh loaf of bread is a matter of course - you don't have to pull into a parking lot, park the car, or anything - it's just on your way from wherever you were going.
The "sell" for NYC food is a combination of variety, quality, and price.
If I'm going to eat out, it's a rare treat and I'm going to drop a couple hundred at a highly reputable place. To consider restaurants and food stands as part of your day to day life style is crazy to me. Just my opinion.
Some people really like food. You want to live elsewhere? More power to you. Just don't fucking trivialize the reason why other people want to live their own life the way they want to.
It's nice that you're able to buy exotic spices where you live, but i'm fine with how you said it because you didn't say something like: you couldn't live anywhere else besides where you are or you'd shoot yourself. Or that you use exotic spices in your cooking because you enjoy variety in your life. Don't we all!
That Afghan syrup you put in water and you grew up drinking, you may have me there.
which can usually be found by poking around the shelves of Indian stores in bigger cities. Certainly Austin and SF would have it, it might take some phone calls to locate though.
My guess is that all of these people actually plan to return to the suburbs eventually, when their kids are old enough for school, and they decide to buy a house (with surprisingly little consideration to nearby Thai food offerings.) My projection of the mindset: you go to the city for exotic experiences, if you wanted to buy stuff for your house, or groceries, or a backpack, why wouldn't you go to the mall?
They'll blather on about how some trip expanded their mind and so forth, despite not speaking any of the language or knowing anything of the history and only being there briefly.
Some people have grown up eating seafood, different vegetables and a variety of spices in their food and aren't so quick to give them up.
> "With the right ingredients, a sharp knife, and a hot pan, you can make just about anything."
The first part is a problem in most places. You could, for example, make your own soy sauce. But you won't, because that's thoroughly impractical.
A lot of ingredients are surprisingly hard to come by in a lot of places. Even in places where you can find them, oftentimes they come in very poor quality (see: try to find good miso most places in the US).
I once lived in a heavily suburban town where I couldn't find a decent bottle of soy sauce to save my life. The only thing I could find was a bottle of brown-salt-liquid.
To put it in perspective, imagine moving somewhere where "bread" is just white Wonder Bread. Forget hot dog bugs, forget burger buns, forget whole wheat, forget baguettes, etc etc. Just plain white wonder bread. This is what the state of "ethnic food" looks like across a lot of the country. While you can make some of these things yourself, at some point it reminds you of the "to make an apple pie, first invent the universe" quote.
"Ethnic" ingredients in many parts of the country are either completely unavailable, or only available in a form that's palatable to people who have no substantial knowledge of the cuisine.
It takes actual population diversity to bring about the good ingredients. There are vast parts of the country where quality "ethnic" ingredients are impossible or impractical to procure.
Side note: the word "ethnic food" itself is indicative of something IMO. A system under which Indian food, Chinese food, Korean food, Afghan food, Malaysian food, and Ethiopian food are easily categorized under a single catch-all term suggests a very severe lack of diversity indeed.
I'm farther from an Indian grocery store today living in a core neighborhood of Brooklyn than when I grew up in Milwaukee or went to school in Pittsburgh. And when I went home to visit Milwaukee, the local food coop had ramps available, just like any hip store in Brooklyn.
I have been trying to find decent Indian food, for example, but have been coming up short. Pittsburgh does have very good modern-American cuisine, but "ethnic" food is a bit lacking.
Going out drinking is insanely cheap by comparison. You can get a good craft beer draft for as low as $2, whereas in NYC the best I'd find would be around $4 (and that would be pretty lucky). There's plenty to do culturally, and the rent/housing prices are very good.
EDIT: Thanks for all the Indian food recommendations. I've got some eating to do!
It's out in Monroeville next to a concrete factory -- but fantastic south indian food. Definitely worth the drive.
Tamarind on North Craig Street in Oakland?
Oh how I miss Pittsburgh... I was there four years and it took a little while but it really, really grew on me. I hope you find more spots to your liking!
were my go to spots before I left Pgh for NYC.
That said, the more options the better in my opinion!
I agree on ethnic food. I still can't find a decent burrito place.
This area (the missoula+bitterroot valley area) also has a surprising number of startups, both software and hardware including a utility bike manufacture that is stealing contracts from the Chinese and various biotechs and big data focussed companies.
