I want money to be able to live in a nice city where I can walk to things, parks and arts are well funded, where the food is great, and where there are nearby cafes and bars. I could own a large McMansion in the burbs instead of my small brownstone in the city, but I prefer the urban living. I just don’t care about having any more bedrooms, and from my perspective the less yard I have to maintain, the less room I have to clean, the better.
On the face-to-face comment: until my local cafe and bar operate a constant zoom meeting and my cycling club sets up rides inside of my home office, I don’t see internet connectivity as a replacement for real contact.
I will say this though — there is a big part of me that wants to live in a mountain town in Colorado or Vermont. Convenient nature and having places to walk to — Problem is from my experience the residents are almost entirely people twice my age with a lot of old money.
On the topic of Nashville, my buddy moved there from Boston. I honestly thought the city was quite fun (minus the humidity and the neighbors of the Airbnb blasting hellfire evangelical sermons on the radio for their morning lawn-mowing routine), but they’ve come to regret the decision because the running isn’t as good and socially right-wing politics still forces itself upon every space. Political compatibility, even for people who prefer to leave those conversations alone, is important.
Have you considered moving to the town where State U is located? Plentiful access to nature, well-educated community, Pho and independent coffee shops, affordable cost of living. This is the case in many states, since the State U was traditionally sited in a big tract of farmland.
I lived in Austin and loved it but the heat got to me. I loved the food and nightlife in Nashville when I visited. Also thoroughly enjoyed Burlington VT and would love to live there some day. I wouldn’t mind ending up back in Boston again though. If that’s the kind of places you mean, then yeah.
I bought a place in Denver now because it’s so much relatively cheaper than Boston while I’m making the same software engineer wage. I could only afford to buy a teensy tiny old studio or a spot in a garage in Boston for the cost of my centrally-located condo in Denver.
I really liked living in Austin, but I'm thinking smaller. Terre Haute, Urbana-Champaign, Kalamazoo, State College, Denton, Madison, Manhattan (Kansas), Binghamton, and many others, depending on your taste in climate, topography, and politics. Maybe Burlington, but the cost of living in Vermont is surprisingly high considering how sparsely populated it is.
I'm surprised you mentioned Terre Haute, but not Bloomington, IN (where Indiana University is located), which is really much, much, much nicer than Terre Haute.
You didn't answer the question though: Why SV? Why wouldn't Jackson, Mississippi work - I've never been there, but I can still guarantee that you will find good parks, arts, food, and you can walk downtown. The exact parks, arts, and foods will be different, but they will be good. (Note that I picked Jackson because it is the first city google maps I saw when I zoomed on the american south region - I picked the American south because of the "red-neck" association)
Very few cities have a functional downtown. In the 3 major cities in Ohio, for instance, the downtown areas were vacated when people fled to suburbs. Malls and shops closed, and blocks were leveled for surface parking. Walkability was killed in favor of drives from the suburbs. Aside from one or two streets near major sports arenas with a couple gentrified bars, downtown businesses open for lunch hour and close by 6. I imagine this is the same in much of the U.S. that isn't known for the urban living scene.
Hot and humid, mosquitoes, flat land, prone to hurricanes, not near an international airport. I presume most people working in tech would consider these a negative.
A quick Google shows lots of daily access to hubs. Unless you fly weekly, quick access to a local airport is much better than an hour and a half on the subway and air train to get to JFK (which has fewer destinations than the big hubs). That's not a real reason.
That isn't much help. The short flight from the local airport to the big hub will end up costing you more than the main flight from the hub to wherever you're going. Those short flights to regional airports cost a relative fortune.
The airport is international - any airport of any size is (a lot of one runway airports serving only small planes are international). You pretty much need to hire your own plane if you want to fly into it, but it is international.
I think meant to say the airport isn't a major hub so you can't actually get anywhere without going first to some other place you don't want to be. That is a fair complaint.
> The airport is international - any airport of any size is
If there's no Customs and Immigration services, then it's not really an international airport - you cannot legally fly from a foreign airport and land in a local airport that doesn't have those services in the USA and likely other countries.
Nothing you said contradicts what I said.Pretty much all airports with commercial service are international.
Note that being international doesn't mean someone sane would fly into the airport international. There are no regular international flights, but is an office for them and if you schedule in advance someone will be there when you arrive internationally. If you don't schedule in advance you might have to wait in the airport for a day for someone to arrive and process you. Even if you schedule in advance expect delays as unlike a hub they don't really have either a system or the experience to process you quickly.
I think cockroaches are a worse scourge than mosquitos (of course not health wise), but that was just noticeable to me at Houston type temperatures/humidity which I assume is comparable. Right now living in SF Bay area and there are definitely mosquitos in abundance near standing water sources here in summer but no cockroaches.
> but they’ve come to regret the decision because the running isn’t as good and socially right-wing politics still forces itself upon every space.
I'm skeptical of this. I've not lived in Nashville, but I've lived in a whole lot of cities across the South: Charlotte, Atlanta, New Orleans. What almost all Southern cities have in common is that conservatives are a minority within the city limits. And indeed, when I check the 2016 election results for Nashville, I see that Clinton won against Trump 59 to 34% -- almost double! And also not surprisingly, Nashville has a Democratic mayor.
Does that sound like a city with right-wing politics forcing itself on every space?
The fact is, unlike Southern small towns and rural areas, Southern cities are in general fairly moderate to liberal, with a significant conservative minority (say 25-30%). Now, given our current political situation, that minority may be at present more vocal than usual, but that doesn't mean that the city is beset by "right-wing politics" occupying every sphere of life.
Also, I've lived in working class neighborhoods in Southern cities for most of my life and have never heard anyone blasting evangelical sermons, around my house or around friends. That's 20+ years as an adult. So you picked an extraordinarily unlucky Airbnb.
Yes, you run into occasional racists or homophobic assholes, but I occasionally ran into the same kinds of people when I lived in NJ for 2 years. There are assholes everywhere.
But by far most of my co-workers working in universities and small companies have been either moderate or liberal, with an occasional conservative thrown in. Which isn't surprising, since that reflects the city's political breakdown. But (at least until recently) we all tend to get along.
Now wrt to the running, I have no idea, you may be right there (although I know that the Chattanooga area has some great running).
But wrt to politics, I'm fairly convinced that your friend's experience in Nashville is either a misinterpretation or they've met with an outlier company and friends (eg, did they work for a defense-related company? if so, those are conservative everywhere, and has nothing to do with Nashville).
One of the great pleasures for Republican state governments is to hobble liberal city government initiates in any way possible, whether that be withholding funding or outlawing logical courses of action. I do not want to live in a place with regressive red state politics that are always in such conflict with the progressive goals of cities.
> One of the great pleasures for Republican state governments is to hobble liberal city government initiates in any way possible, whether that be withholding funding or outlawing logical courses of action.
I agree (although this happens less often than you'd think, for many reasons).
But in the end, I prefer to live here and fight the good fight, instead of abandoning Southern cities to the whims of their surrounding towns and rural areas.
I dunno if it's necessarily that they're outlier companies. A lot of companies in Nashville/Brentwood employ people who don't live in the city.
When I used to work remotely for a company down that way the IT dudes in the office were "These Colors Don't Run" types, at minimum. The closest any of them lived was like, Franklin.
His and his spouse's fields are Finance and Medicine, respectively. I don't know about his specific workplace, but it can be tough to adjust to a conservative culture in medicine fields if you're not used to it. I am close with someone who has plenty of issues with the medical culture here, with other doctors at the hospital showing treatment bias against uninsured patients and those who are drug or alcohol users. It's like they forget that addiction is a disease. If you use marijuana, you will be treated like an addict regardless of your actual pattern of usage. It will be noted as a problem on your chart and you will be asked to stop using it. This is a recurring pattern with patients in a very legal state. It also takes longer to get social services to help uninsured/poor patients hooked up with the right programs compared to how it was in MA. State politics still has an impact on the city, and in fields like medicine, a lot of your day-to-day processes and rules are forced upon you by state legislatures and boards. The cities are not islands in the middle of the ocean. This is the kind of abrasive right-wing culture that's hard to operate in when you take the Hippocratic Oath seriously.
That experience at the Nashville AirBnB was something that felt straight out of a thriller flick, but I totally do agree that it was a one-off experience slash fun story to tell now. First thing I heard after waking up was this preacher dude talking about people being condemned to eternal fire and whatnot, and it kept going for a while. We had several gay people and almost all atheists in the house so it's a bit scary thinking about what these others would do to you if they found out who you are. It's disturbing that this is what people indoctrinate themselves with. It's a one-off/anecdotal experience though.
>And indeed, when I check the 2016 election results for Nashville, I see that Clinton won against Trump 59 to 34% -- almost double!
>Does that sound like a city with right-wing politics forcing itself on every space?
That sounds like a city where about 1/3 of the people you meet will be right-wingers. I'm in the DC area, which is more liberal than Nashville for sure, and half the white women on the dating sites here have pictures of themselves shooting guns and profiles talking about how important Jesus is to them. In Nashville, I'm sure I'd never get a date.
> but they’ve come to regret the decision because the running isn’t as good and socially right-wing politics still forces itself upon every space.
Not true at all. I have lived in Nashville (10+ years), Houston, and Bay Area. There might be some area like Franklin or Belle Meade that is more conservative. But overall Nashville is like most big cities in the south which is liberal.
On the face-to-face comment: until my local cafe and bar operate a constant zoom meeting and my cycling club sets up rides inside of my home office, I don’t see internet connectivity as a replacement for real contact.
I will say this though — there is a big part of me that wants to live in a mountain town in Colorado or Vermont. Convenient nature and having places to walk to — Problem is from my experience the residents are almost entirely people twice my age with a lot of old money.
On the topic of Nashville, my buddy moved there from Boston. I honestly thought the city was quite fun (minus the humidity and the neighbors of the Airbnb blasting hellfire evangelical sermons on the radio for their morning lawn-mowing routine), but they’ve come to regret the decision because the running isn’t as good and socially right-wing politics still forces itself upon every space. Political compatibility, even for people who prefer to leave those conversations alone, is important.