I think that cheap space and low cost of living are ingredients that are too often overlooked in YC style startups.
I'm primarily a software/machine learning guy but now that I've got a garage i've already got small machine shop set up for various hardware projects and experiments and now that we have guest rooms and space I'll be inviting various collaborators out for coding/hiking/climbing/skiing retreats.
The climate is actually reasonably mild in the valley (3,500'), it snows but it usually melts within days or weeks if it is a very cold spell. I'm able to run outside all winter long wearing a light fleece layer and occasionally using microspikes for traction if it is icy.
The local ski area is in a pass at 7k feet and closes if it gets much bellow 0 F which only happened a couple of days this year.
Missoula and the Flathead vallies to the north get inversions causing haze in the valley bottoms much of the winter but the bitterroot gets more sunny winter days.
Absolutely. Having moved here, and being in a position where I work remote and live in a place 100% chosen for my lifestyle, I would never voluntarily switch back. You cannot put a high enough price tag on happiness.
I grew up on a farm - 3,000 acres - we had crops (normal crops - peanuts, corn, etc. and not normal - loblolly trees). Camping and hiking were just what we did to get to the backside of the place to check on fire lanes, crops, do some hunting, etc.
Most people I know that had a more urban upbringing love the idea of being "near" nature. But having spent 20 years of my life in it, other than the occasional weekend hike, I don't want to live any where near it :)
I did lived in the city for over 10 years and loved the social and cultural aspects of it but I found myself driving out to the mountains more and more to recreate. I also met someone with similar interests and got married while in the city, I think it would be much harder to make the rural hop and then meet someone.
We also chose a small town (5k) with a research sector (NIH lab, GSK Facility, spin offs) partly because it has elements of culture you would usually find in a bigger city including some good international restaurants, an educated population etc.
The only ethnic food I find myself missing living in rural New Hampshire is sushi, since the fish we have available here is rather limited compared to big cities. For everything else I’ve either found good restaurants or learned to cook it myself (and in the latter cases, I’m now often disappointed by restaurants).
Pittsburgh is wonderful. There's a lot wrong with it, but a lot of right too. It is certainly very cheap to live, and there's a lot going on. We even have a Techstars-affiliated incubator, which used to offer a really, really good deal. My first startup, CloudFab, went through it years ago. That said, SF is still the best place in the world to do a startup: every city says "We may not be SF, but we have X!" X is _never_ enough to make up for not being SF. I said it when I lived there too, and now that I've lived in SF, I know that's just deeply, deeply wrong. That doesn't mean you _can't_ do it, but it's a handicap.
However, living in a place is very rarely about 'economic sense.' I have a _need_ to live in NYC. I've gotten more work done in the two weeks I've lived here than I did in the entire six months I lived in SF, and maybe about a third of what I did in LA. The hustle, bustle, and opportunities are endless.
Last night I woke up at ten am, did my laundry, then went to a juice bar, worked for a few hours, walked around, ended up literally coding on a bar while watching the US. vs. Ghana game, then took the train over to Herald Square and coded in the park. It was a beautiful evening. Around midnight, walked up to Times Square to squeak in some power before all the stores closed, then worked in another park until 3am, and took the train home. You can't really do that anywhere else, at least in the states.
Oh, and I'm saving about 25% on my rent by moving to Brooklyn from San Francisco, and I'd be saving 60% if I had still lived in the Mission when I left.
So your gold standard is "a city where I code in bars and parks until the middle of the night?" Yeah, I think there's more than one place in the US where you can do that.
Well to be fair, you didn't mention anything about coding in a bar that late.
> there are very few cities in which you can code at a bar and not be weird (which means things like accessible power plugs)
Bars having power outlets is a function of the city they reside in? And I think perhaps you've been living in that SF/LA/NYC bubble too long, it's not as uncommon in the less civilized parts of the country as you may think. Hell, a lot of bars in those backward cities have wifi too!
> there are very few cities in which there's hustle and bustle, even at 3am.
Well you've got me there.
Sorry, don't mean to be super critical, but your "NYC is the only place in the country where you can do these things!!!" mentality struck a nerve.
Speaking of unspoken constraints, I also _need_ to be in a big city. My rule of thumb is "does it have a subway?" If not, it's probably not big enough. That constraint alone cuts it down to fifteenish cities. Not a hard-and-fast rule, but I grew up on a cattle farm. I know that life isn't for me, at all.
That's what I figured, and that's fine. I'm just a little sensitive because usually when these topics come up it comes off as "NYC is the height of great living."
You'd make do too if you had to. Suicide isn't even an option for a lot of people, because preparations and privacy are hard to come by, and they might not even have the mobility to make it happen.
I just wanted you to be aware of what advantages you do have, and what things are really a need (food, water, medical supplies and/or medications, shelter, care if you need it) and what aren't. Other than that live the happiest life that is possible for you!
Nashville, Memphis, Miami, Denver, Portland, Honolulu, Houston, Austin, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle all spring to mind immediately, and that's not even counting the big two -- New Orleans and Vegas.
Also, for what it's worth, I've been coding in bars for over a decade in places like Memphis, TN, Albany, NY, etc., and haven't ever been a problem.
Glad you like New York, and I'm in no way trying to disparage it, but the OP does make a point. That said, everywhere is different, and New York undoubtedly offers a myriad of things not found in other places, and vice versa.
I DID almost move to Chicago once...
My hometown (grew up in Hazelwood/Greenfield) is still a city very much in transition. If you stay in your designated neighborhoods like Oakland, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, etc. you'll be blissful in your little bubble of it being a great town on the upswing. Get ten minutes out of town in almost any direction (sans the southern 376 corridor to the airport) and you'll feel like you are on a different planet.
Sometimes even taking the wrong street will have you wind up in areas that are dilapidated, poverty stricken, and villainous. The Consol Energy Center is a stone's throw from one of the historically worst neighborhoods in the country.
Knowing that, Pittsburgh has radically changed in a very short amount of time. Medical was always big there; but the dotcom boom incubated a wonderful technology center that surrounds Carnegie Mellon and the other fine schools in the area.
I wouldn't hesitate for a second moving back to Pittsburgh...just so long as I get to live in a place of my own choosing and not my old neighborhood :)
Just to say, some of us actually like your old neighborhood. :)
For those who do enjoy the biggest cities, I'm not knocking your choices. A lot of people are energized by living in such a hustling and bustling place. I totally get it.
She lived in Park Slope for the first two years, sharing a two bedroom, fifth floor walkup, attic apartment. The entire apartment was maybe 20 x 20 ft with a good part of it of limited use due to the slant of the roof. Rent was $1,500 a month including utilities. It was a great neighborhood though and she really enjoyed her time there.
The apartment building was sold to a luxury developer and the rent was raised to $2,300 a month. The new owners really just wanted the building empty so they could gut it and change it to luxury apartments. We walked by there this past weekend and the place was boarded up.
Her new apartment is a legitimate two bedroom in a clean but very old building on the edges of Boerum Hill. The neighborhood is okay but you need to be aware that two blocks away it starts get dodgy very quickly. The rent is $2,200 + utilities. Her and her apartment mate looked for two months to find the apartment. It was the only thing they could find that was affordable but wasn’t a filthy dump. The leases on the old and new places overlapped by a month and a half but they had to look early because the inventory is so limited.
Real estate in NYC has gone crazy. Manhattan prices are driven by international buyers looking for a place that’s safe. One bedroom apartments in Manhattan for less than a million are becoming scarce according to the NYT. Brooklyn is priced at what Manhattan was a couple of years ago. The downtown area of Brooklyn has been very popular because of the availability of mass transit to get people into their jobs in Manhattan. As you move out from downtown Brooklyn the commute time increases quickly as subway lines spread out and express trains make less frequent stops. Two to three hours a day on a subway commute becomes old very quickly.
NYC is a great place but unless you have some equity in the place you work you’re very likely not going to be able to afford to have the life you think is waiting for you there.
A friend of mine recently visited from NYC and remarked about how he is paying $3000 for a place in Manhattan with one room. I couldnt imagine living in a building taking an elevator to my place. Cant have pets and he can barely have people over to sit down.
From the stories I hear about SF and NYC, I am probably never going to move to either.
I suppose different people have different preferences. I couldn't imagine stepping out of my door and having literally nothing interesting (not even a grocery store or coffee shop!) in walking distance. Or rather, I can imagine it, because I grew up in suburbia, but I can't imagine wanting to move back. Just feels way too isolated being so far from everything and unable to do even the simplest things without driving.
Of course, I don't personally take the elevator, rather the stairs, because my building has no elevator. :D
Coming from Philadelphia, where I lived in a 2BR HOUSE with a yard and all the amenities for $400/mo less, there was some sticker shock. But when you get to it, there's a lot more opportunity, a lot more options, a lot more of...everything. New York is about "a lot". That's what you pay for.
People seem to be unwilling to explore neighborhoods outside of a 20-minute ride to down/midtown hotspots, which reasonably cost considerably more. If you can stomach an extra 10-20m on the subway you can find very livable rents in good neighborhoods.
Its been a while since I lived there but living in Bay Ridge is not what people think of when they think of living in NYC. There are no museums or shows, great libraries or parks with concerts. (Although there is Shore Road which is a great place to jog.) Going into Manhattan on weekends is a drag when you ride the subway all week. Honestly, comparing living in Bay Ridge to living in someplace like Pittsburgh, I don't see where it's worth the time that the added expenses costs.
Does anyone else think this is sad? When you visit a place like Tokyo, it makes NYC look like a decrepit backwater.
In addition there are commuter trains that cover most of Long Island, Westchester county, Southwest Connecticut, and North New Jersey that connect to stations serviced by the subway and many run hourly or half hourly. NY buses aren't the best - but no system is perfect.
Still I agree that it's a good deal considering how far you can travel.
That has obvious benefits such as helping maintain cleanliness, but I still wouldn't eat a meal without washing my hands after riding on the Tokyo subway.
It does stop running, but Tokyo doesn't. That's why capsule hotels and suitcase lockers.
I don't find myself often venturing to uptown Manhattan, Williamsburg, or anywhere in Queens. My fiancee and I live in Bay Ridge, some family members live in the West Village, and most of our friends live Southern/"Middle" Brooklyn – Park Slope, Bed Stuy, etc.
THAT SAID: The more wholesome amenities available in Bay Ridge blow away most everything else available in Brooklyn (notable exceptions are only Park Slope, BoCoCa, Williamsburg proper). Considering the price, a bargain of a neighborhood. Dining/Drinking-wise, the neighborhood itself is going through a small revolution. Good stuff happening. Super livable area.
Eventually though, I wanted better opportunities. Nobody wanted to pay in New York. If I looked for web design gigs on Craigslist and elsewhere, everybody seemed to think $10/hour was a fair rate. It was insulting. So I got the hell out.
I moved to DC in 2008 and haven't really looked back. In 2008, it was considerably cheaper, and salaries were generally higher. After struggling to find a decent job when I was first planning to move to New York, I was shocked to find that there were many companies and organizations in DC that were jumping to hire me.
Now I live just outside the city. I actually have kids and own a house. Those things would have never been an option in New York, unless I was willing to raise my kids in a shithole apartment. Granted, DC's cost of living is astronomical, but it's still way more accessible than New York.
Everything that I like about New York is still there when I visit once a year or so. And that's about all the partying I have the stomach for these days anyway. Even if I lived there, the best parts of New York would only benefit me on rare occasions, but the drawbacks would be daily.
All that said, if you're in your mid-20s and looking for a few years of having fun and living in a tenement, go for it. I wouldn't advise against it. But if you're looking to ever settle down in New York, it's not a good idea.
I don't know if any city comes close to New York in terms of the entertainment and culture options available there. Even New York's subway system is unparalleled. DC's Metro is beautiful but functionally, it's only a tiny fraction of the New York subway.
Even in DC, I, I keep thinking of how low the cost of living is in Baltimore or Harrisburg, and whether maybe I should try to convince my employer to let me become part- or full-time remote, and take my DC salary to someplace with a lower cost of living.
* Mass transit good enough that you don't need an internal combustion engine
* One of the best pools of internet companies on the east coast
* Extraordinarily diverse: I have friends from all walks of life, from blue collar (UPS delivery) to white collar (finance) to video production, photography, painters, sculptors and trying-to-make-it-actors-but-working-in-service.
* Any kind of cuisine, delivered at any time.
* Live comedy or music any night you want it
* Superb dine-in experiences
* Some of the best museums in the nation
The bad:
* Extraordinarily expensive. But if you live in an outer borough it almost balances out with living in a suburb somewhere: $1500 in rent, $120/mo in transit costs. Compare to Raleigh, NC: $795 for similar apartment in-city-limits, ($100/mo auto insurance, $3.50/gallon @ 27mpg @ 20 mi/day = $78/mo in gas, $300/mo in payments on a $15k car) $478/mo in transit costs. Chose Raleigh because I'm familiar with it, and there are actually some tech companies there (but you'll probably have to commute to RTP unless you're at Red Hat or Citrix or Wells Fargo). So a ~$350/mo (I'd extend this to a generalized 27% - this includes eating out, though not necessarily groceries) premium for living in Brooklyn compared to Raleigh.
* Summers are brutal, and you usually have to rely on in-window units; central HVAC is unheard of except in brand new luxury residential buildings
* Accidentally getting on that one empty car on the subway that just pulled in during rush hour
* Constant temptation to get completely shitfaced every night because there are 5 bars within stumbling distance of home
* It drains your energy until you get used to it.
* It won't be like Sex in the City or Friends (more like Seinfeld with a shittier apartment), and people who expect it to be leave quickly -- thank goodness.
* City income tax on top of state and federal.
* Really, really crappy landlords.
* Really, really crappy sidewalks [translation: too many people don't pick up their dog's (you hope it's a dog's) poo.]
I lived Philadelphia for 9 years (from outside Pittsburgh), I'm curious to what 'a lot more opportunity, a lot more options' mean? I find almost anything NYC can offer that other cities dont are things that I myself do once in a blue moon.
sure, I can't see a 100$+ broadway play at the cost of 24k$ a year in increased housing, but instead I can take the train out for the 1 time a year I do and spend the rest going to i dono, egypt?
My friend left her studio apartment in Clinton Hill and the rent jumped from $1500/month to $2300/month between 2010 and 2012.
Another friend's landlord in Greenpoint has been using 5 units in his building as an AirBnB hotel and is now asking $4500/month for 3 bedroom units in the rest of the building. And those "bedrooms" are really just plywood separators.
Another friend just signed a lease for a $3k/month 1 bedroom with a garden in Bed Stuy.
I love living in Brooklyn but I'm getting pretty tired of seeing the same fancy cocktail places, $16 burger joints, and exorbitant asking prices on apartments deeper and deeper into bk.
In DC that'd get you a 1BR/Studio. I'd figuratively murder someone to get a $1500/month studio in DC.
They are out there, but I definitely got lucky.
But a lot of us (though certainly not all of us) writers and programmers and other such types would rather live somewhere cheaper and less claustrophobic. I know it's certainly what I chose. It's not without its downsides but I like the upsides.
I recently did the classic Manhattan to Brooklyn move and I'm thrilled. Perhaps I have Stockholm Syndrome but I love that it's possible to up and move to a different town and still be in New York City.
But, to each their own. Some writers thrive on isolation and some thrive on socialization.
The city is so affordable that it's not terribly uncommon for upper middle class folks like doctors to have vacation homes, usually lakehouses.
And I imagine there's a lot of really awesome office space available for rent in downtown at affordable rates for would-be startups; not to mention there's undoubtedly a lot of fantastic local CS talent coming out of Wash U which is largely untapped by the city.
Missouri is fully seasonal as well. It's sometimes breathtaking to see everything in bloom in the spring and early summer, and there are plenty of opportunities to play in the snow in winter.
The only thing it's lacking, of course, is an abundance of well-paying stable jobs in technology.
I'd seriously consider doing it if I were more confident in the stability and longevity of remote work.
It's not that the sandwiches are "worth" $10; it's that they're pegged to the square foot rent of the shop which sells them (and of the wages + salaries of the people who make them and provide them for sale; and hence, the rents of the spaces they live in, also).
That's just economics, and the same principles apply in NYC as anywhere else (with different rent figures plugged in).
As far as raising kids, I could definitely see that. Your real-estate dollar goes pretty far. The weather sucks ass, though -- even Paul Graham says so! I really wouldn't want to have to deal with that again.
(Also, the bit about "why should I pay a bunch in rent to live near some nice parks" is such a dumb way of thinking about NYC. But if you really do think that way you definitely should not go to New York.)
Pittsburgh is a great fit for me climate-wise, but given that I'd move to Alaska for the climate, I'm probably an outlier. ;)
The Pittsburgh area gets less sunlight per year than Seattle does (which is somewhat known for being dreary). This one really gets me. Sunlight make me function better. I go to California and the radio stations are talking about how it's been "overcast" and it's like the most sunlight I've seen in my life. Overcast in Pittsburgh means the skies are grey.
I expected that the rent would be cheaper but that I'd miss out in terms of culture, food, and the quality of people I met.
What I'm finding is 1) The culture that is available here is easier to appreciate and digest because there's less paradox of choice 2) The food is a little more limited but overall better 3) The people that I meet are just as smart and interesting. I often forget that I'm back in the South and not in Brooklyn.
Over $1,000/month for a little apartment and $300/month for a parking space.
You could buy two houses in the Pittsburgh suburbs for that much money. A nice 3 bedroom house in a clean, low crime suburb can be had for under $100k. Smaller houses, fixer-uppers and houses in less than ideal neighborhoods can be purchased for under $50k.
I definitely miss the cost of living but I'm making much more money that I ever did in Pittsburgh. I love it there though I day dream of moving to back and living in a nice big house in the east end.
Florida doesn't make any statement about what Pittsburgh is like today.
I would absolutely love to experience NY, since I'm a passionate web developer.. There's so many companies in this field over there that I feel that my career would grow so much faster than if I stay here in Europe (at least in Portugal).
I would personally prefer NY over SF since it's way closer to "home".
Any thoughts on actually being able to financially live in NYC as a fresh grad?
I know many recent grads living in New York (myself included), mostly earning from $60k to $120k, and it's not a problem for any of us. What's tough is settling down with a family. But as a single person - especially with the additional savings you get by not owning a car - it's fine for tech salaries.
To make it more concrete, here's a budget:
$70k starting salary (low for NYC tech)
-$24,500 taxes (overestimated at 35% to be safe)
-$18,000 (1500*12) Manhattan rent + utilities
-$18,000 careless youth living expenses ($1.5k/month subway, eating out, bars, museums, music, traveling, etc)
______
$9,500 left over per year for saving.
So even underestimating salary, overestimating taxes, not choosing a super cheap apartment, and not being frugal in the slightest on monthly living expenses, you still net $9,500 per year.
I wish I could go move someplace cheap. Honest, I do. But, for me, staying healthy is the cheap choice.
Those kinds of quality of life issues are sometimes very, very hard to adequately quantify. These articles often do a poor job of addressing that. Price of housing is not the be all and end all of one's life.
If I don't need medical care because I can breathe without medication, then it matters little what local doctors cost.
Anecdotally, some of my coworkers moved here expressly to raise their families; they liked the school system options here better than the larger cities they came from. I don't have children of my own, so I haven't done the research.
That said, I know several people who have gotten their kids into Pittsburgh charter schools and seem to be happy with that.
If we go the public school route for high school, my kids would feed into Allderdice, and I hear their advanced program is outstanding, with many kids going into Ivies from there.
Also, there's the Pittsburgh Promise.
https://pittsburghpromise.org/earn.php
"The Pittsburgh Promise scholarship is a big idea and a real commitment: if you live in the city and attend Pittsburgh Public schools from 9th grade on, up to a $40,000 Promise scholarship will be waiting for you at graduation."
Only applies to PA schools, but still, an impressive program.
I volunteer for the FIRST Robotics program in Pittsburgh. A couple of years ago, I was chatting with some of the students from Allerdice who also volunteer and were away from school that day due to their team being in the competition---at about the same time that a few miles away, the police were breaking up a large-group fight in Allerdice itself.
Allerdice (last time I checked) is a good school with some real problems. But it's a good school.